Core Molding Technologies, Inc. (AMEX:CMT) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Jeff Geygan: All right. Appreciate it. You’ve talked repeatedly about reducing your exposure to truck. I think last time we reported out that might have been 44% of revs. Where it’s at today? And what do you expect that trend to look like on a forward basis?

Dave Duvall: Yeah. It will continue. It’s part of the strategy. It will vary between 44%, up to say 54% depending on the sales that we see in the other channels, especially when you start seeing personal watercraft, at the beginning of the year. That picks up. At the beginning of the year and trails off, at the end of the year same with building products.

John Zimmer: And I think Jeff one of the pieces of that is our long-term strategy in truck was never to get out. It was to do just profitable business. As we came out of the turnaround, we realized that we had added on business that we just couldn’t get to profitability. And we really think we’ve fixed the majority of that. Dave mentioned, we have one contract that we’re still working on. It gets a little bit of additional pricing. Hopefully that was actively working on right now. So long-term where we are as truck is we’re bidding on new programs with truck. It’s just we’ve got a different mindset than we did probably five years ago. We’re looking to do profitable business with contracts that aren’t one-sided that we really think are good for both business partners. And so I think our truck business truly just has changed strategy versus us totally getting out a change in strategy there. We’ll only do stuff that we think we can make good money on.

Jeff Geygan: Thank you. With your Q4 guide of revenues down 15% to 20%. John I thought you said your fiscal year at that point down roughly 5% to 10%. You anticipate maintaining your gross margins in the 17.5% to 18.5% range. What does that imply for your gross margin in Q2?

John Zimmer: I mean, I think, if you do the math it probably puts us at a gross margin of 13% to 14% 13.5% to 14.5%. And a little bit of that’s just going to be leverage. We are starting to reduce our — we’ve always talked about what we can do is our variable cost is somewhere between 60%, 70% of our cost structure. And so we are able to reduce material price and material cost very quickly. Direct labor comes next and we’ve been moving very quickly on some of that taking some time off at the plants where they take a week down and those types of things so we can reduce that cost. But the one piece that takes a little bit more of a long-term and really we wouldn’t reduce unless we think we got a long-term problem is the fixed cost.

And we will adjust that very significantly because we really think long-term the company is going to continue to grow. We don’t want to have to adjust where we have a real good seasoned workforce. So probably lost leverage in Q4 is more of the issue than anything else. That’s certainly the margin in Q4.

Jeff Geygan: And last question. When do you anticipate providing guidance for 2024 beyond?

John Zimmer: Yeah. So 2024, yeah, we’re still getting a lot of data. I think at the time we release the first — not first quarter, but our year end results which would be early March we would have it. If there’s anything significant that would warrant it before that we would definitely come back out and do a discussion in between. But where we are right now we have a lot of customers telling us that they have — they’re watching the economy as much as us. I got Polaris which is one of our major customers deck right in front of me. They came out and said they’re watching the retail demand situation going on in the United States right now in North America. So I think we will have better data by the time we do the 10-K the earnings release at year end around March. But again if there’s something major between now and then we would definitely come out and tell you guys.