Q4 2024 Mativ Holdings Inc Earnings Call
On the call today from native Ah Julia Chateau.
Speaker Change: Chief Executive Officer, Greg Watson, Chief Financial Officer, and Chris Cooper Director of Investor Relations.
Speaker Change: Today's call is being recorded and will be available for replay later this afternoon.
At this time all PAH.
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Speaker Change: It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Mr. Chris Cooper, Sir you may begin.
Speaker Change: Good morning, everyone and thank you for joining us for <unk> fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings call before we begin I would like to remind you that comments included in today's conference call include forward looking statements actual results may differ materially from these comments for reasons shown in detail.
Speaker Change: In our Securities and Exchange Commission filings, including our annual report on Form 10-K, and our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q.
Speaker Change: Some financial metrics discussed during this call are non-GAAP financial metrics reconciliations of these metrics to the closest GAAP metrics are included in the appendix of the earnings release.
Speaker Change: Unless stated otherwise financial and operational metric comparisons are to the prior year period and relate to continuing operations.
Speaker Change: Earnings release issued yesterday afternoon is available on our website at IR Dot Matt of Dot com.
Julie: I'll turn the call over to Julie.
Julie: Thanks, Chris Good morning, everyone and thank you for joining our call before we get into our results allow me to highlight the three key takeaways from today's call first our SaaS segment turned in another excellent quarter of results capping a very strong year in 2024 and we can.
Julie: Turning to see positive momentum across all categories in the segment.
Julie: Fastest continually improving performance gives us confidence that we can expand the success more broadly across matters, which I will cover in my upcoming remarks.
Julie: Second as we acknowledged during our previous call Sam experienced a difficult quarter as we continue to under sluggish industrial macros together with volume declines and paint protection film stemming from our production quality issue in late 2023.
Julie: You'll hear more about this shortly.
Julie: So rest assured we have fully addressed the quality issue and are focused on regaining the trust of our key customers in this category.
Julie: Third while we restructured the organization and removed over $20 million of overhead cost in 2024, we are continuing to further reduce costs and streamline operations.
Julie: Our prior efforts have proven that we can generate meaningful results from internally focused cost actions and we are prepared for and acting on what it will take to further improve the profitability of the enterprise.
Julie: With that let's discuss overall matter of results.
Julie: <unk> were up 4% organically.
Julie: We saw volume improvement in many of our product categories, partially offset by lower demand again, primarily in advanced films.
Julie: In SaaS, our strong performance in Q4 demonstrated continued and increased momentum with volume increases in all categories.
Julie: We had mixed results and Sam.
Julie: With strength in some of our filtration categories offset by softness in our advanced films business, which we highlighted last quarter and about which I will provide an update momentarily.
Julie: The strong momentum that we have seen in SaaS. Since early 2024 continued in the fourth quarter with sales up almost 13% year over year on an organic basis adjusted.
Julie: <unk> EBITDA was up almost 8% compared to prior year.
Julie: All SaaS categories delivered volume improvement in Q4 with tapes labels and liners driving the largest gain followed by paper and packaging and healthcare.
Julie: On a full year basis, SaaS produced meaningful reported adjusted EBITDA and margin improvement in all four quarters of 2024.
Julie: Resulting in full year, adjusted EBITDA up almost 19% and margin up 210 basis points.
Julie: The strong SaaS order pace has continued into Q1 and the team is focused on the opportunities that lie ahead in 2025.
Julie: One example of the discipline and upside within the SaaS commercial team is that our 2025 sales pipeline today is more than 50% greater than what it was a year ago.
Julie: We have also expanded our presence in targeted growth categories, such as digital print e-commerce and specialty tapes.
Julie: As well as significantly improved the volume and financial profile of our health care business.
Julie: I am very pleased with the progress in this segment.
Julie: Turning to <unk>. Our overall results were mixed in Q4 with stable performance in filtration and challenges in advanced films consistent with what we discussed in our previous call in November.
Julie: During that call. We commented on our comprehensive turnaround plan for paint protection film, which is now well underway.
Julie: Our first priority was restoring quality within paint protection film low demand driven primarily by a quality issue with products manufactured in late 2023 resulted in share loss.
Julie: Since mid 2024, our quality has improved significantly with recent investment in visual detection technology, and our largest films site.
Julie: And improved process controls to ensure sustainability of our quality improvement.
Julie: We are actively working closely with existing and new customers to qualify our products subject to these new quality control improvements.
Julie: Second we are focused on growing share and adjacent specialty markets, such as medical and optical films.
Julie: After paint protection. These are our largest film product categories and I am pleased to report that volume was up 30% in Q4 versus prior year with stronger order pace carrying into Q1.
Julie: We are aggressively adding operator capacity at our largest film plant in the U S to keep up with this growing demand.
Julie: Third we have developed a mid tier price point paint protection product that has similar margin profiles to our existing film products and that we will continue to advance with customers. This year, we expect to gain traction with this initiative throughout the year.
Julie: Fourth we have replaced and Upskill site leadership as well as sales and quality leadership to drive improvements in this business.
Julie: And lastly in support of our efforts in adjacent categories, We announced new Smart glass film partnerships with two companies that create innovative film and glass solutions that reduce cost and improved comfort.
Julie: While early in development. These products have received strong interest from new and existing customers and we expect these relationships to support longer term growth in optical films in 2026 and beyond.
Julie: The challenge in paint protection film effects and isolated part of our business, albeit an important part and we are working expeditiously to recover as well as diversify into strong adjacent film product categories.
Julie: Notably as we enter Q1, we are seeing sequential improved demand across all film product categories.
Julie: From a raw material perspective, we are expecting moderate headwinds on input costs to offset expected inflation, we have announced selective pricing actions in both segments.
Julie: These pricing actions will be very targeted to areas, where we see the biggest raw material impact and supply chain imbalance.
Julie: Additionally, we are working on initiatives to further reduce complexity streamline our organization and reduce supply chain and operating costs.
Julie: Our commitment and culture of continuous improvement will not slow as we enter 2025.
Julie: In the last 18 months, we have repositioned the portfolio divested underperforming and non strategic assets reduced our debt by over 35%.
Julie: Streamlined our plant footprint by over 25% and restructured our organization, reducing nonoperating costs by over $20 million in 2024 with plan for an additional $20 million of overhead reduction by the end of 2026.
Julie: As part of this effort to further unlock cross.
Ryan: We have promoted Ryan our current leader to lead the commercial activities across all of Madden with responsibility for staff and Sam <unk>.
Ryan: Brian joined US in early 2024, and his and his team's strong leadership commercial discipline and customer focus has been instrumental in driving our SaaS segment to deliver strong results, including three consecutive quarters of sales growth and four consecutive quarters of reported.
Ryan: Adjusted EBITDA and margin growth I am confident we will further leverage these capabilities across matter and with our most strategic customers.
Ryan: Before I turn it over to Greg I want to end with a few words about our strategy and execution approach in 2025.
Speaker Change: We have a clear portfolio strategy with identified growth platforms and investments for the future align with our strongest markets and customers.
Greg: This includes investments in capacity and capabilities infiltration release liners specialty tapes and healthcare.
Greg: From an execution approach as we enter 2025, we are laser focused on profit growth cash flow generation and reducing our debt and leverage.
Greg: While I firmly believe the initiatives and successes that the team has achieved in this past year are the right actions and they set us up for the future we have been in a low industrial demand environment longer than expected.
Greg: As such in 2025, you will see us reduce overall capital spending while still investing for growth.
Greg: Even more aggressive on our footprint efforts.
Greg: Continue to streamline the organization by reducing complexity in how we go to market and further reduce supply chain and manufacturing cost.
Greg: These actions are targeted at reducing costs, while simultaneously supporting and improving customer relationships.
Greg: And based upon our growing momentum and success in SaaS as well as our keen awareness and action plans and Sam we are optimistic about what we can accomplish as we leveraged our teams and commercial excellence best practices across matter.
Greg: With that I'll turn it over to Greg for a more detailed discussion of our financial performance.
Thanks, Julian and good morning, everyone consolidated net sales from continuing operations for the quarter were $459 million compared to $452 million in the prior year.
Greg: Sales were up four 3% year over year on an organic basis, and one 4% as reported.
Greg: While selling prices were essentially flat versus the prior year.
Greg: Adjusted EBITDA from continuing operations was $44 8 million down 10% from $50 million in the prior year.
Higher input costs and higher manufacturing costs, driven by fixed absorption represented a combined $9 million unfavorable impact, which was partially offset by $2 million of higher volume mix and a combined $2 million of lower SG&A and distribution costs.
Greg: <unk> net sales of $291 million were up almost 13% on an organic basis and up more than 20 million or almost 8% from last year as reported.
Greg: Organic growth reflected higher volumes across all our end markets and higher selling prices.
Greg: SaaS generated strong adjusted EBITDA performance of $36 million, which was up almost 8% year over year.
Greg: Adjusted EBITDA margin increased slightly versus the prior year.
Greg: The year over year performance reflected higher volumes across all our categories.
Greg: And favorable distribution costs.
Greg: Partially offset by unfavorable net selling price versus input costs and higher manufacturing costs.
Greg: Net sales in <unk> of $168 million were down more than 7% versus Q4 of 'twenty three.
Greg: As Julian mentioned earlier, we reported stable volumes in our filtration categories.
Greg: Were more than offset by lower volumes in our advanced films and netting categories, along with lower selling prices.
<unk> adjusted EBITDA of 26 million was down more than $10 million year over year.
Greg: Reflecting the effects of lower volumes in our high margin advanced films and netting categories.
Greg: Unfavorable net selling price versus input costs.
Greg: And higher manufacturing costs.
Greg: We partially offset these pressures with growth in water and air filtration and optical and medical films.
Greg: As well as with lower distribution costs.
Greg: Turning to a few of the corporate items unallocated corporate adjusted EBITDA expense of $17 million was down 14% versus the prior year.
Greg: Primarily driven by lower SG&A expenses as our previous overhead reduction efforts continue to deliver.
Greg: Interest expense of $20 million increased $6 million from the prior year, primarily due to the allocation of a portion of our interest expense to discontinued operations in 2023.
Greg: When taking hedges into account over 80% of our debt is at a fixed rate and matures on a staggered basis between 2027 and 2029.
Greg: Other income of $9 million increased $10 million compared with the prior year period.
Largely due to gains on asset sales related to facility rationalizations as well as gains on foreign exchange.
Greg: Tax was 110% benefit in the quarter driven by a onetime tax adjustment, which if excluded would yield an effective tax rate of 31%.
Greg: At the end of the quarter net debt was $995 million and available liquidity was $451 million.
Greg: Our net leverage ratio as defined in our credit agreement was four four times.
Greg: Our number one priority for cash flow utilization is and continues to be deleveraging and debt reduction.
Greg: We reduced the size of our cash balance by more than $60 million since the end of Q3 in large part through a companywide repatriation effort, they're reassessed the available cash requirements and consolidated excess balances.
Greg: The proceeds from this effort contributed to us paying down more than $50 million of our outstanding debt.
Greg: As a reminder, our target leverage range is two five to three five times.
Greg: Turning to Q1 of 2025 market demand remains challenged and this will impact our Q1 results.
Greg: I would also like to remind you that due to our normal seasonality patterns in Q4, our inventory cost that we will be selling through in Q1 is expected to be the highest of this year and higher than prior year.
Greg: Additionally, Q1 will likely have higher input costs to be offset with announced pricing that will impact the remainder of the year.
Greg: As for the full year 2025, we're focused on driving profit cash generation and further margin improvement, including continued aggressive cost reductions and operational excellence improvements.
Greg: For modeling purposes for the full year, we expect.
Greg: Adjusted unallocated expenses of around $80 million.
Greg: Depreciation amortization and stock based comp to be around $100 million.
Greg: Interest expense to be around $70 million, plus another $8 million in fees for our AR securitization.
Greg: Capital expenditures of around $50 million.
Greg: Onetime costs to be around $15 million to $20 million.
Greg: A slight increase in net working capital of around $10 million.
Greg: FX to be a $15 million top line headwind through the year.
Greg: And for our normalized tax rate, we suggest using 24%.
Greg: From a raw material perspective, we are expecting a 10% to $15 million headwind on input costs, mainly driven by slight increases in the price of pulp papers resins and polymers.
Greg: Timing wise, we expect these expense increases to be phased in over the course of the first half of 2025, and then to hold steady across the back half of the year.
Greg: We expect to fully offset the raw material inflation through pricing actions over the course of the year.
Greg: Without Julian I'll hand, it back over to you for your closing remarks.
Speaker Change: Thanks, Craig what you should take away from this call is that we are executing against initiatives to deliver a more agile operating model grow share in our current markets, while also expanding our addressable market and capture incremental value with new products and partnerships.
Speaker Change: These actions include announced price increases.
Speaker Change: Cost reduction programs expected to yield 20% more savings than prior year, a 50% increase in total company sales pipeline.
Speaker Change: New leadership across our business and specifically within advanced films reduced.
Speaker Change: Reduced capital spending plans aggressive footprint optimization strong progress in our advanced films turnaround effort and continued steps forward in our overhead reduction efforts.
Speaker Change: Look forward to showing what this team can accomplish in 2025. Thank.
Speaker Change: Thank you for joining us this morning, and please open the line for questions.
Julie: Thank you Julie.
Julie: We will now begin the question and answer session.
Julie: I would like to ask a question. Please press star one on your touch timeframe.
Julie: If you change your mind for any reason and would like to meet that question. You can press Star then two.
Julie: And as a reminder, we do ask that you limit yourself to two questions and then if you didn't have any further please join the queue.
Julie: And again that is star followed by one to register for a question we will attain for amendment Welles' question sounds like you said.
Julie: The first question we have on the phone lines comes from the line of John <unk>.
Julie: Tim.
Julie: C. J S Securities. Please go ahead.
Julie: Yes, hi, good morning, it's Pete Lucas for Jon.
Speaker Change: You touched on it at the end in your prepared remarks, maybe just a little bit more color. It sounds like once again Q1 going to be impacted by higher inventory and input costs, but it sounds like the input costs over time.
Speaker Change: We will start to subside with pricing kind of maybe give us a little more color on that.
Pete Lucas: Sure. Thanks Pete.
Pete Lucas: Overall as we mentioned we're at this point, we're seeing 10% to $15 million of.
Pete Lucas: Potential increased input costs really spread across a few different few different areas. We have plans in place with some announced pricing actions to cover that where over the course of the year will be net positive again.
Pete Lucas: That said, yes, the first quarter, we expect that to be a.
Pete Lucas: Moderate negative for the quarter.
Speaker Change: <unk> talked earlier about the.
Speaker Change: The higher inventory costs as well that we would be selling through in Q1.
Speaker Change: Great, Thanks, and I guess.
Speaker Change: You covered a lot.
Speaker Change: Only one left I'll just get in the tariff question.
Speaker Change: Just ask any specific strategy I know, it's hard debit strategy for the unknown.
Speaker Change: But for potential, Canada, and Mexico tariffs.
Speaker Change: Have you seen anything from your competitors there.
Speaker Change: Sure Yes.
Speaker Change: Yes, I would say on tariffs from a competitive standpoint, we haven't really seen anything yet because of just what you said the uncertainty in the marketplace and we have plans in place to mitigate the tariff depending on where they land the ones that have been implemented so far very minimal impact for us.
Speaker Change: Others get implemented in Canada, and Mexico, we have the opportunity to shift our supply chain around quite a bit.
Speaker Change: As well as look at other options from a pricing standpoint to mitigate mitigate those those costs.
Speaker Change: Very helpful. Thanks, I'll jump back in the queue.
Pete Lucas: Thanks Pete.
Pete Lucas: Thank you just a quick reminder, that star one to register for a question.
Speaker Change: And your next question comes from.
Danielle Harrington: Danielle Harrington.
Speaker Change: Sidoti and company. Please go ahead your annuity.
Speaker Change: Hey, good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for taking my questions.
Speaker Change: That's that's really exciting news about Ryan So Julien I'm, just kind of wondering.
Speaker Change: What can fans gain from the successes you've seen within the SaaS segment.
Speaker Change: And then along the same lines.
Speaker Change: With the with the Fam segment going through.
Speaker Change: The Tiger team right now, which is installed there you saw great success within the health care turnaround in 2023 strong organic growth as the healthcare turnaround sustainable long term and do you expect similar success with with the sand segment in advance films in particular moving forward.
Speaker Change: Sure. Thanks, Dan Let me start with your first question, which was what will we leverage in staff or I'm, sorry in fab that.
Speaker Change: We might be leveraging in SaaS today, I think there are four key areas that we would focus on the first is demand generation that means the pipeline discipline and the tools that we use effectively in fact, we target about 50% of our revenue to be in our pipeline and we'll continue to refine that and our step in our <unk> segment. The second one a strategic customer.
Speaker Change: Management is a very mature and effective joint business planning model that customers value and that has opened up several new doors within our SaaS segment, and we expect to do the same and Sam The third one is cross business and cross selling opportunities and thats with customers as the priority, but this will even more so.
Speaker Change: The door to how we look within customers deep and broadly and across the entire portfolio of Matt is to support them in a more holistic manner and then the fourth one is really leveraging our talent across segments towards the greatest opportunities and that could mean.
Speaker Change: R&D expertise marketing expertise selling capabilities that will leverage more broadly within matters. So I'm excited about that I think we will see continued improvement and progress and Sam. It really is primarily impacted by one specific market right now and there is a lot of momentum in some of the other markets.
Speaker Change: Within the Tam, particularly in filtration and air and water HVAC industrial process as life Sciences.
Speaker Change: If I turn to your second question, which was about the Tiger team and the fact that we had referenced previously.
Speaker Change: We had done a similar exercise on healthcare and is that sustainable and let me just give you a quick update on on healthcare that team was really focused on our scout the health care business. So about 70% of what makes up that category that reported category.
Speaker Change: And I would tell you in the last 18 months. The team has completely turned around performance from a stagnant topline to be above 10% growth in 2024, and healthcare and margins that are accretive to the SaaS segment. So I'm really pleased with our results in the health care turnaround that was primarily.
Speaker Change: <unk> on the commercial side of our business, including.
Speaker Change: New customer programming revised customer agreements penetrating new customers and are going more deeply and broadly within those customers and I would tell you also healthcare continues to be an area, where we've been able to leverage the matters portfolio to provide cross buying opportunities for our.
Speaker Change: <unk> and most notably that release sliders, most healthcare customers also purchased release liner and we're able to provide a more holistic buying option for them and an efficient supply chain.
Speaker Change: So at this point with the turnaround and with the growth and with the opportunities and the investments in healthcare, we view it as a key growth platform and we're investing in partnerships with our largest customers as we move forward I'm really really pleased with it.
Speaker Change: Similar results in our Tiger team focused on sales, it's a little bit more internally focused because the first and biggest issue was a quality disruption that we had in our largest sites.
Speaker Change: In late 2023, so that has been resolved.
Speaker Change: And we've invested in technology virtual detection technology, we've changed out and upgraded our site leadership, our quality leadership and are selling leadership within that part of the organization.
Speaker Change: I think theres a lot of good progress there, but we have to go through the qualifications with our customers because we did stumble on quality. So I would expect that to ramp in more positively in the back half of this year than the first half of this year.
Speaker Change: Perfect and then if I can I'm going to sneak in one more quick one.
Speaker Change: On last quarter's call and then in recent calls in general you've highlighted some of the investments that you've made into new filtration line release liner line automotive Tate athletic tapes and I understand that the capex is going to be down in 2025, but could you just update us on the progress of those previous investments and how you see.
Speaker Change: Bose playing out moving forward.
Sure most of them are still kind of in the infancy stage the melt blown line in our German facility is up and operating and that supports saturated transportation filtration and so.
Speaker Change: We will continue to optimize the system there the coder in Mexico supports release liner growth, which is growing really well in North America and with great opportunities in South America.
Speaker Change: The Cape lines that you mentioned in Italy, and in Canada are really just in the early phases. So those havent been installed and started up yet and then we recently invested in health care automation in our Knoxville facility to support our largest customer and capacity and capability additions there as well.
Speaker Change: So even though we are reducing our capex spending.
Speaker Change: I'm very confident we have the right spending in place from a growth standpoint, we'll cut back some on our cost reduction capital and our maintenance capital that we can defer into some future years.
Speaker Change: Okay. Thanks, very much Julie I really appreciate it best of luck in the coming quarter guys.
Julie: Thanks, Dan.
Speaker Change: Yes.
Speaker Change: Thank you.
Speaker Change: I can confirm we Tony had Nathan other questions registered.
Julie: I would like to hand, it back to Julie <unk>, Chief Executive Officer for some final closing comments.
Julie: Thank you I want to thank everyone for joining us on the call. This morning, and we look forward to talking to many of you later this afternoon and tomorrow and look forward to talking to you at our next call.
Julie: Thank you.
Can confirm that does conclude today's conference you may now disconnect your lines and please enjoy the rest of your day.
Julie: Yeah.