Titan Machinery Inc. (NASDAQ:TITN) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
Titan Machinery Inc. (NASDAQ:TITN) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript March 21, 2024
Titan Machinery Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $1.31, expectations were $0.99. Titan Machinery Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Greetings. Welcome to the Titan Machinery Inc. Fourth Quarter Fiscal 2024 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Jeff Sonnek from IR. You may begin.
Jeff Sonnek: Thank you and welcome to Titan Machinery’s fourth quarter fiscal 2024 earnings conference call today. We have from the company Bryan Knutson, President and Chief Executive Officer and Bo Larsen, Chief Financial Officer. By now, everyone should have access to the earnings release for the fiscal fourth quarter ended January 31, 2024. If you have not received the release, it’s available on the IR tab of Titan’s website at ir.titanmachinery.com. This call is being webcast and a replay will be available on the company’s website as well. Additionally, we are providing a presentation to accompany today’s prepared remarks which can be found also on the same website, ir.titanmachinery.com. The presentation is located directly below the webcast information in the middle of the page.
We’d like to remind everyone that the prepared remarks contain forward-looking statements and management may make additional forward-looking statements in response to your questions. The statements do not guarantee future performance and therefore, undue reliance should be placed upon them. These forward-looking statements are based on current expectations of management and involve inherent risks and uncertainties, including those identified in the risk factors section of Titan’s most recently filed annual report on Form 10-K. These risk factors contain a more detailed discussion of the factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in any forward-looking statements. Except as maybe required by applicable law, Titan assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements that maybe made in today’s release or call.
Please note that during today’s call, we may discuss non-GAAP financial measures including results on an adjusted basis. We believe these adjusted financial measures can facilitate a more complete analysis and greater transparency into Titan’s ongoing financial performance, particularly when comparing underlying results from period to period. We have included reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to their most directly comparable GAAP measures in today’s release. At the conclusion of our prepared remarks, we will open the call to take your questions. And now, I’d like to introduce the company’s President and CEO, Mr. Bryan Knutson. Bryan, please go ahead.
Bryan Knutson: Thank you, Jeff. Good morning, everyone. I want to begin today’s call by providing some historical context, which will help put our recent earnings performance into perspective, then I will offer some thoughts on our fiscal 2025 outlook that we are providing today and finish with a summary of our segment performance before passing the call to Bo for his financial review and incremental thoughts on our modeling assumptions. We finished fiscal year 2024 with a strong performance that was driven by growth across all of our legacy operating segments and resulted in record revenue of $2.8 billion and record earnings per share of $4.93. This marked the third consecutive year of achieving record earnings per share while achieving a pre-tax margin of greater than 5%.
Our business remains in a position of strength and we expect to demonstrate the durability of our earnings through this cycle following a multiyear effort to implement greater efficiency across our organization. Moreover, this is exactly the level of execution that we outlined at our 2017 Investor Day. I’d remind everyone that back then we were working hard on expense and inventory optimization as a means to driving higher levels of profitability through the cycle. At that meeting, we also outlined a path to $2 earnings per share. Conceptually, we wanted to ensure we made the adjustments necessary to drive an acceleration in operating leverage, so that we were in a strong position once the next cycle arrived. Our business today is nearly twice as large as those projections from 2017 in terms of revenue and I am proud to say our earnings power of nearly $5 per share is higher by 2.5x.
Those principles remain in place today that is positioning the business to drive greater and more sustainable levels of profitability in all demand environments, which leads me to some brief commentary on our outlook for fiscal 2025 that we are introducing today. First of all, I’d like to highlight a few key differences between this cycle and the last one for both Titan and the industry in general and why both are in a healthier position today than the previous cycle. First, for the industry as a whole, as has been well documented, supply chain constraints significantly limited OEM production volumes, restricting the amount of new equipment that was going into the market over the past few years. Because of this, fleet age for categories such as high horsepower tractors are still above long-term averages.
There has been less short-term leasing activity further limiting the amount of late mile used equipment for sale. Farmers have had three highly profitable years to bolster their balance sheets and advancements in precision ag technology continued to drive productivity gains, providing ROI and new equipment and aftermarket upgrades. For Titan specifically, as the industry continues to consolidate with larger, higher horsepower, and more technologically advanced equipment, we optimized our footprint and removed costs from the business through these restructuring efforts during the last cycle. We doubled down on our customer care strategy driving more sustainable growth in our parts and service business. And we bolstered our professional back office team who focus on managing inventory levels and use trading valuations.
While all of these factors I just mentioned put us in a healthier spot today than we were a decade ago, net farm income is expected to be at or possibly below the 20-year average in calendar year 2024. And interest rates don’t appear to be dropping as fast as our customers would like to see. General consensus by industry participants is that ag volumes will be around mid-cycle levels this year. As such, we don’t expect to repeat the success we enjoyed over the past two fiscal years, but we remain in a strong position heading into our current fiscal 2025. We believe this year will prove to be best described as year of transition. We have rapidly moved out of a period characterized by restricted supply and high demand to one that reflects ample to even excess supply and mid-cycle demand.
We continue to have good visibility into demand for the first half of the fiscal year given healthy backlog and pre-sale activity. However, the supply chain has caught up quickly in recent months and OEM lead times have normalized whereas they had extended out 12 to 18 months not that long ago. In a broader sense, this normalized supply environment is a welcome change after years of excessive delays and the additional uncertainty with allocations. This allows us to significantly improve our in-stock levels of high horsepower equipment, self-propelled sprayers and wheel loaders across our footprint. But the pace of the improved supply creates challenges in the near-term as we will be working through a rapid influx of equipment deliveries, which will be visible in our new and used inventory balances throughout this fiscal year.
As we meet demand from our existing backlog, those new unit sales to customers also generate trade-ins of used equipment. The guidance we are providing today reflects anticipated margin compression in part so that we can manage inventory levels through this transitional period. Our team will proactively manage through these factors in order to drive strong financial results and position us to maintain the higher levels of pre-tax margin that we have worked so hard to produce. Bo will provide some additional depth on the assumptions that underpin our modeling guidance for fiscal 2025. But before I pass the call to him, I want to briefly walk through our customary update on each of our reporting segments starting with domestic agriculture. We had a great finish to the year growing segment same-store revenue by 36% in the fourth quarter.
This was largely a function of the team’s strong execution on improving the pace of customer deliveries, following a concerted effort to complete pre-delivery inspections on new machinery. As we have discussed during the past several quarters, balancing the limitations of our service capacity between our ongoing needs of customers with incremental demands for pre-delivery inspections has been a challenge. So with that in mind, in addition to the strong equipment deliveries, I am particularly pleased with our ability to continue to advance our customer care strategy and drive a double-digit same-store sales increase in our reoccurring parts and service business. Investing in people and CapEx to increase our service network capacity remains a key priority for our organization.
As such, we will continue to focus on recruiting, hiring and training skilled technicians in the coming fiscal year as well as investing in related capital expenditures to support that growth. Shifting to our domestic construction segment, as expected, our construction segment produced a strong fourth quarter with same-store sales growth of 18%. This was due in part to timing of OEM deliveries this year versus last and our focus on getting these units turned around and out to our customers. We are pleased with the execution of our construction team, who have continued to drive growth and maintain healthy pre-tax margins. Although there has been some recent softening, as we look ahead, we see general stability in the construction markets that we serve.
Further, we also anticipate benefiting from improved availability of equipment from our OEM partners. Now moving on to an overview of our Europe segment, which represents our business within the countries of Bulgaria, Germany, Romania and Ukraine. As discussed on our third quarter call, the growing season varied this year, with timely precipitation driving above average yields in Germany and Ukraine, while dry conditions create some headwinds in Bulgaria and Romania. As expected, we saw slowdown in demand in the fourth quarter, but still achieved modest year-over-year sales growth on a same-store basis. Turning to our new Australia segment, the O'Connor’s acquisition is now consolidated into our financials for the first time this quarter, so you will be able to monitor our progress in our segment reporting going forward.
The segment’s fourth quarter came in as expected and plentiful rainfall has provided healthy subsoil moisture across our footprint heading into the next growing season. We have completed initial integration discussions across departments, sharing best practices and setting the stage for future collaboration. In the coming months, we will initiate the branding transition to Titan Machinery and I’d like to reiterate how excited we are to have O'Connor’s join the Titan team. Finally, I want to sincerely thank our employees for their tremendous efforts that drove our record revenue and earnings. With that, I will turn the call over to Bo for his financial review.
Bo Larsen: Thanks, Bryan and good morning everyone. I’ll start with a brief review of our fiscal 2024 full year results. As Bryan noted in his commentary, we had another exceptional year and are proud of the performance the team delivered. While we don’t expect to repeat this performance in the coming year, we are focused on demonstrating improved results relative to that of the previous cycle as we move forward. Total revenue increased 24.9% to a record $2.8 billion, driven by balanced growth across each of our revenue categories. Equipment grew 25.3% for the full year and was complemented by solid contributions from our recurring parts and service businesses, which increased 25.6% and 21.2% respectively. Additionally, rental and other was up 10.4%.
Earnings per diluted share increased 9.8% to $4.93 for fiscal 2024. This was a record for Titan and it was also right in line with the midpoint of the guidance we established at the beginning of fiscal 2024 after adjusting for the O’Connor’s acquisition. Shifting to our consolidated results for the fiscal 2024 fourth quarter, total revenue was $852.1 million, an increase of 46.2% compared to the prior year period. Growth was driven by a 29.9% increase in same-store sales with the balance reflecting the contribution from the O’Connor’s and other acquisitions. Our equipment revenue increased 51.6% versus the prior year period. Both parts and service revenue each increased 25.7% and rental and other revenue was up 3.1% versus the prior year period.
Gross profit for the fourth quarter was $141 million and as expected gross profit margin contracted year-over-year to 16.6% driven primarily by lower equipment margins, which are experiencing some normalization as expected at this stage in the cycle. The fourth quarters of fiscal 2024 and fiscal 2023 included benefits related to manufacturer incentive plans of $7.8 million and $1.8 million respectively. Operating expenses were $100.3 million for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2024 compared to $83.7 million in the prior year period. The year-over-year increase of 19.9% was driven by additional operating expenses related to our acquisitions that have taken place in the past year as well as an increase in variable expenses associated with increased sales.
Floor plan and other interest expense was $9.3 million as compared to $2.1 million for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2023. With the increase led by a higher level of interest bearing inventory, the usage of existing floor plan capacity to finance the O’Connor’s acquisition and higher interest rates. Net income for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2024 was $24 million or $1.05 per diluted share, which included approximately $0.26 of benefits associated with manufacturer incentive plans. This compares to last year’s fourth quarter net income of $18.1 million or $0.80 per diluted share, which included approximately $0.06 of benefits associated with manufacturer incentive plans. Now turning to our segment results for the fourth quarter. In our agriculture segment, sales increased 40.8% to $620.6 million.
Growth was led by strong same-store sales increase of 35.5%, which was further supported by contributions from the acquisitions of Pioneer Farm Equipment in February 2023 and Scott Supply in January 2024. Agriculture segment pre-tax income was $28.8 million and compared to $19.3 million in the fourth quarter of the prior year. In our construction segment, same-store sales increased to 17.7% to $100.1 million led by the timing of equipment deliveries, which shifted some revenue into the fourth quarter of this year as compared to the timing of deliveries to customers in the second half of last year. Pre-tax income was $4.6 million and compared to $5.4 million in the fourth quarter of the prior year. In our Europe segment, sales increased 8.1% to $61.6 million, which reflects a 5.5% currency tailwind on the strengthening euro.
Net of the effect of these foreign currency fluctuations, revenue increased $2.1 million or 3.6%. Pre-tax loss was $600,000 and compared to pre-tax income of $1.5 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2023. The decrease in profitability was driven primarily by a partial normalization of equipment margins and higher operating expenses. In our Australia segment, sales were $69.8 million and pre-tax income was $4.1 million. This was in line with the lower end of the range we provided on the Q3 call, primarily due to timing of OEM deliveries. This segment is well positioned to start fiscal 2025 with a good amount of pre-sell orders on hand. Now on to our balance sheet and inventory position. We had cash of $38 million and an adjusted debt to tangible net worth ratio of 1.5x as of January 31, which is well below our bank covenant of 3.5x.
Equipment inventory increased approximately $200 million in the fourth quarter, of which approximately $87 million is attributable to acquisitions made during the fourth quarter. As Bryan mentioned, we were pleased to be able to improve the pace of customer deliveries following a concerted effort to complete pre-delivery inspections of new machinery. But as expected, our high volume of deliveries to customers was more than offset by receipts from our OEM partners as they were rapidly catching up on production backlog as they finish the calendar year. With that, I will finish by sharing a few comments on our fiscal 2025 full year guidance which we are providing today. First, some segment specific color on the top line. For the agriculture segment, our initial assumption is for revenue to be flat to up 5%.
This includes a full year revenue contribution from Scott Supply, which closed in January of 2024 and achieved revenues of approximately $40 million for calendar year 2023. It also assumes mid to high single-digit growth on our parts and service business as we continue to advance our customer care strategy. As for equipment revenues, it assumes industry equipment volumes to be down 10% to 15% and pricing on new equipment to be up low single-digits. The underlying growth for equipment revenue is expected to be driven by market share gains aided by improved availability of high horsepower equipment as well as proactive posture on selling through the use of credit equipment that will be generated through trade-ins. The construction segment has diverse exposure to various end markets and construction activity in Titan’s Midwest footprint remains at level supporting healthy demand.
Our initial assumption is for revenue growth in the range of up 3% to 8%. Here again, we assume mid to high single-digit growth of our parts and service business and the low single-digit increase of pricing on new equipment. Construction should also benefit from improved availability of key equipment categories for which we have been – not been able to fulfill demand in recent years. For the Europe segment, our initial assumption is for revenue to be flat to up 5%. Our European business being predominantly ag based has most of the same thematics as we laid out today for our ag segment, one difference being that each country has its own nuances and are at different points in terms of maturation of our business operations. For instance, while our operations in Romania and Bulgaria are more mature, Ukraine is being impacted by ongoing conflict with Russia and in Germany, we are in the earlier innings of establishing our presence across our footprint.
As for the Australia segment, which made its debut in Q4 with the acquisition of O’Connor’s, we currently expect FY ‘25 revenue to be in the range of $250 million to $270 million, which is right in line with the $258 million that they achieved in their most recently completed fiscal year prior to acquisition. This business has a strong foundation in place with a focused operations team and is positioned well to deliver a solid first year performance as part of the Titan Machinery. Now on for some overall commentary across our segments. From a gross margin perspective, we expect equipment margins to normalize across all four of our segments as there is now ample supply of inventory available for sale on dealer lots. An additional impact on the agriculture side, as the U.S. net farm income is expected to decrease approximately 25%, which has started to impact demand for equipment purchases.
As such, we expect incremental compression on equipment margins in this transitionary period. As for operating expenses, we continue to take action to retain and recruit talent in a consistently tight labor market, especially with service technicians. We also expect a ramp up in IT expenses as we look to complete the rollout of our new ERP across our remaining U.S. locations. From a year-over-year comparison perspective, it’s also worth noting that our Australia segment has a similar level of operating expenses as a percentage of sales as the rest of the business, implying an annualized run-rate of about $30 million for that segment. Taken together, these impacts are expected to result in operating expenses as a percentage of sales about 40 basis points higher than was realized in fiscal 2024 across the company as a whole.
Moving to interest expense, I would expect similar levels of quarterly floor plan interest expense in the first half of fiscal 2025 as we incurred in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2024 and then see it reduced from there as OEM interest-free terms normalize and interest rates are expected to reduce modestly in the back half of the year. What I mean by normalization of interest-free terms is that in recent years due to low equipment availability, OEMs provided shorter than typical interest-free periods. But that has started to shift back to more normal terms and is expected to be a benefit to interest expense. Bringing it altogether on a diluted earnings per share basis, we are introducing a fiscal 2025 range of $3 to $3.50 per share, which implies a pre-tax margin of 3.2% to 3.5%.
Overall, we believe the variables just discussed are reasonably factored into the ranges we are providing today though both risks and opportunities still exist. The midpoint of our guidance at $3.25 earnings per share, which reflects a mid-cycle ag environment, along with some added transitional pressures would be the third highest EPS in company history and continues to build on a solid foundation for more sustainable and profitable growth through the cycle. To provide more color on this important topic, we have added a slide in the back of our earnings presentation, which provides a comparison of recent years versus the prior ag cycle. It also summarizes some of the key reasons for the improved profitability as has already been discussed today.
Overall, we are focused on executing the plan and driving higher levels of profitability through the cycle. This concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, we are now ready for the question-and-answer session of our call.
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