Synalloy Corporation
Q4 2014 Earnings Call Transcript

Published: 9 Feb 2015

[Operator:]

Welcome to the Synalloy fourth quarter earnings conference call. At this time all participants are in a listen only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session and instructions will be given at that time. [Operator Instructions] I’d now like to turn the conference over to your host for today Mr. Craig Bram, CEO of Synalloy.

[Craig C. Bram:]

Welcome to Synalloy Corporation’s fourth quarter and year end [indiscernible] our CFO. It’s been an exceptionally strong year for the company as we’ve completed a number of major initiatives including our exit from the fabrication business and the acquisition of Specialty Pipe & Tube. Adjusted EBITDA on an absolute basis reached record levels in 2014 and we are positioned for additional growth in 2015. Synalloy increased its dividend for the year at double digit rate which represented the eighth consecutive year of payouts. After reviewing the company’s results we will provide you with a brief summary of each business unit’s performance followed by Q&A. As is customary we will present our financial performance for continuing operations only for the current period and year-to-date as well as comparisons to the prior year using three different methods

[Operator:]

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Kevin Maczka – BB&T Capital Markets.

[Kevin Maczka:]

First question, there’s no mention here in the release or on the call today, but in January you did trade letters with Eastern Company. Is there anything more you can say about the status of where that stands?

[Craig C. Bram:]

At this point I can’t comment on that.

[Kevin Maczka:]

Pricing, there sounds like there’s some pretty wild swings here. Maybe it wasn’t pure price but more driven by mix, but you do have a comment in the release about rolling out some new sales tools and avoiding some lower margin business that hurt pricing. Can you address what pure price pressure you were seeing in Q4, how you envision that as it’s baked into your guidance for the new year, and what kind of impact these new pricing tools can have?

[Craig C. Bram:]

I think that mention in the earnings release was really focused on 2013 and what we experienced there in terms of pricing generally being depressed. Part of that was of our own making in 2013 where we ship a lot of commodity pipe and considerably less special alloys and we were able to rectify that in 2014 which is why the conversion revenue was much stronger for BRISMET in 2014 than in 2013. We actually saw our conversion revenue improve from about $0.86 a pound in 2013 to about $1.22 in 2014.

[Kevin Maczka:]

Is that the best way to think about the magnitude of the pure price that you’re seeing? Again, can you comment on anything that you’ve baked into your 2015 outlook?

[Craig C. Bram:]

We really haven’t baked anything into 2015 in terms of a material change in pricing for BRISMET. We’re still looking for a similar product mix that we had in 2014. It’s interesting, if you look at nickel prices at the start in the fourth quarter of 2013 and then first half of 2014, nickel price per pound is virtually now at the same price it was that we started out 2014 so while nickel is certainly depressed it’s not at a lower level than what we experienced going into 2014. I guess that’s a long way of answering your question that we don’t expect any material price changes at BRISMET assuming we can hold the mix constant to what we did in 2014. Some of those tools that are referenced in the earnings release are really focused on keeping track of the sizes of pipe that we’re selling, the alloys, how much of our production is dedicated to certain commodity pipe versus special alloy pipe, how much is dedicated to small OD pipe versus large OD pipe. We’ve got a very nice backlog going into this year. We had orders in Q4 that were $32 million at BRISMET that were heavily oriented towards special alloy and large OD type pipe sales. At this point in time based on what we can see, we’re expecting similar pricing and conversion revenue per pound look in 2015 that we achieve in 2014.

[Kevin Maczka:]

I appreciate the color on the impact of lower oil, you gave some numbers there on EBITDA, in that same type of scenario what kind of revenue hit would you expect?

[Craig C. Bram:]

The revenue hit on that $26 million low end number is based on about a 30% to 35% revenue hit and that translates into about a 50% EBITDA hit. Again, we would expect that we would perform better than that. We’ve got some product lines for both Palmer and SPT Houston that we didn’t have last year. We’ve got the code vessel certification – we’ve made our first code vessel out at Palmer and that is actually a certification that we need to not only sell code vessels but to sell tanks to a number of customers in the Permian and Eagle Ford that we currently do a minimal amount of business with. We think that will be very helpful in mitigating any of the hit we might be exposed to. The other thing I’d say is that Palmer’s customers tend to be very large E&P companies and while they’re certainly cutting their cap ex as well, they’re not focused on cap ex cuts because they’re highly leveraged and their balance sheets won’t allow them to drill as much as they’d like to and so we’re not burdened with any customers who are in financial difficulty that quite frankly, may actually go away during a time period like this as opposed to just slowing down.

[Operator:]

[Operator Instructions] I’m showing no further questions. I’d like to turn the conference back over to management for any closing remarks.

[Craig C. Bram:]

Again, we appreciate everybody’s support this year and I hope to see as many of you as possible at our annual meeting in Richmond. Have a great day. Thanks.

[Operator:]

Ladies and gentlemen thank you for your participation in today’s conference. This does conclude the program and you may all disconnect. Have a great rest of your day.