NACCO Industries, Inc. (NYSE:NC) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

NACCO Industries, Inc. (NYSE:NC) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 5, 2024

NACCO Industries, Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Operator: Welcome to the NACCO Industries First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. Our host for today is Christina Kmetko, Investor Relations. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Christina Kmetko. You may begin.

Christina Kmetko: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our First Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. Thank you for joining us this morning. I’m Christina Kmetko. I’m responsible for investor relations at NACCO. Joining me today are J.C. Butler, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Elizabeth Loveman, Senior Vice President and Controller. Yesterday, we published our 2024 first quarter results and filed our 10-Q. This information is available on our website. Today’s call is also being webcast. The webcast will be on our website later this afternoon and available for approximately 12 months. Our remarks that follow, including answers to your questions, contain forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to several risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements made here today.

These risks include, among others, matters that we’ve described in our earnings release, 10Q, and other SEC filings. We may not update these forward-looking statements until our next quarterly earnings conference call. We’ll also be discussing non-GAAP information that we believe is useful in evaluating the company’s operating performance. Reconciliation for these non-GAAP measures can be found in our earnings release and on our website. With the formalities out of the way, I’ll turn the call over to J.C. for some opening remarks. J.C.

J.C. Butler, Jr.: Thank you, Christine. Good morning, everyone. I’m glad to be on the call this morning since we have a lot of good news to report. I mentioned during our year-end call that I am optimistic about our 2024 outlook as we move past a tough 2023. We expected unfavorable 2023 comparisons would turn favorable in 2024. So I’m pleased to report that our first quarter operating results were in line with those expectations. Our consolidated operating profit increased 162% over the prior year, driven by significantly improved earnings at our Minerals Management and North American Mining segments. Christy will go into more detail about our first quarter earnings and provide an overview of our outlook in a minute. But, first, let me give you an update on our operations.

I’ll start with some positive operational news about our Coal Mining segment. I’m pleased to report the repairs to the damaged boiler at the Red Hills Power Plant are expected to be completed during the second half of 2024. As you can see from our financials, the Coal Mining segment’s revenues decreased primarily due to fewer coal deliveries as a result of this issue. While the Red Hills Power Plant is still only operating on one boiler, it is helpful to have greater visibility on our customers’ timeline for resolution. As we’ve discussed for several quarters, Mississippi Lignite Mining Company’s Red Hills Mine completed the move to a new mine area in 2023. This move sets us up nicely for the future, and we expect production costs at MLMC to decline significantly in 2024 and 2023 levels.

These costs, however, are expected to remain above historical levels through 2024 until the boiler issue at the power plant is resolved, deliveries return to normal, and a pit extension is completed later this year. Before I move to our other segments, I want to comment on the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent announcement of new rules for coal-fired power plants. On April 25th, the EPA issued a pre-publication version of the final rules for mercury air toxic standards and greenhouse gas emissions, which require compliance as early as 2027 and 2030. These rules are ultimately enforced as drafted and will be applicable to the power plants that we serve. While we are still in the process of analyzing these new rules, I’d like to note that similar previous efforts by the EPA were met with extensive litigation, and we’re anticipating a similar response to these rules.

As you can imagine, this is a very high priority for us. It’s worth noting that the United States is experiencing strong overall growth in the demand for electricity. MLMC supplies coal to the Red Hills Power Plant, which supplies electricity to TVA. TVA just announced in their 10-Q filing earlier this week that they experienced an all-time record high peak power demand during Q1. These EPA rules go into effect as written. It’s hard to see how the country adequately replaces the energy generated by these power plants. Shifting to our other segments, I mentioned earlier that our Minerals Management and North American Mining segments generated improved operating results in the first quarter. At Minerals Management, the higher first quarter income was the result of higher production volumes and included earnings from the large acquisition of mineral interest that closed in December.

The Catapult Mineral Partners team, which oversees this segment, has done a great job of growing and diversifying our portfolio of mineral interests over the last few years. We now own a larger portfolio of mineral interests. We are more diversified in terms of operations, geographic footprint, and stages of mineral development, ranging from producing wells to undeveloped mineral interests. The Catapult team is again targeting mineral interests of up to $20 million in 2024. Our North American Mining segment also delivered strong year-over-year earnings improvement. North American Mining’s operating profit improved 184% and segment adjusted EBITDA increased 70% compared with 2023. I am proud of the significant progress the North American Mining team has made on operational and strategic projects that contributed to the improved 2024 first quarter results.

Our Sawtooth Mining operation is the exclusive miner for the Thacker Pass Lithium Project lithium project owned by Lithium Americas Corporation. Sawtooth Mining is contributing moderate income to North American Mining segment during the current construction phase of that contract and is expected to continue to do so until we enter the production phase, which is expected to occur in the 2027-2028 timeframe. More information about this project is available on the Lithium Americas website. The North American Mining team continues to evaluate and pursue new business opportunities, including diversification into additional minerals, as we did in 2023 with a new contract to mine phosphate for a customer in Florida. Overall, I believe we’re making meaningful progress towards building this segment into a very successful business platform.

Finally, moving to our Mitigation Resources of North America business. This team continues to advance existing mitigation projects and build on the substantial foundation it has established over the past several years. Mitigation Resources added a new project in the first quarter by acquiring an attractive piece of land near a high growth area in central Florida. We anticipate that Mitigation Resources will further expand its business model in 2024 with a focus on generating a modest operating profit in 2025 and achieving sustainable profitability in future years. Overall, I continue to be very optimistic about our outlook in 2024 and beyond. I have a lot of confidence in our team, and I’m pleased with the way all of these businesses continue to advance their strategies, including efforts to protect our Coal Mining business.

With that, I’ll turn the call back over to Christy to cover our results for the quarter and our outlook in more detail. Christy?

Christina Kmetko : Thank you, J.C. Let me begin with high-level comments about our consolidated first quarter financial results. Then I’ll provide some detail on our individual segments. We reported consolidated income before taxes of $5.6 million compared with $4.4 million last year, a 28% increase. A shift in our mix of earnings led to an effective income tax rate of 18% this quarter versus a negative rate of 30% in first quarter 2023, which resulted in a $2.3 million year-over-year increase in income tax expense. Due to the higher income tax expense, our first quarter 2024 consolidated net income decreased to $4.6 million or $0.61 per share compared with $5.7 million or $0.76 per share last year. We generated EBITDA of $11.2 million.

This was modestly higher than the prior year EBITDA of $10.8 million. The operating profit and EBITDA growth was primarily due to significant improvements in earnings at our Minerals Management and North American Mining segments. Minerals Management generated operating profit of $7.9 million and segment adjusted EBITDA of $8.9 million and over 30% increase in both metrics compared with the prior-year quarter. The improved earnings were due to higher production volumes, including contributions from a large acquisition of mineral interest near the end of last year. At North American Mining, operating profit of $2.4 million and EBITDA of $4.6 million increased significantly compared with last year. The first quarter improvements were primarily due to favorable pricing and delivery mix.

Improved margins at the limestone quarries as a result of recent contract amendments also contributed to North American Mining’s favorable results. The improvement in operating profit at both Minerals Management and North American Mining were partly offset by lower Coal Mining results. Our Coal Mining segment reported an operating loss of $417,000 and generated segment adjusted EBITDA of $1.8 million. This compares to operating profit of $313,000 and segment adjusted EBITDA of $4.6 million in 2023. J.C. noted that the Coal Mining segment’s revenues decreased primarily due to the boiler issue at Mississippi Lignite Mining Company. However, the revenue decrease was offset by a reduction in cost of sales, resulting in comparable quarter-over-quarter results.

Lower earnings at our unconsolidated operations, primarily due to reduced customer requirements at Coteau, contributed to the decrease in the Coal Mining segment’s results. Looking forward at our Coal Mining segment, we expect strong 2024 operating profit compared with the significant 2023 loss, which included a $60.8 million impairment charge. Higher segment adjusted EBITDA, which excludes the impairment charge, is also projected. These anticipated increases are primarily due to an improvement in the results of Mississippi Lignite Mining Company and higher earnings at Falkirk and Coteau in the second half of 2024. While MLMC is expected to incur a loss in 2024, largely attributable to reduced coal deliveries while the power plant is operating with only one boiler, the loss is projected to be significantly less than 2020-2023, excluding the impairment charge.

This is primarily because production costs are expected to decrease compared with last year. In addition, the effect of the impairment charge taken last year will result in lower depreciation and amortization expense and contribute to lower production costs in 2024 and beyond. The projected increase in full year 2024 earnings at the unconsolidated mining operations is driven primarily by an expectation for increased customer requirements at Coteau and Falkirk, as well as a higher per ton management fee at Falkirk beginning in June 2024 when temporary price concessions end. Turning to North American Mining, we expect substantial quarterly growth in operating profit and segment adjusted EBITDA in each remaining 2024 quarter, leading to significantly improved full year results over 2023.

Improvements at existing operations as well as contributions from new and modified contracts will all contribute to the improvement in results. Finally, at Minerals Management, we expect 2024 operating profit and segment adjusted EBITDA to decrease moderately compared with the prior year, excluding the 2023 impairment charge. The forecasted reduction in profitability is primarily driven by current market expectations for natural gas and oil prices as well as development and production assumptions on currently owned reserves. Overall, at a consolidated level, we expect to generate net income in 2024 compared with the substantial 2023 net loss. Adjusted EBITDA, which excludes any impact from the prior year impairment, is also projected to increase significantly over 2023.

These improvements are mainly due to increased profitability at the Coal Mining segment. Growth in North American Mining is also expected to contribute to the higher 2024 net income. Before I turn the call over to questions, let me close with some information about our balance sheet and cash flow. We ended the quarter with consolidated cash of approximately $62 million and debt of $50 million. We had availability of $100 million under our revolving credit facility. During the first quarter, we repurchased approximately 128,000 shares for $4.3 million under an existing share repurchase program. In 2024, we expect cash flow before financing activities to be a moderate use of cash. We will now turn to any questions you may have.

See also 10 Best May Dividend Stocks To Buy and 15 Best States to Retire for Women in the US.

Q&A Session

Operator: [Operator Instructions]. We will take our first question from Doug Weiss with DSW Investments.

Doug Weiss: A question on the mining business. Once you’ve started a project, how much is the ongoing capital expense on those projects on an annual basis?

J.C. Butler, Jr.: Are you talking about a coal mine, or are you talking about a North American Mining project?

Doug Weiss: North American mining.

J.C. Butler, Jr.: It entirely depends on the project. In some instances, we own the equipment and will maintain that equipment over the life of the contract. And that’s all included in the fee structure that we receive. In other instances, the customer is responsible for funding those things. So it’s really very contract specific. I guess I would add that most of the operations that we do inside North American Mining – I’ll just use an example, right? We might acquire a drag line that will operate at a quarry or a phosphate mine or somewhere else for somebody. And the upfront capital is the most significant piece, typically. of that project. Over time, you’re going to have repairs to the drag line, you’re going to have planned outages where you need to do periodic upgrades and improvements. But for the most part, I think you could think of the North American mining project of having a majority of its CapEx upfront, although there will be some over time.

Doug Weiss: To the extent you’re not brining on new projects, is it fair to say that a fairly high proportion of the EBITDA in that division will convert to cash flow? Yeah, it just sounds like – yeah.

J.C. Butler, Jr.: I think that’s the safe assumption. As opposed to – I’ll compare that to a manufacturing business where you’re constantly replacing things on your manufacturing line. The mining business is typically not like that. But you will go through – as we saw on our Red Hills mine, you go through periods of time when you have to reinvest. But, generally, EBITDA is – true EBITDA, you can think of it as cash flow.

Doug Weiss: And would you be able to pay what sort of returns you’re looking for on that for the upfront investment in terms of – you get a new project and you spent $20 million or whatever on the drag line, what sort of EBITDA you hope to earn on that in the years that follow?

J.C. Butler, Jr.: Well, given the fact that these are multi-year projects with investment upfront, I’d point you to like an IRR calculation and we target things that are in the mid-high teens in general.

Doug Weiss: When you guide to quarterly growth for that business, do you mean sequential growth, like the second quarter will be better than the first quarter and so on?

J.C. Butler, Jr.: Generally, yes. But like any business, you can’t draw a straight line to all those points and have it look like a nice neat graph.

Doug Weiss: I guess moving on to your royalty businesses, you give disclosures in the K on your reserves, but I’ve found with other royalty businesses, those reserves aren’t really that communicative in terms of the real reserve life of those assets. And I wondered if you could just speak generally about what you think the economic life is, particularly for your gas assets. I guess Appalachia would be the largest one.

J.C. Butler, Jr.: Yeah, the Appalachian assets are our legacy assets. We’ve acquired those over decades and decades. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those had been acquired in the early part of the 1900s as we were establishing our underground coal mining business in that part of the country. That’s where the company started. Well, let’s just go through history, right? We acquired the natural gas reserves as part of acquiring all minerals historically. In many instances, we mined the coal or somebody else ended up mining the coal. We sold the surface at some point if that was owned. And we’ve owned these natural gas assets for a very, very long time. You get sort of, I guess, probably 10 years at most ago. And horizontal fracking became kind of the prevalent way of producing the minerals in Appalachia.

And then pipelines came in sort of in the 2017, 2018 timeframe, which is when we said this thing’s about to get supersized. So we made a conscious decision to – let’s go hire people that are experts in this area and develop our Catapult Minerals Partners business. So they oversee those assets. A lot of that’s been developed, but there’s a lot of wells yet to be developed. If you look at the typical decline curve on a well, it varies, but on average, these things can last for decades. They have a large – any kind of horizontal fracking well has large production upfront and it tails off pretty quickly, but then it can run for a very, very long time. It can run for decades. In fact, I know there are royalty companies out there that focus on just buying the tails of wells from people.

So, you take the natural gas assets in Appalachia and you translate that to what we’re buying elsewhere and we’re targeting a broad portfolio of mineral interests, meaning when we buy a package, it typically has got producing wells, it’s got wells that have been drilled but not completed, so they’re not producing. It’s got wells that have been permitted, but nobody’s taken any action on the permits. And there are undeveloped reserves. One of the things I love about this business is a majority of the value we’re paying for these assets is focused on the producing wells because that’s what a lot of people are paying for. A lot of people are interested in what’s the cash flow is I’m going to get out of this right away. And we, of course, look at that and we appreciate that.

But we’re also acquiring a lot of reserve interests that are going to start – be developed and produce in years to come. So I see this business as accumulating more and more and more that which just provides a much stronger and longer run way for profitability to come out of this part of the business. It’s kind of a wide-ranging answer. Does that address your question?

Doug Weiss: Yes, I think so. As you look at opportunities to acquire, are you seeing better value on the oil side or on the gas side?

J.C. Butler, Jr.: It varies. In many instances, it gets to specific dynamics around the transaction. Like really, why is somebody selling? Has somebody had a fund for the last 20 years and they’re closing out the fund and they need to sell? Has somebody been getting their funding from a private equity firm and that goes away and so they need to raise some capital by selling some wells? What’s their motivation? That’s really probably the greatest driver of swings in value from my experience. Do prices affect the value of mineral interests? They do on the margin, but it doesn’t swing as much as you would think it might based on monthly, quarterly changes in oil and gas prices.

Doug Weiss: On MLMC, once you’re all done with the moving locations and so on, what’s a good, normalized cost of goods sold there?

J.C. Butler, Jr.: We don’t disclose that. And your point about we’re moved and we’re done, we’re moved, we’re almost done. You’ll note in our disclosures that we talk about a pit extension. So we went over, we established the new pit. We’re operating over there. It’s going very well. We’re very pleased with the way that’s playing out. Part of the plan, we knew when we got there, we were going to make the initial pit longer. As you can imagine, a longer pit is going to be a more efficient way to mine. It’s like anything, right? It’s larger scale. You make it a bigger pit. So we’re still extending that pit this year. It’ll be done later this year, at which point the costs will really drop to where they think they should be, which is much more in line with historical levels.

We’re getting a double punch right now because we’re – self-inflicted wound. It’s the smart thing to do to extend the length of this pit, which adds to our costs. The other thing you’ve got is the power plant that’s just operating on one of the two boilers, so our production is only at about half what it would normally be, which puts – it’s not efficient. It makes it a higher cost operation. I think we’re headed back to historical levels that we feel quite good about. We just have to get a couple more quarters behind us.

Doug Weiss: Just touching on North American Mining again, you had a really nice step up in your EBITDA margin this quarter. Is that sustainable or are those margins going to move around quarter to quarter?

J.C. Butler, Jr.: Well, everybody’s margins move around quarter to quarter. So with that qualifier, I think there have been some fundamental shifts in the business, some of which are strategic in nature, tactical in nature. We’ve been working on some things over the last few years. You’ve seen in prior quarters, we’ve disclosed that even last year, we put a pause on new business development while we were straightening out some operational matters. We feel good about where those are. One of the other things we’ve done is sign up some new contracts. We’re always tweaking our contract structure because these contracts won’t run for a bunch of years. We’re always tweaking the contract structure to think about how do we best serve our customers while thinking about our own – the economics of our business.

I think you’ve got a combination of some new contracts, some amended contracts as well as some operational and strategic improvements we put in place that are paying dividends. I think that we are headed towards a stronger performance in that business going forward because of those things. Is it going to be consistent every single quarter? Probably not, but I feel good about where we’re headed.

Doug Weiss: And you have an unconsolidated income line in that division. Can you say what that is? Which asset or what mine that is?

Elizabeth Loveman: It’s just some smaller historical mines that are locations that we account for as a variable interest entity, and so under the equity method.

Doug Weiss: Okay. On the Coal segment, I’m curious using the Sabine Mine as sort of a case study where you receive several years of payments after the mine closed, could you just talk a little bit about how good the economics are of those closure payments relative to the prior operating earnings of the mines?

J.C. Butler, Jr.: I’ll speak generally. Generally, during production – in our management fee contracts, which in the Coal Mining segment are Coteau, Falkirk, Coyote Creek, and Sabine, so generally during production, that’s when you’re doing a lot of work, you’ve got a lot of people, a lot going on, so the fee is higher. In the initial years, the first few years after you go into final mine reclamation, there’s still a lot of work to be done. There’s a lot of dirt moving going on. There’s a lot of regulatory things that we’re dealing with, a lot of land issues. I shouldn’t call them issues, it’s really just land matters related to wrapping up the mine. And so, the fee is still pretty robust, although generally not what it was during production.

And then, after a few years, we’ll go into a period that is the tail end of final mine reclamation, which is really more the dirt work is done, it’s monitoring water, it’s looking for erosion, it’s making sure that the things that were planted are growing as they should. So the fee steps down generally in the later years of a contract. Now, every contract’s different with respect to how that works and what we’re responsible for and what the customer is responsible for. But in each instance, the customer still continues to pay 100% of the cost. And this is really just related to the fee that we receive. But it’s a kind of a step down structure as the amount of work that’s required decreases.

Doug Weiss: Quickly, on your new projects, so on the remediation business, how big a business do you think that could be looking out three to five years?

J.C. Butler, Jr.: Well, we’ve not said how big we think it can be. We haven’t disclosed that. I will tell you that the business, which we started five, six years ago, is on a much faster growth trajectory than we anticipated when we started it. We’ve been very pleased with our ability leverage sort of the North American coal environmental reputation as a way to propel that business into having a lot of credibility, even though it was essentially a startup. Number of the people that are in that business came from our coal mining operations, and it’s really been helpful as we’ve got going. We’ve also got a great relationship with the Army Corps of Engineers in the areas where we operate, which has been helpful to us. So I guess I’d add to the fact that the mitigation part of the business is growing faster than we thought it would.

We’ve branched out now to also start doing abandoned mine land reclamation. You saw our disclosures that we are the preferred provider of abandoned mine land services in the State of Texas, which is a big deal. And we’ve been doing some other remediation projects as well that are neither mitigation banks nor abandoned mine land reclamation. So we’re seeing growth opportunities in a number of areas, kind of organically grown. And it’s on a great growth trajectory. The question we always kick around is at what point does this thing become a segment? And I don’t know. I would say hopefully sooner or later. I think the people in the business would say they hope later rather than sooner because you get a lot more attention when you’re a segment.

But this is a business that’s growing very nicely, very rapidly, and the disclosure we put out is we think they’re going to be profitable at an operating profit level in 2025 and it’ll be sustainable future years. One of the reasons is because particularly on the mitigation banking side, you acquire a piece of property, and then it takes a year or so to get your mitigation banking instrument with the Army Corps of Engineers, and then you sell the credits over an extended period of time. It can be 10 years. So the initial years of this business on the mitigation banking side was planting a lot of seeds by initiating projects. We’re now getting into the period where we’re going to start seeing very attractive income from the credit sales out of those banks.

So not a direct answer to your question, but I hope that was helpful.

Doug Weiss: I think last question. You gave some additional detail on the K on your solar project. Can you talk a little bit about how large an investment you’re contemplating there and do you continue to think it’s going to be a very high ROI?

J.C. Butler, Jr.: I mean the returns are pretty attractive on the projects as we’re viewing them. I think our approach is primarily, although not entirely, but our approach is primarily that we’re going to serve as developers. We have knowledge that I think is somewhat unique with respect to properties that would be attractive for solar farms, including reclaimed mined land, whether that’s ours or others. A lot of people are scared off that stuff. We understand what the risks and opportunities are with respect to those properties. Our investments are really going to be in the development phase, which is acquiring the land or securing the land through lease or other means. And then working on interconnect studies and finding EPC contractors and getting the whole thing put together into a package.