Columbus McKinnon Corporation (NASDAQ:CMCO) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Steve Ferazani: Good morning, David. Good morning, Greg. Appreciate all the info on the call this morning. Couple of things I want to check in on. Greg, you explained a little bit the year-over-year gross margin decline. I think you alluded to a big Garvey order at the end of 4Q a year ago. But I’m just trying to make sure that’s — most of the change, particularly because your revenue was essentially flat sequentially where we saw the gross margin decline. I’m just trying to get a sense of gross margin trends.

Greg Rustowicz: Yes. So great question. Thanks for that, Steve. So a year ago, our gross margins were, I believe, 37.2% in the quarter. And they actually were the same level as they were in the fiscal second quarter. So we didn’t see our historical drop. And what I was mentioning is that a large driver of why we didn’t see our historical 100 basis point drop that we would typically see because of less workdays is that we had — we own Garvey for 1 month, but they had a tremendous month of December with some meaningful revenue to one large customer that had almost 60% gross margin. So it was very, very accretive, and that’s why we didn’t see the typical drop. Now this year, we saw a drop a little bit more than 100 basis points.

I believe it was the 160 basis points from Q2. And what I talked about on the call was that we actually — about a 100 of that would — we would normally expect with just less working days. There were only 60 working days versus 64 in the September quarter. But in addition, we did have lower productivity, which is seeing our bridge largely driven by our factory, which is our largest, most complex, most highly engineered factory. And we’ve had — we’ve seen more of a mix shift where we have more engineered to order product, and less standard product, which is more complex, takes more time. And also we had no issues just with the planning of these large projects. And so that impacted us as well in the quarter. And we are, Steve, introducing a solution for that challenge as we speak, and are going live with a new production planning module for that facility that augments or supplements what we have in place today with our SAP solution to take that to a next level.

And we expect to see benefits for that, that will phase in our Q1 of next year time period. So as we think about our Q4 gross margin, Steve, we would expect normally around a 37% gross margin. We’re kind of in that zip code, especially with the additional workdays. However, we are going to see roughly an 80 basis point mix, negative mix impact from some rail projects that are going to ship in the quarter and our rail business has typically — it’s about a $10 million of revenue. And it typically is — gross margins are much lower than the overall corporate average. So that is going to have about an 80 basis point — 80 to 100 basis point impact.

David Wilson: Steve, those are projects that have been — sorry, Steve, those are the projects that have been delayed, given those supply chain issues we’ve talked about. And so there’s been some pricing impacts, cost impacts that are phasing through on those. A lot of electrical component and price adjustments and controls, and that’s the impact of the lower margins. And typical volume in that business in a quarter is about 3x less than what we’re shipping. And so that drives this mix shift and the margin impact, Greg, is talking about 80 basis points.

Steve Ferazani: So when we think about this moving forward, even past this quarter, generally mix shift has been helping you because Dorner and Garvey have been growing at a faster rate and at higher margin. You mentioned the e-commerce customer. How were you thinking about mix shift over the next multiple quarters in terms of what you’re seeing from orders, et cetera?