Trane Technologies : First Quarter 2024 View Transcript

Trane Technologies

Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call

April 30, 2024 / 10:00 AM EST

Trane Technologies

Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call

April 30, 2024

10:00 AM EST

Operator: Good morning. Welcome to the Trane Technologies Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call. (Operator Instructions)

I will now turn the call over to Zac Nagle, Vice President of Investor Relations.

Zac Nagle: Thanks, Operator. Good morning. Thank you for joining us for Trane Technologies' first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. This call is being webcast on our website at tranetechnologies.com where you'll find the accompanying presentation. We're also recording and archiving this call on our website.`

Please go to Slide 2. Statements made in today's call that are not historical facts are considered forward- looking statements and are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of federal securities law.

Please see our SEC filings for a description of some of the factors that may cause our actual results to differ materially from anticipated results.

This presentation also includes non-GAAP measures, which are explained in the financial tables attached to our news release. Joining me on today's call are Dave Regnery, Chair and CEO; and Chris Kuehn, Executive Vice President and CFO.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Dave.

David Regnery: Thanks, Zac. Thanks everyone, for joining today's call. As we begin, I'd like to spend a few minutes on our purpose-driven strategy, which drives our engaging, uplifting culture and enables our differentiated financial results over time.

Our purpose is centered on creating a more sustainable world, and our strategy is aligned to powerful mega trends like energy efficiency, decarbonization and digital transformation.

Customer demand continues to increase as the need to address climate change becomes more urgent.

We need creative solutions and game-changing innovation to bend the curve on global warming and that's where Trane Technologies leads.

Our relentless innovation, proven business operating system and high-performing culture enables us to consistently deliver a leading growth profile, strong margins and powerful free cash flow. The end result

is strong value creation across the board for our customers, our shareholders, our employees and for the planet.

Please turn to Slide 4. In the first quarter, we extended our track record of strong execution.

Our global teams delivered robust performance across the board. Quarterly bookings of more than $5 billion were at an all-time high and up 17% organically.

Organic revenues were up 14%. Adjusted operating margins were up 230 basis points and adjusted EPS was up 38%.

First quarter bookings strength was again led by our Commercial HVAC businesses globally, which were up over 20% with growth in more than 30% in equipment and mid-teens in services.

Bookings in our Americas Commercial HVAC business were once again a standout, up 30% with more than 40% growth in equipment and more than 15% in services. Booking strength was broad-based with growth in nearly all vertical markets.

We delivered exceptional bookings growth across our applied solutions, leveraging the power of our direct sales force, deep customer relationships and leading innovation to capitalize on increasing project complexity in high-growth verticals.

Our Commercial HVAC pipeline remains robust around the world, and we see tremendous growth opportunities well into the future.

Our strong growth profile provides us with excellent optionality to accelerate key investments in 2024 while delivering strong leverage, EPS and free cash flow.

We put a number of high ROI investments in flight in the first quarter. With a focus on future growth, these investments include product innovation, increased capacity, sales and service excellence, digital and automation.

Our bookings performance further strengthens our position for 2024 and increasingly for 2025. Q1 ending backlog of $7.7 billion is up 10% from year-end 2023.

We increased our backlog for 2025 and beyond by $800 million to a total of $1.8 billion, increasing visibility to future growth. Based on our Q1 results and expectations for continued strong performance, we're raising our full year revenue and EPS guidance. Chris will cover the details in a few minutes.

Please go to Slide 5. Demand for our innovative solutions continues to be exceptional with a book-to-bill of 120% on strong organic revenue growth of 14%.

In the Americas segment, our Commercial HVAC business delivered strong performance across the board. Bookings were up 30% in the quarter and up over 60% on a 3-year stack, led by our applied

solutions portfolio, which we estimate carries an eight to 10 multiplier of higher-margin services revenue over the life of the equipment.

Backlog for applied solutions continues to grow, which bodes well for future growth. Commercial HVAC revenues were up mid-20s with more than 35% growth in equipment and mid-teens growth in services. The compounding of services revenue year after year provides strong growth in good times and is resilient in more challenging macro conditions.

We're investing heavily in sales and services excellence programs, strengthen our business for the long term.

Turning to residential. Bookings were down low single digits and revenues were up low single digits. The business performed stronger than our initial expectations for Q1, and we're cautiously optimistic moving forward.

Our transport businesses performed as expected, with bookings down low single digits and revenues down mid-teens.

While we see the down cycle in transport as modest overall, the business is facing tough comps from 2023, a plus 20% growth comp in the first half and a down 20% growth comp in the second half, which impacts the OpEx in the near term.

In 2024, we expect to see a soft first half and a strong second half. Turning to EMEA. The region performed in line with our expectations. Commercial HVAC bookings and revenues were strong, up low teens and up high single digits, respectively, while transport bookings and revenues were down low single digits. The book-to-bill was very strong at approximately 120%.

Turning to Asia. The team delivered strong performance consistent with our expectations for the quarter. China remains very strong, with bookings up more than 20% and revenues up high teens.

Asia's book-to-bill was also very strong at approximately 120%.

Now I'd like to turn the call over to Chris. Chris?

Christopher Kuehn: Thanks, Dave. Please turn to Slide 6. This slide provides a snapshot of our performance in the first quarter and highlight strong execution top to bottom.

Organic revenues were up 14%, adjusted EBITDA and operating margins were up 200 basis points and 230 basis points, respectively, and adjusted EPS was up 38%.

At an enterprise level, we delivered strong organic revenue growth in equipment and services, both up low teens.

Our high-performance flywheel continues to pay dividends, with relentless investments in innovation, driving strong top line growth, margin expansion and EPS growth.

Please turn to Slide 7. At the enterprise level, we delivered robust volume growth with strong incrementals, positive price realization and productivity that more than offset inflation.

In our Americas segment, we delivered about 12 points of volume and about three points price, with our Americas Commercial HVAC business delivering very strong volume growth of approximately 20 points.

Strong adjusted operating margin expansion of 240 basis points was driven by strength in our Commercial HVAC business, which more than offset the expected impact from revenue decline in our transport business.

In our EMEA segment, we delivered about three points of volume and about one point of price with stronger volume in our Commercial HVAC business. Adjusted operating margins were up 30 basis points for the segment and stronger when you consider the impact of acquisitions and FX in the quarter.

Excluding FX currency losses related to the devaluation in the Egyptian pound in the quarter, EMEA EBITDA margins would have been 19.5%. The Asia segment delivered mid-teens revenue growth almost exclusively from higher volumes.

Strong volume, productivity and modest price contributed to 310 basis points of adjusted operating margin expansion.

We reinvested heavily back into each business in the first quarter and expect to ramp these investments through the year to drive growth well into the future. Now I'd like to turn the call back over to Dave. Dave?

David Regnery: Thanks, Chris. Please turn to Slide 8.

Our end market segment and business unit outlook is largely unchanged from our Q4 earnings call with a couple of notable differences. First, our Americas Commercial HVAC business had a very strong quarter, stronger than we expected despite a tough comp of mid-teens revenue growth in the first quarter of 2023.

We're encouraged by the strong start for the business, especially when you take into account the exceptional 30% bookings growth and 125% book-to-bill ratio on mid-20s revenue growth in the quarter.

We expect the Americas Commercial HVAC business to remain strong throughout 2024 versus increasingly tough comps from 2023 as we move throughout the year. Second, our residential business performed stronger than we expected in the first quarter.

We expect the business to be down modestly on continued destocking, and we believe the EPA clarification on sell-through helped to mitigate some of the independent wholesale distributors concern heading into this season.

While we're pleased with the results, the first quarter for residential is typically a very small percentage of the year and doesn't provide a sufficient read through to the balance of the season.

We believe it's prudent to move through Q2 and gain more visibility before extrapolating too much from Q1. All other businesses performed as expected, and the outlook for the year are unchanged.

We provided additional details on the slide for your reference.

Now I'd like to turn the call back over to Chris. Chris?

Christopher Kuehn: Thanks, Dave. Please turn to Slide 9. Our initial 2024 guidance reflected optimism about key end markets and our ability to outperform.

While we're only one quarter in, our exceptional bookings, revenues and backlog in our Commercial HVAC businesses strengthen our conviction that 2024 will be another year of robust top line and bottom line growth. We're raising our organic revenue guidance by 2percentage points to 8% to 9% from 6% to 7% prior.

We're also raising our full year adjusted earnings per share guidance by $0.30 at the midpoint and raising the low end of our guidance range above the high end of our prior guidance range.

Our new adjusted EPS guidance range is narrowed to $10.40 to $10.50, up from $10 to $10.30 prior. Embedded in our guidance is our philosophy around our value creation flywheel, which builds in relentless high levels of business reinvestment to drive end market outgrowth, healthy leverage and strong free cash flow.

We expect to see investments continue to ramp in the second quarter and into the back half of the year, accompanied by leading growth and strong incrementals.

We continue to expect about one point of growth from M&A in 2024 with a negative impact of approximately $30 million to adjusted operating income for the full year or a negative impact of about five points to reported leverage versus organic leverage.

The impact is primarily related to the technology acquisition, Nuvolo which carries noncash accelerated intangibles amortization of approximately $25 million, plus year one acquisition and integration-related costs.

We also expect a negative impact to revenues of about 1percentage point from FX in 2024.

FX is expected to offset the point of M&A revenue growth on a reported basis meaning our organic and reported revenue growth guidance is now the same at 8% to 9% for 2024. There's no change to our organic leverage target of 25% plus for the year, consistent with our stated long-term target.

Turning to cash. We had a strong start to free cash flow generation in the first quarter, and we expect 2024 to be another year of free cash flow conversion of 100% or greater. For the second quarter, we expect revenue growth of approximately 8.5% and adjusted EPS of approximately $3.05. Please see Page 17 for additional information that may be helpful for modeling purposes. Please go to Slide 10.

We remain committed to our balanced capital allocation strategy, focused on consistently deploying excess cash to opportunities with the highest returns for shareholders.

First, we continue to strengthen our core business through relentless business reinvestment. Second, we're committed to maintaining a strong balance sheet that provides us with continued optionality as our markets evolve.

Third, we expect to consistently deploy 100% of excess cash over time. Our balanced approach includes strategic M&A to further improve long-term shareholder returns and share repurchases as the stock trades below our calculated intrinsic value.

Please turn to Slide 11, and I'll provide an update on our 2024 capital deployment. Year-to-date through April, we've deployed $540 million in cash with $190 million to dividends and $350 million to share repurchases.

We have $2.1 billion remaining under the current share repurchase authorization, providing us with strong optionality as our shares remain attractive, trading below our calculated intrinsic value.

Our M&A pipeline remains active.

We continue to see potential opportunities for value-accretive M&A as we did in 2023 where we made key, strategic investments to accelerate our progress across energy services and digital solutions, industrial process cooling and precision temperature control technology.

For 2024, we expect to deploy approximately $2.5 billion in cash. Our strong free cash flow, liquidity and balance sheet give us excellent capital allocation optionality moving forward.

Now I'd like to turn the call back over to Dave. Dave?

David Regnery: Thanks, Chris. Please go to Slide 13. As discussed, our transport performance in Q1 was as expected, and there's no change to our outlook for the year. The overall markets are expected to be down modestly, and we expect to outperform in both regions.

We've continued to provide this slide in the deck for your reference. Please turn to Slide 14. We operate our transport business for the long term.

While we're moving through a modest downturn in 2024, this is a great business with a bright future. ACT projects a strong trailer market rebound from 2024 into 2025, up 19% and project continued growth through their forecast horizon in 2029.

We have a diversified transport business globally with opportunities to grow across the portfolio, with leading innovation, strong execution through our business operating system and a world-class dealer network, we're well positioned to outperform in any market environment.

Please go to Slide 15. In summary, we are well positioned to drive differentiated growth and value over time. Our leading innovation, proven business operating system and unmatched culture enables us to consistently deliver top quartile financial performance over the long term while continuing to reinvest in our business.

I believe our best days are ahead. We have the team, the strategy and the track record to deliver a leading performance in 2024 and differentiated shareholder returns over the long term.

And now we'd be happy to take your questions. Operator?

Operator: (Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Andy Kaplowitz with Citigroup.

Andrew Kaplowitz: Dave, can you give us a little more color into your order momentum and backlog growth? You obviously enjoyed significant acceleration orders and you mentioned strength in applied.

So can you give us any more color to how much of the continued Americas orders acceleration is coming from data centers. Do you think you can continue to grow your backlog from here?

And maybe your thoughts on the duration of this order cycle if it is, in fact, data center-led?

David Regnery: Yes. Thanks for the question, Andy, good question. Look, in the quarter, we saw a broad-based growth, and it wasn't concentrated necessarily in any one vertical. I mean we certainly had strength in data centers.

We certainly have strengthen in education, healthcare, high-tech industrials. It was almost hard for us to find a vertical that we didn't grow in.

We did have a bit of weakness, and I guess you would say conventional office and some in lodging.

But for the most part, it was broad-based growth, and it was really on a global level.

So a lot of strength in our Commercial HVAC businesses.

The good news is our pipeline is also very strong.

So this would be before an order actually comes in to be a booking, this is what our sales teams are working on. That continues to be very strong as well.

So look, it's a lot of innovation. I'm certainly proud of what the team's been able to deliver, and we're executing at a very high level right now.

Andrew Kaplowitz: Dave, definitely, I can appreciate that.

So on that note, organic incremental margins continue to trend higher than your 25%. Given the strength in your markets and the overall ability to execute, why isn't 30% or 35% as you've been able to record for a while now the new 25% for Trane?

Then where are you on, let's say the slope of productivity projects that you've been undertaking?

Because we know you've been really focused on productivity after not being able to do as much during the pandemic.

Christopher Kuehn: Andy, it's Chris.

I'll start and then Dave may jump in.

So as we think about the first quarter, investments back into the business began to ramp really stronger into February and March than, say the start of the quarter and our run rate exiting Q1 is stronger than when we started. The pipeline for investments continues to grow.

These are across multiple categories.

So to your question, we really like the long-term framework of the 25% or better incrementals. That's what we're continuing to guide for 2024.

But the investment pipeline and where we can see the market outgrowth here and the order rates and the revenue rates, I think just tells us we want to keep investing back in the business. Think of these investments, again around innovation, sales and service investments that Dave talked about in the comments.

These are upfront tools as well as people investments, making sure we've got capacity investments, automation in the factory; digital, the list goes on, and we want to make sure we're always funding back into the business.

On the productivity side, we're not there yet. We're getting better on the gross productivity, but there's still more opportunities for us going forward.

Operator: Your next question comes from Scott Davis with Melius Research.

Scott Davis: Guys, just following up on Andy's question a little bit.

But can you mark to market where you're at on data center capability?

I know you made that investment in liquid stack.

I think it's called -- do you have kind of -- are you developing kind of soup to nuts capabilities in the data center to be able to handle some of these newer, hotter chips?

David Regnery: Yes. Great question, Scott. I think we've been very well positioned in data center vertical for a long time.

I think you know this, but technology tends to move pretty fast in this vertical compared to others.

We're certainly aware of these new technologies that are being developed really at the terminal side of cooling.

So think of that as direct cooling to the chip or think of it as emerging cooling at the rack level.

One of the things that we do really, really well at Trane Technologies is we think about systems.

If you think about a data center's cooling systems, you need to think about the entire system.

So some of it certainly is what we would call the terminal side, and that's what we just referred to.

But these systems also require sophisticated air handling.

They also require high efficiency chillers, and we look at the entire system to really help the customer think through the entire energy needs for the whole data center.

The other thing that's really emerging, you're going to hear more about this is we think of the data center, think of it as a thermal management system.

So I know you know this, but when you're cooling a space, you're removing heat from it. Data centers have a lot of heat.

What do you do with that heat that you're removing?

Conventional thinking would be it gets emitted back out into the atmosphere.

But how can you repurpose that heat, and we've done some projects still early stages here, where we're creating district heating loops from the heat that would normally just be wasted and reusing it as an asset.

So it's a very dynamic space.

It's obviously growing at a nice clip. It will grow at a nice rate for the continued future and we're spot in the middle of it, and it's always been a very strong vertical and it will be in the future.

Scott Davis: That makes sense, Dave. And just a little bit of a pie in the sky here.

But does it make more sense to think about you guys in a data center partnering with somebody like Vertiv or explicitly competing against them because it seems like you both have very different capabilities, but obviously overlap on some critical apps there.

So how do you guys think about that opportunity when you think about these giant, giant about like a 1- gigawatt data center, something where the engineering capabilities would presumably almost rely on maybe more than one supplier, not just 1.

Is that accurate, Dave?

Or am I thinking about it wrong?

David Regnery: Yes.

I wouldn't call out any particular company here, but I would tell you that we have technology partners that we work with because you're spot on.

It's a cooling system, right.

It's no different than think about a system that exists within a building, right, we may not have every component, but we would have a partner that would have that component, but we would help integrate it into a system that would be operating in an efficient way for the customer.

Scott Davis: Best of luck guys, congrats on this start for the year.

Operator: Your next question comes from Julian Mitchell with Barclays.

Julian Mitchell: Maybe just a first question on the organic sales guide for the year.

So it looks like the first half, you're up maybe about 11% based on the guidance, the full year you've got up sort of high singles, so second half is there at maybe 6% or so.

Is the way to think about that and understand we haven't yet seen cooling season and so forth.

But is the way to think about that revenue guide framework, it's a big slowdown in commercial HVAC versus Q1 because of the extremely tough comps -- because I would have thought resi and TK would look better year-on-year sales in the back half versus the first half.

So with the total enterprise sort of going from 11% to 6%, is it just really that Commercial HVAC piece just battling the tough comps?