Spirit Aerosystems Holdings, Inc. (SPR) UBS Aerospace Virtual Conference
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Corrected Transcript 12-Nov-2020 Spirit AeroSystems Holdings, Inc. (SPR) UBS Aerospace Virtual Conference Total Pages: 16 1-877-FACTSET www.callstreet.com Copyright © 2001-2020 FactSet CallStreet, LLC Spirit AeroSystems Holdings, Inc. (SPR) Corrected Transcript UBS Aerospace Virtual Conference 12-Nov-2020 CORPORATE PARTICIPANTS Thomas C. Gentile President, Chief Executive Officer & Director, Spirit AeroSystems Holdings, Inc. ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... OTHER PARTICIPANTS Myles Walton Analyst, UBS Securities LLC ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... MANAGEMENT DISCUSSION SECTION Myles Walton Analyst, UBS Securities LLC Well, thanks so much for joining us again. Welcome back to the UBS Virtual Aerospace Conference. And with us for this next session, we're really privileged to have with us, Spirit AeroSystems' CEO, Tom Gentile. It's going to be a conversation. And so, to enliven that conversation, I'd really ask you to put questions into the chat. So, if you look in your interface on your desktop, you'll see upper left-hand corner there'll be a Q&A tab. Go ahead and submit that question. We'll fold it into the discussion as we go through this conversation. So, Tom, thanks so much for joining us this morning. Tom Gentile was named President and CEO of Spirit AeroSystems in August 2016. As everybody I'm sure on the call knows, Spirit AeroSystems is one of the largest aerospace structures provider in the world for both commercial and military markets. Prior to Spirit, he was President and CEO of GE Capital. And before that, he was also CEO of GE Healthcare Systems and also the CEO of GE Aviation Services. So, a broad breadth of background. Most of the conversation, I'm sure, will be around Spirit AeroSystems and its position in the market, but his perspective from prior experiences, I'm sure, will form the discussion for those on the line. And again, please put those questions in the chat and we'll pull them into the discussion. So, Tom, I think you had some opening remarks to maybe set the stage and I'm going to turn it all over to you. ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... Thomas C. Gentile President, Chief Executive Officer & Director, Spirit AeroSystems Holdings, Inc. All right. Thanks, Myles. Great to be here. And good morning, good afternoon, everybody. Just wanted to start off with an overview of Spirit's situation. Obviously, this has been a very difficult year with the dual challenges of the MAX grounding and COVID-19. For Spirit, about 70% of the structure of MAX is what we supply. And so, with that being grounded, that impacted us. It was half our revenue last year. And so – and then coupled with COVID this year, we saw about a 58% drop in our revenue in Q3. And at the same time, we've seen our deliveries all across the board with Boeing wide-bodies and Airbus down about 45%. And so, that's had an impact on our stock. We've been downgraded. 2 1-877-FACTSET www.callstreet.com Copyright © 2001-2020 FactSet CallStreet, LLC Spirit AeroSystems Holdings, Inc. (SPR) Corrected Transcript UBS Aerospace Virtual Conference 12-Nov-2020 And so, what we've done is we've taken actions to reduce costs, to preserve liquidity, also to continue driving diversification of our customer base, and to improve productivity in our factories. And so, from the standpoint of costs, we've aligned our costs to our lower levels of production. So, one of the things that we've done is we took about 8,000 of our commercial employees out of our workforce, so about 44%. We also cut executive salaries 20%. We've had our salaried employees on four-day workweeks for basically the whole year since March. We've taken out a lot of other indirect costs, so about $1 billion of total cost or 40% of our nonmaterial base. The other thing we've done is we've taken a lot of actions to preserve liquidity. We negotiated with Boeing a $225 million advance earlier in the year. We deferred $123 million repayment to Boeing until 2022. But we also raised capital. In two different transactions, we raised $2.1 billion of new capital. We cut our capital expenditures by about $150 million to $125 million. We reduced our dividend down to $0.01, but we also terminated – we mutually terminated an acquisition we had planned with Asco that really eliminated a capital outlay of $420 million. We did close our acquisition with Bombardier, but at a reduced price. We took $225 million off the cash consideration, which was a 45% reduction. So, combined with all those things, we substantially improved our cash position. We ended Q3 on a pro forma basis with $2 billion in cash on the balance sheet. Our cash burn in Q3 was about $72 million. And so, if you look forward, even if things stay about as they are, we have more than 20 quarters of cash on our balance sheet. So, plenty to weather the storm however long it lasts. But we do expect to be cash flow-positive beginning in 2022 based on current projections. At the same time, with the acquisition of Bombardier's aerostructure assets, we've really improved our diversification, more Airbus content, more work on composites, more wing, also more aftermarket. The Bombardier acquisition more than doubles our aftermarket presence. So, as we look forward, next year, Boeing commercial is going to be about 45% of our total, Airbus will be about 25%, defense about 15%, business jets now become more significant at 8% and aftermarket at 8%. So, a much more diversified company. And we're taking advantage of this slower period of production to really improve productivity. So, we are automating things, digitizing more of our factory floor, improving our workflow in our factories, so that when we do go up in rate, and we will, we'll be a lot more productive when we do so. So, coming out of this situation, we do now have a good cash cushion. We've taken our costs down to the levels of production that we are currently at and that'll start to help our margins as we go forward. And we have a very good work package on every aircraft in Boeing and Airbus's backlog, and the backlogs have more or less been resilient. Obviously, MAX has lost some backlog, but it's still at about 3,400 units and Airbus remains very intact as well. So, we feel like we're in a good position, more diversified, good cash position. We'll be more productive coming out of this. And we are optimistic about the future. We won't be on Zoom calls forever. We will start to travel again and that will mean that production rates will go back up in the future. It'll take a couple of years but they will recover. So, with that, Myles, we can go right to questions. 3 1-877-FACTSET www.callstreet.com Copyright © 2001-2020 FactSet CallStreet, LLC Spirit AeroSystems Holdings, Inc. (SPR) Corrected Transcript UBS Aerospace Virtual Conference 12-Nov-2020 QUESTION AND ANSWER SECTION Myles Walton Analyst, UBS Securities LLC Q Well, I can't wait to [indiscernible] (5:55). Maybe let's talk a little bit high level about the health of the supply chain below you and next to you. And you've given to us in sort of two lenses. One is your lateral supply chain and those that you see as similar to you, beating into the supply chain; above you, so the Boeing and Airbus; but also maybe more specifically your supply chain and its health, how it's dealing with the current downturn, have they been as successful as you have in terms of getting to a cost structure that they can almost break-even and, to your point, have 20 quarters of stability if nothing improved. Give those two lenses. ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... Thomas C. Gentile President, Chief Executive Officer & Director, Spirit AeroSystems Holdings, Inc. A All right. Well, the supply chain clearly has been impacted by this situation, both the MAX grounding and COVID. These are historic crises in the industry. And with air traffic now down, still down 65%, and it was down more than 90% back in March and April. So this has been difficult for everybody. I'd say, though, the supply chain laterally has been remarkably resilient. People have been able to get access to capital markets. I described our efforts. You've seen the same with Triumph. You've seen the same with airlines. People have been able to access the public capital markets and that has certainly helped. I think some of the actions the Fed take that has taken – has enabled that. In terms of our supply chain, as we look below, that's critical that that supply chain remains healthy and they've also been resilient. We have seen a couple of bankruptcies, but surprisingly few at this point, only a couple really. And I think part of that, though, is that where we are in the cycle. So the MAX grounding and then the subsequent pause in production that Boeing announced last December was so quick that we didn't really have time to react to it. And so, we had all of our orders, particularly from the international suppliers, coming in on the water and coming in. So, first quarter and second quarter really, we saw a working capital drag because we were still paying out for all of that supply that was coming in. We've readjusted all the purchase orders now and so now you're going start to see some destocking at the suppliers.