Barnes Group Inc. (NYSE:B) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Dawn: I think we have a pretty reasonable idea internally what the effect was, in terms of its drag and output and hence obviously higher costs that resulted. And I think as you could imagine, as we have those new people on board and they come up to speed, they’re trained by higher expertise staff that also has to divert their time to do training and development. You catch up with that learning curve, so to speak, and you get back more to the trajectory we were on before. So that kind of phase of hiring and training and development is well with underway. And I think that that really, we kind of feel that in a three to six month timeframe that new hires can be pretty effective at coming on board, either in the OEM side in particular, but also in the MRO side and being effective.

So we think there’s headwinds there. I don’t think we could end up giving a precise quantification other than that it’s a drag. And COVID absenteeism, very unique and situational. First of all, China opened virtually overnight, everybody started interface. There was a high COVID outbreak. It also coincided with the Chinese New Year, which was challenging timing. I think COVID went through our operational facilities extremely quickly within the course of a few weeks. Virtually almost every single employee we had, had experienced an interface with COVID, unfortunately. So it was a big disruption, combined with Chinese New Year, ends up being kind of a drag for us through the kind of the December period and of January. We think we’re well beyond that now if that effect as well in the past.

So I think it will be just kind of a onetime hit for us in terms of the business. But it would be tough really to give you kind of a quantification down to the bottom line of what that is. Julie, you may have other comments here that you may want to add to this as well.

Julie Streich: Sure, Matt. Just to add a little bit of color to the Aerospace performance. In the fourth quarter relative to the third quarter, if you’re looking at that, we also saw a slight dip in our aftermarket sales, which also would have contributed to performance in the fourth quarter. It was just a little bit of change in purchasing patterns as GE was going through some of their transitions. Nothing we’re concerned about at all, but from a mix perspective, that also had an impact on the margin performance in the fourth quarter.

Matt Summerville: And then as a follow-up, I just — I want to understand some of the pluses and minuses impacting Q1. If I look at the $0.36 to $0.40 that Julie mentioned, that’s really no better than what you did in the first quarter of 2022 or in the first quarter of 2021. So help me understand with the restructuring well underway in Industrial, why maybe we’re not seeing better year-on-year performance there, go through kind of the pluses and minuses? Thank you.

Thomas Hook: Sure. I can add, and Julie kind of walk through the macros there and I can chime in at the end on the big picture.