TriMas Corporation (NASDAQ:TRS) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

I would say, Katie, the cycle time, we talked about this before — or the lead time is greatly reduced in the market right now, because volumes are down, because there’s available capacity, and what normally would have occurred as customers work through their inventory levels, you would normally see a pipeline refill. We’re not seeing that necessarily. And I don’t think we’ll see that until and unless the market starts to snap back in a more meaningful way. So lead times are down. It’s a bit difficult to predict our revenue precisely, but we’re coming off such a low base that we’re pretty confident that we’ll do better than we did in Q4 last year.

Katie Fleischer: And then just switching to margins in Packaging. Should we assume — I know you discussed the cost savings and the impact that you’re getting from that on your margins. Is the operating margin that we saw within Packaging this quarter a pretty fair assumption going forward? Or do you think you’ll be able to get additional leverage from those cost improvements for next year?

Thomas Amato: Well, I think for the nearest term, it’s a pretty good assumption ’til Q4-ish. But as we go into 2024, I’m expecting that we’ll start to see some operating leverage gains occur. We’ll probably be pretty mindful about our assumptions when we give guidance there. But when I look back at Q3, I wasn’t too surprised with our sales rate, but I was very pleased with our conversion. And I’ve said this before in calls, we can see through nonfinancial indicators, things working. And typically, the numbers follow, and we started to see that because we started our cost savings efforts, I think, pretty early in the year. And the benefits started to come through for us nicely in Q3. So we should experience a nice full year run rate in 2024. And assuming some revenue comes back, which we hope happens and as we launch new programs later in the year, I’d expect to get some operating leverage gains.

Katie Fleischer: And then — just the last one on M&A. What does the pipeline look like right now? Have you had to shift your strategy at all given the high rate environment, has it become more or less attractive?

Thomas Amato: So I’ll take that in reverse order. First of all, we are modeling things a bit differently. We’ve increased our cost of capital given the higher interest rates. That’s a great question, and we’ve already adjusted for that. With respect to the M&A market overall, first of all, we’re not going to force anything. Strategically, we’re looking at a number of companies. We’re able to make very clear decisions on things that fit our strategy and things that are just interesting companies out there. The M&A market, I would say, generally for the end markets we’re in, the products we’re in and where we want to grow, I mean there’s not a lot — there’s not many, many opportunities as we would see, for example, 3 years ago, where it was a pretty hot market.

But we are looking at some nice adds globally. I think if interest rates tick down a bit, I think that will start catalyzing what companies start to come to market, because there’s a lot of privately owned companies out there that I think those owners are more working with those companies and their capital structure than being interested in bringing them to market at this point in time.

Katie Fleischer: And then — sorry, just one last quick question in terms of modeling. You talked about your tax — the tax benefit this quarter. Can you just give a little bit more detail on that and if we should assume a lower level of taxes going forward?