Terex - Earnings Call - Q3 2014
October 30, 2014
Transcript
Speaker 0
Good morning. My name is Vanessa, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Terex Corporation Third Quarter twenty fourteen Financial Results Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question and answer session.
Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Ronald DeFeo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead, sir.
Speaker 1
Thank you, Vanessa, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. As always, we appreciate your interest in our company today. On the call with me is Kevin Bradley, our Chief Financial Officer and Kevin O'Reilly, Vice President of Operational Finance Tom Gelston, Vice President of Investor Relations and our segment presidents that many of you already know. I won't name them by name, but they're either on the call or in the room here with me this morning. As usual, a replay of this call is available on the Terex website under Audio Archives in the Investor Relations section.
I'm going to begin with some overall commentary and highlights and Kevin is going to follow with a detailed financial report. I'll also then follow-up with some specific improvement targets and an overall summary before we open it up to your questions. We'll be following a presentation, the presentation that accompanied the earnings release and it's available on our website. Not included in this presentation is the recently announced JV with Manitex. However, I will make a few remarks on this before taking your questions.
I'd like to request that you ask one question and a follow-up in order to give everyone a chance to participate. Let me direct your attention to page two, which is the forward looking statement and non GAAP measures explanation. We encourage you to read this as well as other items in our disclosures because the material we will be discussing today does include forward looking information. So now let me begin. Turning to page three.
The third quarter results for Terex on an adjusted basis were earnings per share of $0.59 and on a reported basis EPS of $0.51 This was substantially in line with our most recent guidance of $0.55 to $0.65 for the quarter that we gave in mid September. The adjustments were for workforce reduction and restructuring charges in our MHPS segment along with accelerated amortization charges taken in relation to the retirement of the previous senior debt facility. As our results demonstrate, the environment is both challenging and difficult to predict. Terex is getting stronger, but we cannot depend upon the end markets to drive our improvements. Overall, we had net sales growth of about 3%, half of which came from favorable currency exchange rates.
Aerial Work Platform's margins were disappointing but explainable. Fundamentally, we expected better revenue than we achieved in Q3, so we had excess headcount causing short term inefficiency or under absorption. This coupled with a product campaign was an expense of about $17,000,000 the majority of which related to under absorption. Importantly, currency translation in particular related to a large intercompany payable in Brazil negatively affected margin $9,000,000 and factory startup costs in the quarter were negative $4,000,000 We did reduce AWP employment by about 500 people in the quarter. The cranes segment continues to see good performance from our utilities business, but the core construction crane market remains challenged as we telegraphed in September.
Both construction and MHPS performed about as expected overall. We have undertaken the restructuring and footprint actions that I mentioned earlier and this resulted in a pretax charge of $10,700,000 in the quarter. Materials processing profits declined due to a mix of global business conditions and investments being made for product line expansion. Free cash flow in the quarter was $71,000,000 And lastly, given the challenges of currency and the markets, we believe the full year EPS and cash flow to be at or near the lower end of the previous guidance. Turning to page four.
Since the market environment plays a critical role in the performance of each segment, I thought a few words might be appropriate to frame how we're thinking about our business today. This is a little different than what we expected and different than we had assumed the next several years to be like. Basically, we don't want to assume any market recovery until we actually see one. Starting with AWP, the market is expected to remain strong with overall demand levels for equipment expected to remain flat over the near term and near term of course is over the next twelve to fifteen months. As our construction business is substantially a European dependent business, the outlook would be flat to slightly lower.
Our cranes business continues to be one that is most challenging to forecast. However, we are planning a flat overall market environment as non residential growth non residential construction growth remains uncertain. Within this segment, however, we have a utilities business and a North American services business, both of which are trending in a positive way. For our MHPS segment, we see a flat material handling market bolstered by a positive service business. As twenty fourteen was a big year and will be a big year in the fourth quarter of delivering large port automation projects in Europe and to a lesser degree in The United States, 2015 is likely to be a lower year in terms of port equipment sales.
That said, we do not we do expect to see new port automation business awarded to us, but the exact timing of these awards is difficult to predict. Lastly, our materials processing business continues to be pressured by slower mining related sales, offsetting any improvement being experienced on the aggregate side, but the overall business would be best described as flat to positive. The main takeaway here is that market recovery should no longer be assumed. We therefore will focus on the cost and growth initiatives that can be executed irrespective of market movements. On page five to provide some insights, we show the geographic trends for the overall business both on a quarterly and year to date business.
The pie charts also summarize of our overall net sales by region. While Europe looks strong, it is off of a historically low base and includes some of the large automation orders port business for Rotterdam. North America improvements are aerial work platform led with the negative trends from rough terrain cranes happening in the market in North America. Declines in Latin America are significant and virtually all market based. Asia and Oceania are mixed for the year.
The bottom line is that global growth does not exist and is hard to come by. A geographic diversity strategy is important to have and we're glad we diversified our business over the years, but short term uncertainty prevails. I'll come back and summarize what we're going to do about this, but I'd first like to turn it over to Kevin, who will go through the detailed financial results for the quarter. Kevin? Thanks, Ron, and good morning, everyone.
I'll be reviewing results for the third quarter as well
Speaker 2
as year to date 2014 and comparing them to the prior year results. All comparisons that I'll be calling out are using as adjusted figures. Let's turn to page six, which provides Q3 results. There were no adjustments in 2013. Adjustments made in the current period to our GAAP results included the impact of a restructuring charge taken in MHPS segment, as well as the loss on early extinguishment of debt related to our refinancing of the senior credit facility.
Details on these adjustments are included in the appendix of the presentation. Net sales for the quarter of $1,800,000,000 increased from the prior year by 3% or approximately $53,000,000 Changes in foreign exchange accounted for almost half of the increase. Our AWP business posted 12% growth and construction was up 10%. MHPS and MP were up modestly compared to the prior year at 25% respectively. Our cranes business was down just over 7% as the mobile cranes component of this segment has experienced a decline in market demand.
Gross margin decreased 1.4 percentage points to 20.3% from the prior year, driven largely by our AWP and MP businesses. SG percentage of sales decreased from 13.8% in 2013 to 13.3% for the quarter. Income from operations decreased $11,100,000 compared to the prior year. As a percentage of sales, operating margins decreased from 7.9% to 7% for the quarter with cranes, MP and AWP driving the year over year decline. Net interest and other expense decreased versus the prior year, driven largely by lower outstanding debt and lower rates under our new credit facility.
The effective tax rate was approximately 32% for Q3 compared to twenty one point four percent in the prior year quarter. This difference was mainly due to the impact on favorable settlements of uncertain tax provisions that significantly reduced the effective tax rate in the 2013. For the quarter, earnings per share was $0.59 compared to EPS of $0.73 in 2013. EBITDA for the quarter was $163,900,000 or 9.1% of net sales compared to $175,900,000 or 10% in 2013. Net working capital as a percentage of annualized sales was 25.9%, basically flat with the prior year quarter of 25.7%.
Return on invested capital increased to 9.8% from 5.6% in the prior year. Turning to page seven, we show our year to date results compared to 13. Sales growth for the year to date period was 4.7% led by a stronger AWP business up 15% and growth in our MHPS business up 8%. Construction and material processing were essentially flat year over year, while our crane business was down 9% for the first nine months of twenty fourteen. Gross margin year to date of 20.4% was slightly lower approximately 40 basis points against prior year's results.
Improvements in our MHPS business were more than offset by declines in AWP and MP. Operating margins were down slightly for the first nine months at 6.6% versus 6.8% in 2013. Net interest and other expense decreased slightly versus the prior year. Our year to date effective tax rate is approximately 30.8% compared to 32.1% in 2013. Earnings per share for the period was up $04 versus the same period in 2013.
EBITDA on a year to date basis was $475,200,000 or 8.6% compared to $469,600,000 or 8.9% in 2013. Page six provides a bridge breaking down the $115,000,000 increase in liquidity for the quarter. Free cash flow, which we define as cash from ops less CapEx was $71,000,000 and generally in line with our expectations. Sorry, this is on page eight. During the quarter, we completed the refinancing of our senior credit facility, which lowered our borrowing costs as well as adding $100,000,000 in revolver borrowing capacity.
Additionally, we repaid $51,000,000 in debt during the quarter, most of which was to pay borrowings in Italy. We continue to repurchase stock during the third quarter and combined with our dividend represented a use of cash of $12,000,000 in the period. Since September 30, we have repurchased an additional 1,800,000.0 shares for approximately $51,000,000 Page nine bridges the change in net sales for both the quarter and year to date periods. You will notice that both periods show significant growth in AWP driven by strong global demand with the exception of South America as well as the slowdown in cranes. Turning to page 10, we provide similar bridges breaking down our operating profit results for both the quarter and year to date period.
Here you will see that despite improving sales AWP operating profit has been pressured by under absorption, factory start up costs as well as unfavorable currency impacts. Construction and crane results reflect the impact of their changing sales, construction favorably and cranes negatively. MHPS continues to improve and are benefiting from the savings programs previously enacted. And lastly, our MP business declined on geographic and product mix, under absorption and investments in new products. With that, let me turn it back to Ron.
Speaker 1
Thank you, Kevin. So now let me discuss our corporate improvement initiatives. And frankly, everything we talk about will be improved by a better market or diminished by a worse market. But we of course need to initiate change irrespective of external events and at times react to those external events. Sometimes improvements are recognizing and changing what you did yesterday because it was either wrong or based upon incorrect assumptions.
We have more work to do, but I think you'll know that Terex has significantly changed over the past five years. I will not recount portfolio changes over the past right now. I want to focus on the change assignments we've made within the company by segment and by category. Within these, as you will see, more can be developed, but any organization has a finite change capacity and it's up to the leadership to stretch this capacity, but with care not to stretch beyond capability. Page 11 specifies anticipated improvements over the next two years by segment and category.
The categories supply chain, productivity headcount, restructuring footprint, design product simplification and new products and markets will all be the categories that we work across the organization to find new improvement initiatives Now these won't happen evenly, but we will report to you specific progress or disappointments. You should not assume that all these get achieved, but new projects will be added to the list as well. But to get on this list, there needed to be specific projects already being worked intensely with realizable benefits of this magnitude on an annualized basis, if not more and some of these will also pay out well beyond 2016. More than 50 projects make up this list, which you can see adds up to about $200,000,000 of operating profit improvement framed within the next couple of years. Importantly, there are also working capital improvement initiatives, which when coupled with free cash flow should be able to allow for $300,000,000 to $500,000,000 of debt reduction or share repurchase.
An additional 300 basis points of improvements we expect will come from a lower effective tax rate. This is excluding discrete items as we make meaningful changes to our organization and business approach. An example of an improvement initiative that began in earnest a couple of months ago is detailed on page 12. This chart compares Terex's DSO and DPO levels over the past eight years. You can see prior to the financial crisis, we had a favorable ten day gap with more DPO days than DSO days.
This changed however and today the gap is just the opposite. The difference is $300,000,000 of cash. We've already negotiated a go forward improvement of at least $50,000,000 over the past couple of months. We may not be able to return to the level of the past, but there is real opportunity here and there's already real progress that has been made in our go forward ratios. So in summary on page 13, the end markets are going to remain quite difficult to predict, but we are focused on specific measurable improvement initiatives that we feel will make our company stronger in any environment.
In the short term, equipment commissioning, in particular in our MHPS segment with the port automation projects, is important key to our Q4 performance and we feel positive about where we stand in this area. We believe that the full year EPS and free cash flow will be at or near the lower end of the prior guidance. And finally, the improvement initiatives we are targeting can generate $200,000,000 of operating profit, 300 to $500,000,000 of debt reduction or share repurchase and a three percentage point reduction in our tax rate over the next couple of years. A couple of comments on the JV with Manitex that we announced yesterday. We believe this is an excellent transaction for both of our companies.
Terex will stay in the business of compact equipment just as aggressively and just as positively as before, but we with total cash anticipated from the transaction to be at least $125,000,000 We have a solid partner that can also help grow ASV. Overall, we expect this transaction neutral to actually slightly earnings positive on an EPS basis. So net net, we have a number of positives from this transaction. It's a good step in further improving and managing our portfolio, something we have been doing aggressively over the past several years. So the bottom line is that Terex's tomorrow will be better than today in a meaningful way.
And if the markets improve, so much the better. Operator, I'd now like to open it up for questions. And thank you.
Speaker 0
Your first question comes from the line of Nicole DeBasi from Morgan Stanley.
Speaker 3
So I'd like to ask a question on the Self Help Plan. I guess, first, is this truly independent of end market performance? And the reason I'm asking is, we're now looking at a year of very little earnings growth on very little revenue growth in 2014. So I guess I'm trying to figure out what's different going forward. And then any more thoughts on cadence so that we're able to hold you guys accountable to your plans for the next two years specifically?
Speaker 1
Okay, Nicole. I think there's a couple of questions in that. And I think the first thing I want to do is set to rest 2014 a little bit And to say that we did expect the market to improve somewhat, we structured ourselves for the market to improve and it cost us money. So while the net net earnings overall year over year will only be up marginally or a small amount, the reality is we made a wrong assumption thinking business would be stronger. In particular, that's the case in cranes.
And in particular, we assumed more growth in AWP and to a degree also in our materials processing business. So fair criticism. We accept that criticism, but it's what has helped us rechange our assumptions going forward into the next couple of years. All right. So now there's a continuation of some of the we don't want to call them self help because self help assumes that we can completely deliver these absolutely the way they are irrespective of market change.
The reality is that market change impacts our outcomes. So what we've attempted to do is frame these on the basis of flat market conditions and positive market will help, a weaker market won't. But overall, we have very specific projects by segment that are highlighted here. Now let me talk a couple of about couple of these things. Within supply chain at AWP, this is a combination of materials sourcing projects already underway, including some sourcing changes to China that while in the next couple of years may only have a $15,000,000 impact over the remaining several years are going to have multiples of that in an impact.
But we're just looking at this in the next couple of years. With regard to productivity and headcount, 30,000,000, given the fact that we had in the second quarter a $15,000,000 or so unabsorbed issue at AWP, Matt and the team are pretty confident he can achieve $30,000,000 in a two year period with the base being 2014, okay? Let me turn to our cranes business. We've got highly focused teams working on design and simplification changes to our several lattice boom projects in particular design programs that add up in detail to $30,000,000 These are not we've got to find the $30,000,000 These are already identified product changes that are in process of being implemented. Okay.
Obviously, dollars 30,000,000 becomes $40,000,000 if we sell more of those products. But the $30,000,000 becomes $20,000,000 if we sell less of those products. So you have to have a baseline in a certain sense. In Steve's business MHPS, many of you are going to visit the MHPS business in mid November. You will see cost reduction initiatives unrelated to the market that will take upwards to 30% of our hoist costs out in our material handling business, a massive change to how we have run this business as well as a brand new girder that is very different than what anybody else is marketing today.
We are taking upwards to 17% of the weight out of that product and being able to offer a better product at an attractive price than our competition. So I think I don't want to go through every one of the projects, But this just didn't happen as a result of this call. These are the projects that were underway that the market has basically been asking us to detail. But I wanted to make sure that we could both take this detail, assure ourselves that there's enough activity behind every one of these projects, but also just give you enough confidence that we're going to drive this $200,000,000 improvement in the next couple of years. Hopefully the markets don't get worse on us.
If they do, this will only make our company better.
Speaker 3
Okay. Thanks, Ron. That was really, really helpful detail. But for my follow-up kind of on the same topic, the one thing that's missing from the slide is the cost that you guys will incur to deliver on the restructuring plan. So is it kind of one for one like it will cost you $200,000,000 to deliver on the plan and will you be adding back those restructuring costs to earnings?
Speaker 1
At this stage on the projects we have laid out, all of the restructuring costs with the exception of only a few million dollars have already been taken. That's not to say we won't have an additional project or two with some associated restructuring costs in the future, but that would be additive to this list. So for the most part, we've announced the restructuring cost associated with the list that I presented here.
Speaker 3
Okay. Thanks. I'll pass it on.
Speaker 0
Your next question comes from the line of Mig Dobre.
Speaker 4
Good morning, Ron and team. I have a couple of questions on AWP. The layoffs that you mentioned here, maybe you can provide us with a little more color because at least to me 500 people seems like a large number. And I remember visiting your facilities roughly a year ago in Washington and what I saw there impressed me is it pretty lean and well ran operation. So I'm trying to understand where is it that this headcount is coming from?
And why is it that we've seen frankly escalating costs here over a short period of time?
Speaker 1
Well, I think Mig and I'll turn this back to Matt in a second. But I think the simple answer is that while we delivered 12% let's say quarter over quarter, year over year improvement in revenue, we were thinking that the revenue was actually going to be stronger than that. And so we were staffed and organized for a little bit even stronger revenue. That's one side of it. The other side of it is that we actually have some variability in our workforce and having more people in the March through September period is not unusual.
So I wouldn't expect all 500 of those people to be gone forever. Okay. But Matt, why don't you take it from there?
Speaker 5
Yeah. In Q3, business didn't come in as strong as we anticipated. It was still strong as you can see from our top line growth, but the orders were slowing and the backlog was dropping quickly. So we made a conscious decision to level our production out and reduce our inventory. That was one of our key focuses was to take the finished goods inventory we had and make sure that we didn't get stuck with it.
As we got deeper into the quarter, we decided to release the temporary workers and to settle into a capacity position that matches the actual demand that we expect to see for the balance of the year. And we see this type of seasonality every year, Although this year I'd say it feels a little bit more compressed. We got off to a slow start at the beginning of the year. March took off. And then about July we started to think see things drop off.
So we feel like we reacted appropriately. We're sized appropriately for the Q4 that we're in right now. Inventory is where we want it and we're anticipating a good 2015.
Speaker 4
Well then I guess my follow-up here, you're singling out three categories of costs that impacted the margin here. How do you think these costs progress going forward? Should we continue to think of them as a headwind in the fourth quarter like the factory startup costs for instance? Or does that shake out at a point in time?
Speaker 1
Well, me answer that Megan again pass it on to Matt to start with. From my perspective, I would take of the seventeen million dollars we identified, I'd say an under absorption, I'd say roughly half of that is probably something that was pretty unusual for us in the quarter. I take the currency translation and as I said that related to an intercompany payable and it took place virtually on the last day or so of the quarter, the last because the Brazilian currency devalued almost 10% in the last couple of weeks. So we had a large intercompany payable that caused us to write it down and that's upwards to $9,000,000 Now that affected AWP. There were some other currency benefits in the company that were positive in other areas.
But since everyone focused on the AWP margin, I think it's important to say exactly why and what that is. And frankly that's not the kind of thing that I would expect to be repeated. Could it happen again? Possibly, but not to that level of magnitude and it's certainly a fairly unusual item. And the last point, the startup of the Oklahoma City facility and the variances at our facility in Moses Lake, which relate to the movement of our telehandler production.
That's unusual, probably going to continue a little bit in the fourth quarter, but we expect to be at efficient production rates in 2015. So and what we're doing is we're really rearranging our manufacturing footprint at AWP over a period of time in order to prepare for some longer term change to our Redmond footprint and to do it as efficiently as we possibly can. So I probably answered the question Matt for you, so I apologize.
Speaker 6
All right. Thank Your
Speaker 0
next question comes from the line of Alex Blanton from Clear Harbor Asset Management.
Speaker 7
Good morning.
Speaker 1
Hello, Alex.
Speaker 8
Hi. I'd like to just ask you what the reasons are that you did this spin off with Manitex, ASV. Followed ASV before you bought it. It's a great company. And you said in the I think Manitex said in their release, it had current sales of $128,000,000 Do you remember what the sales were when you bought it in 02/2008?
Speaker 1
I don't off the top of my head. They were it was clearly bigger than the $128,000,000 but I not by a huge don't think that's really the relevant point today because that was pre crisis Alex. So I think in the simplest of terms, if you can sell a business or divest the majority of the business and end up with $125,000,000 of transactional cash benefits and have positive earnings accretion and remain in the business because you've got a good partner that's committed to growing the business in a company that has a good history of product and product support seems like a pretty positive transaction for everybody. So that's the net net of it. I don't really think we ought to spend a lot of time dissecting the products of ASV at this stage, but
Speaker 8
Not at all, but I was wondering do you expect Manitex to be able to sell do a better job of distributing and selling the product than you can? Is that the reason?
Speaker 1
No. In fact, I think we're going to continue to do the same job we've been doing if not more, but I expect Manitex to be additive, okay? So it's not better. It's just a new way to grow the business.
Speaker 8
Who proposed that? Was it you or Manitex?
Speaker 1
I don't think that's a relevant question now.
Speaker 8
Okay. My follow-up is on AWPs. You were up about 12% in sales for the quarter. What had you expected to be
Speaker 1
I think we expect it to be up more.
Speaker 8
And was that shortfall what part of the market was it geographically? And also was it national rental companies or independents?
Speaker 1
Matt, what do you want to comment on that?
Speaker 5
Yes. I think that the where the North American market is has been and continues to drive our volumes. And the North American market is good and it's strong. The question was how strong and how long would it last through the year. And what it turned out was it was very compressed that the buying season was shorter than we anticipated.
It's still good. And if you look at the rest of the world, Europe continues to be very, very strong as well as Asia Pac. The only place that's soft at all is Latin America in particular Brazil. So really it was North America not continuing as strong as we expected through the seasonality.
Speaker 8
I understand. But what part of North America? Was it national rental companies or independents?
Speaker 5
It's both. The national accounts are a larger percentage of our sales this year than they were in prior years, but the independents are still buying in a similar cycle as the large.
Speaker 8
But they bought less than they Alex, normally do
Speaker 1
we don't want to we're not going to give it just a split between national and independents. Both are doing fine by us, okay? We don't see an unusual thing to disclose there. Thank you, Alex.
Speaker 8
Okay. Thanks.
Speaker 0
Your next question comes from the line of Jerry Revich from Goldman Sachs.
Speaker 9
I'm wondering if you could just flesh out a little bit more the supply chain opportunity in AWP. You mentioned some of that is sourcing to China. Can you just provide more color of what proportion of total AWP costs you expect to move? What's the impact on working capital? And then maybe touch on the corporate expense savings that you're targeting $15,000,000 And if you could just provide some more color there?
Speaker 1
Sure. Matt, why don't you talk about supply chain opportunities? Look at this number, but even bigger opportunities longer term.
Speaker 5
Yes. The supply chain opportunities have been an ongoing activity from our supply chain team and our engineering teams. Some of the opportunities that Ron mentioned factory in China continuing to make more and more of our product line. And in that process, we're using a Chinese supply chain and we're getting very familiar and very comfortable with the quality levels. In particular, the big area that we're targeting is around steel.
If you look at North American plate costs, which is a huge part of our supply chain, they went up year to date they've gone up 14%. If you look at the cost of plate in China, it's significantly less. So we are starting to look at some major components coming from China and they will feed our factories here. So that's probably the biggest thing. The other things are a combination of trying different suppliers and value engineering to take costs out of products.
Speaker 1
How about the next question? I'll move that to Kevin Bradley on the $15,000,000 of cost reduction from corporate. That was Jerry's question.
Speaker 2
Yes, Jerry. The majority of that roughly $12,000,000 is coming out of our IT spend. So the two parts that we've identified right now are shared services for accounting at roughly $3,000,000 and IT cost reduction at about $12,000,000 Obviously, there's more things within My Basketage. The IT piece is largely from looking at what are the things that we're doing directly versus where can we maybe more efficiently and effectively get those things accomplished accomplished outside the company by competent third parties. So there's a little bit of things moving to more of an outsourced model, a more cloud based technology profile for the company and that's driving a fairly meaningful drop in our cost over the next couple of years.
Speaker 9
Okay. And then on the steel cost transition, can you just talk about over what time period do you expect to ramp that up? How much of a tailwind should we look for in 2015? And longer term what proportion of your steel do you expect to source from China?
Speaker 1
Matt, do you want to comment on that?
Speaker 5
Well, that's in process now. It's going to it will ramp into it. I don't have exact percentages of the BOM that I can give you. But I can tell you that we have active we have parts coming in already and we have a longer list of parts that we are actively quoting. So it will transition through 2015 and we'll really see a larger benefit in 2016.
Speaker 1
So of that $15,000,000 that we laid out, dollars 12,000,000 which related specifically to build material optimization and 3,000,000 on logistics, okay? But the $12,000,000 actually is a much larger number over the next several years and it relates to a series of those projects that Matt laid out. So I think we're being actually fairly conservative in taking $12,000,000 at this stage to put into our plan.
Speaker 9
Okay. Thank you.
Speaker 0
Your next question comes from the line of Rob Wertheimer from Vertical Research Partners.
Speaker 6
Hello.
Speaker 10
So one quick question. I don't know if you'll be able to comment, but there's another crane OEM out there that sort of has similar order pattern to you and referenced relatively high crane utilization rates including on towers. And I just didn't know if you were seeing the same thing in the market with pretty high underlying customer health and their reluctance to order or whether the utilization is more patchy in your view?
Speaker 1
I'm going to pass that on to
Speaker 11
Tim Ford. Tim? Rob thanks for the question. Over the past few weeks, I've actually had a number of conversations with many of our dealers and I would characterize the conversations they go something like this. We're having a really good year.
Our rental utilizations are high and we're making a lot of money. And when you probe into that, you start to wonder well why aren't they buying? I'll give
Speaker 12
you a little
Speaker 11
vignette from a conversation I had with one of our better dealers the other day. He said to me that over the past several years, he's seen his customer profile go from putting machines out on rent with the idea of rent to own happening in a six to twelve month period. And now it's more like a twenty four to thirty six month period where he's so he's making a lot of money on the rental, but he's not actually selling the machine. And I think that pattern is pretty consistent the overall market. That's primarily a North American comment, but it's pretty universally true across the board.
Speaker 1
So healthy customers will result in new crane orders. So we like the fact that there's healthy customers. We are just frustrated a bit because it hasn't translated into those orders. So rather than planning for them, we decided after taking our lumps that we're not going to plan for them and we're going to just plan for a flat environment. And hopefully, the net net of health among our customers will result in more orders down the road.
Speaker 10
Makes sense. If I can ask one small question. It seems like you did an effective monetization of an embedded loss on AWV, so you get the tax. Are you able to say do you get half the tax loss that's embedded in there or all of it? Mean thank you.
Speaker 1
Yes. We'll get a substantial portion of it. Is really happening here is that it's Terex overall and remember that we have embedded positions. We wrote down the goodwill a number of years ago on ASV when we bought the business, but obviously you don't get to write down the goodwill for U. S.
Tax purposes. But we have a huge gain from the sale of some of our other assets. So I think you can put those two things together and see how these things work out.
Speaker 10
Makes sense. Thank you.
Speaker 8
Your
Speaker 0
next question comes from the line of David Raso from ISI Group.
Speaker 13
Good ended question here. I mean with AWPs the last four years being 40% to 60% of your operating earnings, the significance of the business obviously can't be overstated. So just seeing the way the backlog fell, I mean there's always some seasonal decline, but down almost 50% at a minimum raises an eyebrow on the comment that you have confidence twenty fifteen will
Speaker 10
be a good
Speaker 13
aerial demand profile. So just knowing the way the business usually when it picks up, it really picks up and when it slows down, it doesn't necessarily perk right back up. Can you help us a bit with the conversations you're having with your customers in The U. S. And Europe to not look at that backlog decline and at a minimum get nervous that why are we even thinking fifteen has a decent demand profile?
Speaker 1
Okay. I'll pass that on to Matt, David. But I reference want the 2012, 2013 and twenty fourteen Q3 ending backlogs. In 2012, it was two thirty two million dollars In 2013, it was $312,000,000 In 2014, it was $214,000,000 I put that within the margin of error in terms of our backlog. Yes, it would be better to have more backlog at this point in time.
But I think we really need to frame this with the color that Matt will now give you about each one of the customers.
Speaker 5
Yes. That's a great question because when you look at the backlog number by itself without any other context, can be a little bit spooky this time of year. But where we're feeling good about next year really comes down to talking with our customers. And if you just start by looking at the fundamentals their time utilization most of the rental companies in North America are at their record time utilizations. Rental rates are coming up.
Used equipment market is healthy. There's not much out there. And so the rental companies when we talk to them about hey how does this year look compared to next year, most people are saying about on par that the CapEx that they're planning on spending is going to be about the same. What's going on in the market right now is what the rental companies are doing is they're getting the equipment right when they need it, because there's a lot of capacity in the market. This time of year what they're doing running it at high utilization rates and they're de fleeting if they need to, so they can get through the slower months.
And then they're planning on coming right back in because the market continues to look good. So when we say flat, flat is good, especially for North America. The rates that we're at, if you look at the historic peaks, we're at a really good spot. Then when you move over to Europe, our next biggest market, it's a little bit different and it's actually a little bit more positive, because their fleets are older. So they're much heavier into the replenishment cycle.
And when we talk to the rental companies there, they're talking about really having to up their CapEx. So it's not as big as North America, but it's an encouraging thing. So on the backlog, I think that as we move through fourth quarter, we'll see that it's climbing and it will be in a normal seasonal pattern where we get hit with a lot of orders in fourth quarter and early first quarter.
Speaker 13
Okay. So exiting the year, you expect the backlog to be higher than where we just exited 3Q just to be Yes.
Speaker 5
That's typically the pattern we follow.
Speaker 13
And the margin progression obviously we just came in at 11.4%. How should we think about including some of the initiatives underway for cost and supply chain? How should we think about progression of margins? To get back to the full year, this year is going to end around 13%, 13.5%. To get us back to where even margins are flat, we're obviously going need to ramp it back up.
Because your first half comps are a bit hard on the margins. Can you walk us through a bit on how at least framework wise you're thinking of the progression of margins from here?
Speaker 1
Well, David, we said in our press release that we expect to get back to the mid teens margins within the next twelve months. Obviously, that is a fairly general statement because we didn't want to give quarterly margin guidance. But second quarter is almost always the strongest margin quarter in the AWP business. So we would expect Q2 to be very strong. Q4 is actually one of the weaker quarters.
The fact that Q3 is weaker is more because of the items we mentioned, okay, but it actually would be significantly better than Q4 in a normal environment. So I think that should provide you some color. The basics here is that we don't see a huge amount of price competition. We see some, but we don't see a huge amount of opportunity to take price is up. So net net pretty flat from that perspective.
So the difference will be our ability to execute somewhere in the range of this $69,000,000 opportunity a portion of which will happen in 2015 and a portion of which will happen in 2016.
Speaker 13
That was the spirit of the question. I mean 2Q has got to be in mid teens or you don't have really much of a chance to get the full year margins to flat 2015 versus 2014 at a minimum.
Speaker 1
But No question about it.
Speaker 13
Yes. Okay. And then quickly just on the tax rate the 300 bps. Can you give us a little help on 2015? I know there's lot of moving parts geographically, but just given us some framework within the company you're working on to get the tax rate lower.
Can you at least give us some suggestion around 2015 tax rate versus 2014?
Speaker 2
Sure, David. The progress on tax rate coming from the areas that we've called out historically. We do expect to see an improvement in jurisdictional mix, which includes the investment we've made and the transition we've made towards a global trading model that will increase that benefit will increase in 2015. Also some of the restructuring that we've done historically including in MHPS specifically addressing losses not benefited territories should be improved in 2015 as well. So those two things make up the majority of the improvement we're seeing.
Speaker 13
Again, apologize. There's some quantification. Should we expect 100 the 300 bps next year? I'm not trying to hold you to an exact number, but we should see a lower tax rate in 2015 than 2014?
Speaker 12
Yes. I would expect to see at least half of it.
Speaker 13
Okay. Terrific. Thank you.
Speaker 0
Your next question comes from the line of Jamie Cook from Credit Suisse.
Speaker 14
Good morning. I guess a couple of questions. One, I guess the one positive on the quarter was the margin progression we saw in MHPS. So Ron, can you just talk about how comfortable you feel there whether the margin improvement that we've seen is sort of sustainable? And with the other businesses not doing so well, sort
Speaker 0
of do you think you
Speaker 14
can get margin improvement year over year and potentially you could quantify the material process margin obviously was disappointing, but in a flat sort of environment, do you think you can get back to sort of the low teens as we think to 15%? And then my third question just is longer term, Ron, I'm just trying to understand how you're managing the business over the next two to three years. And getting back to the aerial work platform issue, with 2015 sort of flattening out and businesses are never flat in these markets, are you running the business for 2016 potentially being down in aerial work platform? Thanks.
Speaker 1
Okay, Jamie. I'm going to answer the last question first and then provide a little highlight to Steve and then give Kieran a chance on that. A lot of questions there, but I think the last question first is, I'm not managing the company today for a flat I mean for a declining AWP business in 2016. Don't have any indication that that's going to happen. Our view is that what's really happening is the rental companies broadly are managing their business in a much careful way.
The fact that they're not adding huge amounts of fleets and are continuing to have high utilizations, in fact even diversifying to a degree away from AWP can only prolong the cycle for us. And the fact that Europe is still at its very early stages of recovery and we're seeing some pretty meaningful growth in our business in China, I mean, it's not out of the realm of possibilities that we'll have $100,000,000 business in aerial work platforms in China in the very near term when the most we ever did there was 20,000,025 million dollars okay? So and we believe we're the market leader in that market. So I think AWP is always a bit choppy. As Matt said, it's always a bit scary depending upon how things view at a certain time of the year.
But I think the real change versus history is that we've got strong, well capitalized, profitable customers that are diversifying and growing in a healthy way. That could not have been said that aggressively five years ago, seven years ago. And that really is a positive for business. So hopefully I've given you some confidence. Then how do I manage the company?
We manage the company focusing on the $200,000,000 getting that done, making sure it drops to the bottom line incrementally, finding more projects because if you notice there's a lot of blanks in that chart where there should be numbers, where there should be more financial impact opportunities across the board. So we still think we can find more opportunities there and drive that to conclusion. And when the markets get better and I know to say they will likely get better that will take us up. And if they don't get better, we'll have a healthier company irrespective of anything. So that's what we got to do in managing the overall enterprise.
There are puts and takes and one of Steve's biggest challenges is he's got to find a way to offset a meaningful drop in automation business in the ports in 2015 and still drive margin improvement overall in his sector. So that's not a slam dunk, but that's why he's taken some restructuring charges etcetera. And he's anxious to show the investor base some of the stuff he's doing in Germany in a few weeks. So Steve, I'll turn that over to you and then we can let Kieran comment on his business.
Speaker 12
Yes. Thanks, Ron. Thanks, Jamie, for the question. And I'll talk about the two businesses because again they're very different. And I'll start with where Ron left off on port.
And the challenge in port is for us to fill this year we'll probably do about $250,000,002 $60,000,000 of automation orders, most of that we're going to deliver probably in the fourth quarter. So we've delivered this in Q3, there's about $80,000,000 Next quarter, we need to deliver about $100,000,000 So that's not going to come back, but we are going to get some automation. For next year, we have I think probably one or two orders that we will sign in Q4. Some of that will be deliverable in 2015 of next year. Some of it will go into 2016.
So that's the challenge is really managing that. But this year we've made substantial changes in improving our product portfolio in the Port Solutions business. We're launching a new ReachStacker. We're launching a new next year a new empty and a full container from our full container handler from our Italian businesses. We've launched some new mobile harbor cranes.
So we're really changing I think the portfolio of our Port Solutions business.
Speaker 1
But our big challenge is
Speaker 12
how do we fill that gap. So that's probably going to be a bit of a negative drag on us next year. On the MH side, I'm more positive. I do think that the profitability is sustainable on a flat market. I don't think lot of these markets are going to grow.
And I want to talk a little bit about what happened this year because we do mention that we took a lot of cost out through the restructuring that we did with the $47,000,000 charge we took last year. But we have had some market headwinds that are built into the numbers that you see this year. Australia was off quite substantially. The automotive market totally shut down. They moved out of Australia.
We've taken action there and we've seen benefits roll through there. South Africa was another market that was difficult to handicap. We had a strike, a multi week strike in the middle of the year that impacted our deliveries of support equipment. So that's been a headwind. Latin America, I'd say Mexico is doing pretty good, but Brazil is a big drag on us and we took some restructuring there and we're changing the business environment there, but I think that's going to be a flat to down market.
China has been a big positive for us and there's been a big ramp up in our lower cost product there that has really been on the upside. And then services has been kind of on the up. So I look at MH as a business going forward that the margins should continue to improve. The footprint rationalization that we're doing and the charge that we took this quarter, the $10,700,000 is related to a closure of a facility in Germany that we're moving into the Czech Republic that will probably have savings of I'd say going forward once we get it closed about 8,000,000 So there are substantial things that we're doing in the business to make it more profitable on same or less revenue.
Speaker 1
Net net, Jamie, I think we're on track with what we said for a multiyear plan for the MHPS improvements. Kieran, why don't you comment on that?
Speaker 6
Yes. I think the question was explaining whether was asked whether MP could get back to sort of traditional double digit margins, right? Obviously, on a quarter on quarter basis, we've had a decline, right? Just to highlight some the primary reasons for the decline on a quarter on quarter basis was primarily product mix driven. Historically, we have sold some of our larger more quarrying focused products into markets like Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe primarily Russia and also Australia.
So you had a mixture. We've experienced obviously unforeseen in terms of the extent of it, a mixture of some political uncertainty around for example the Russian thing. And then basically the rest of it is primarily commodities driven. You see a lot of it as we've seen commodities at sort of five year lows around iron ore. So that mineral that shift in the commodities driven what we call our mineral related markets has changed the product mix.
That's been offset by more of sales that we sell primarily into Western Europe, which is more of our contractor products, are much more competitive, always have been they attract much more competition and therefore we get lower margin. So clearly going forward, we were somewhat taken didn't expect the mineral driven margins to be under pressure and didn't forecast a lot of the geopolitical issues that occurred, whether it's in The Middle East and the sort of periphery countries, Obviously, as that settles down, we'd be fairly confident that that demand for the larger products comes back. The other big area just moving on would be the SG and A. And I think as Ron pointed out in the presentation overall, we've obviously run-in the business for the longer term. We've made significant investments primarily in our engineering part of our SG and A primarily focused on product development.
Key areas that we're developing products And addition to our traditional crushing and screening business where we spend a lot of money on dual power electric products, right, which we would expect to drive revenues into next year. But the other big things would be we're making meaningful product developments into new areas of material processing primarily around the environmental space. I'm going to say environmental space, I'm talking about waste processing and wood processing equipment. There's a number of new products that will hit the marketplace early into Q1 and into Q2. We expect that to drive revenue over the longer term.
Obviously, it's a short term investment. And we've also made some investment, additional investment. We believe we're making good traction in mineral washing and our Terex washing business. And we've also got a lot of engineering product development underway there. So obviously, need some help from the market, but we've also making some investments for the longer term.
Speaker 1
Okay, Karen. Thank you.
Speaker 14
Thank you.
Speaker 0
Your next question comes from the line of Steven Fisher with UBS.
Speaker 15
It is. To what extent did you engage customers directly in determining what you're choosing to do versus your own internal assessments? I'm just kind of wondering how much these programs are intended to improve customer satisfaction versus just the operational improvements?
Speaker 1
Well, thank you. There's a line on page 11 called new products and markets and $63,000,000 of improvements are identified there, dollars 24,000,000 from AWP, 20,000,000 from cranes being the largest portion, but certainly some in construction and the other areas. We're very engaged customers on those. In fact, most of what we've identified here are products that we are either already have already introduced and are in their second and third years of growth or will soon to be introducing. So we've got some exciting new products.
Kieran mentioned a couple that his whole organization has done. The AWP includes new telehandler products. It includes continuing our Superboom category where we've made great progress with our SX-one 180 introduction making us a real leader in that category. So a lot of customer engagement.
Speaker 15
Okay. And then just a follow-up. Since you mentioned the AWPs on that $24,000,000 can you just split out maybe how much is more the new products telehandlers versus new markets maybe China?
Speaker 1
Yes. It's virtually all new products, okay, continuation of new products. We haven't assumed a lot from new geography at this stage. Maybe we'll get a positive there, but at this stage we haven't assumed that.
Speaker 15
Okay. Thank you.
Speaker 0
Your next question comes from the line of Andy Casey with Wells Fargo Securities.
Speaker 15
Good morning. On these improvement initiatives, I want to try to clarify what the base levels are that you want us to consider. First, could you help us understand a little bit ballpark, what is the base tax rate level ex discrete items that we should use before deducting the 300 bps?
Speaker 2
Andy, we're staying with 2014 at 30% to 33%. That's the guide range. So that would the base assumption that we're working from.
Speaker 15
Okay. Thank you. And then second, if I could return to part of Jamie's question, but from a higher level. I'm trying to gauge how to view the overall potential improvement plan impact to earnings. This year you have some puts and takes.
Your comment that investment in these projects has basically already been taken. And then if we assume a flattish market for the next couple years, do you suggest that we add the benefit to something like a mid-two dollars number or if it's different is it lower or higher? Thanks.
Speaker 1
Well, 200,000,000 pretax improvement, okay? That's what we expect to achieve in the next couple of years. In addition, there'll be some debt reduction and some effective tax improvement. I think we don't want to deliver 2015 guidance at this stage because we're going through our process. So maybe 2015 will have some moderately different assumptions on market conditions when we finish our budget process.
So as I said, that's one of the important ways to frame self help. If you take self help as only taking the positives without assuming that there'll be some negatives you end up in a bad place. But I think for the most part these projects are things that are well underway, mostly all invested in and you should expect that we can coming out of 2000 I'd really be disappointed if exiting 2016 we didn't have all $200,000,000 pretax done. It would be better I think that would be the worst circumstance from how I look at this. That would be the worst circumstance.
Speaker 15
Thanks, Ron. Just one follow-up on that. The investment in the projects that you've already taken, did that dampen the 2014 number?
Speaker 1
Well, we called out a couple of the big ones, Luizenthal or the closure of our German factory and there's a couple that we don't call out in each one of the business. But I think in fairness that's kind of normal. So I don't think we ought to use that as an excuse. We didn't use as an adjusted number the currency or the productivity challenges at AWP. That's really not fair to do to adjust out.
So in a certain sense maybe, but I think the best thing we what I could say to you is use 2014 as our base period. That's our base period from a cost and improvement point of view and these initiatives should build off of that.
Speaker 15
You very much.
Speaker 0
Your next question comes from the line of Ann Dugan from JPMorgan.
Speaker 16
My question is around the working capital, Ron. Just curious how that ended up getting inverted back. It's just kind of basic blocking and tackling that you pay customers and your suppliers at about the same pace. I'm curious what happened along the way to reverse that?
Speaker 1
Kevin, why don't you take that? I've been around longer than you, but I think you can provide some specifics.
Speaker 2
I'll start it and maybe you can add Ron. Ann, obviously you can see the time of the inflection really was through the crisis. And candidly there were a lot of things driving our marketplace behavior during that period to get through it. So clearly there were accommodations made to our customers in terms of the ones that were buying during that period in terms of access to terms where they maybe couldn't get financing. And likewise in order for many of our suppliers to keep them in the game, we were fairly lenient.
And so the problem is we're way past the crisis and we're looking at this and saying this is a significant opportunity that we have to capture. So getting focused on it as Ron said very deliberately and very granularly. Ron mentioned on the AP side alone already that's an annualized benefit that $50,000,000 that he referred to. But just to give you some context that incorporates 700 suppliers. So it's broad based and meaningful impact that on an annualized basis we get to achieve.
We think we're just getting started on this and that a significant percentage of that $300,000,000 is available to us as long as we stay focused and execute. But it's
Speaker 1
a legitimate question as why did it take us so long to get on this. And I think that no surprise that this was an issue for us. We felt that at the time we sold our mining business, we had a lot of cash and we were attempting to improve our margins. So we actually did an exchange for some of our suppliers to improve our margins. But that's history.
And moving to a shared services strategy, we were paying our bills and changing the way we're going to pay our bills through a shared services process. We weren't so sure we could implement this kind of a change. Frankly, we are surprising our own organization in how much we can actually affect the outcomes here. So shame on us for taking a little bit longer than we should have. We certainly knew it was there.
We were beating people up over it. We weren't getting anywhere. So we implemented a more aggressive process and we are getting somewhere now.
Speaker 16
Yes. I appreciate your candid answer, Ron. I really do. It just struck me surprising just given how you do really focus on the balance sheet.
Speaker 1
Yes.
Speaker 16
And then just on these improvement initiatives, some of these items like supply chain are notoriously difficult to execute. We always find that it's not as easy to force everybody to buy the same kind of steel etcetera, etcetera. Could you rank order the five initiatives in order of how comfortable you feel on ease of execution to hardest to execute?
Speaker 1
Yes. Okay. I'll give that a shot, Ann. But I just want you to know to get on this list, we had to have a very high level of confidence that we could execute, okay? So just to get on this list, mean there are a lot of other things we looked at in the company, but I just I want to make sure you don't get a sense that this list is a bunch of stuff we just assembled for this conference call.
So the AWP number on supply chain Matt talked about. Those are projects already identified very specific. But you notice in cranes the $3,000,000 in supply chain looks like an exceptionally small number. But the reality is that down in the design product simplification of cranes $30,000,000 not speaking for Tim here, a lot of what's going to happen there is actually going to come from the supply chain. So we've got but his team is actually redesigning a number of the products we have in order to get at that cost change.
So that's why we started this probably six, nine, twelve months ago and it's going to pay dividends 2015 and 2016. '16. But I wouldn't really know how to rank order in terms of priority these five categories. I think these things we're all in on.
Speaker 16
Ron. Thanks. I appreciate the color, independent.
Speaker 8
Thank you, Ann. Okay.
Speaker 0
Your next question comes from the line of Eli Lusgaardin from Longbow Securities.
Speaker 7
Clarification and I think we're also starting to point to thinking about next year and the question is how much estimate is going to drop. Is it $180,000,000 that has to be made up in the Port Solutions? Is that the void for next year? And can you give us some color you saw that AWPs is sort of probably a flattish to up market next year with flat profitability. Give us some sense of where our risks are for next year because the fear is not going to happen this year we accept it and we applaud your movement and your programs to for self help.
But just to get some ideas so people can come out in a reasonable space for next year because that's going be the key thing to determine where
Speaker 4
the stock goes right now.
Speaker 1
Yes. We understand, Eli. So I'm going to answer kind of overall, but I do want to point it off to you Steve and maybe to Tim because of some meaningful changes in these areas. I guess net net, I believe we'll have some positives and some negatives in our revenue base, but bottom line is it will be flat. That's the right planning environment and that's the right situation.
We're going to have some cost increases that are natural. People expect to get salary increases. People expect to get salary increases. We're going to have to offset that with other activities within the company to give salary increases. Not that we won't, but maybe we won't give them as much and maybe they won't happen at the same time, okay?
They may happen a little bit later. So we're going to pay attention to that level of detail. If the markets are better, we'll be more generous. If the markets aren't better, we won't be. We know a couple of negative headwinds we have.
The biggest one is the negative that Steve mentioned in the port business. So I'll put that off to Steve. And Tim is going to follow because he's already experienced most of the negatives we expect in the crane market. I don't see the crane market declining much more. Rough terrains are down 25% category wise in North America this year.
So I don't think we're going to see that continuation. So Steve why don't you comment about port? I don't think it's $180,000,000
Speaker 12
delta. Thanks, Eli. On port, I'd say right now, the gap is probably about $150,000,000 I mean, we're going to I think do at least $100,000,000 of automation next year. Have some of the rollover that if you remember the first quarter I mentioned the 50,000,000 that we thought we were going to get this year, which actually rolled over. So that equipment is at the port and we're going to get it and probably flows through in Q1 and Q2.
We're going get at least another order in Q4 potentially two. So I think that that gap I put around $100,000,000 to $150,000,000 Now I think as Ron said, we're still going to show improvement as an MH and PS business. So the port revenue is going to drop a little bit. We're going to plan for MH being flat, but the profitability of the business is going to go up. So we're doing things to make sure that we can continue to show progress from a profitability of the MH and PS segment.
Speaker 11
So Eli, in the Crane business, would characterize it as very mixed. We have some markets that are hanging in there and other markets that are very, very challenged. I think as Ron said and he framed the answer, we really felt significantly this year a little bit last year in certain markets. But if I take a longer view from an orders standpoint, we're disappointed in the third quarter order intake. But if you look over the course of the year, book to bill is about one.
So through the year, we're managing the order book. And if you look at an R6 rolling six order basis, we're up about 4.5%. And on a rolling 12 basis, we're up about percent. So overall in a very difficult environment, we're scraping some orders out along the way. Will it get better or worse?
I think that's the $64,000,000 question. But as we sit here today, I think we've taken most of our lumps from a market standpoint.
Speaker 7
And just a quick follow-up on construction because of its European context. Is there the improvements that are going to be takeaways enough to maintain profitability in that business for next year?
Speaker 1
Yes. This is George. Thank you for the question. With what we've done over the last few years resizing the businesses and getting them to a level of cost, I think the market just staying flat to a little down, we'll be able to maintain what we've achieved so far in the last two quarters.
Speaker 7
Thank you very much.
Speaker 1
Okay, Eli.
Speaker 0
Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Kaplowitz from Barclays.
Speaker 17
Good morning. Morning. Ron, so you've talked about a flat market in AWP, but you are growing your telehandler presence quite a bit starting this year. And I assume it will continue to grow into next year. So does that mean the rest of the business is actually down?
How do we I mean I know Telhams right now is a very small part of the business, but how do we think about the growth in that business versus the rest of the business in 2015?
Speaker 1
Matt, why don't you answer that? I think you're closer to it.
Speaker 5
Yes. So what we're talking about Andy is we're seeing the North American market level. And your question is right, we're growing our telehandler business. We've added over the last couple of years, we've added three models and that is helping offset some. But if you look at categories, one of the dynamics that we're seeing is the as the Tier 4s have been implemented
Speaker 12
on
Speaker 5
the BOOM product line in particular, we're seeing them not grow as fast. It's still growing, but not as fast as scissors and the telehandlers. So there's a bit of a mix change. But in general altogether, it's going to be relatively flat. Do you see on the improvement initiatives the benefit that we're going to get from the new products?
So it gives you some kind of a reference on how we think that we're going to what we think we're going to get from that. But it is a bit of a mix shift.
Speaker 17
Okay. That's helpful. And Ron maybe I could ask you about the company's CEO succession plans. I mean you've been doing this for a long time. We can all see sort of when your recent contract ends.
So how do we think about that as we go over the next couple of years here?
Speaker 1
That's a difficult question for me to answer, but I will say this. I feel very good about the company's succession planning process. Clearly, Board has been engaged in this topic for some time, for many years in fact. Our Board has a very deep knowledge of talent within the company and a deep knowledge of talent outside the company. And I feel very positive about the Board's approach to succession planning.
I'll continue to serve the company aggressively and in a positive way hopefully until we decide that somebody else ought to do that. And I'm not going to give you a date. I do have a contract that ends at the 2015. But I'm 62 years old today. So we'll let you make your own judgments.
Speaker 17
Thank you, Ram.
Speaker 0
Your next question comes from the line of Ross Gilardi from Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Speaker 13
Most of my questions have been answered at this point. But I just still want to understand, Ron, I mean, you lowered your outlook back in September and at the time placed most of the blame on cranes. And clearly the weakness was more widespread than that processing. So why didn't you flag the weakness in AWP and material processing back in September? Did something change dramatically in the last two weeks of the quarter?
Speaker 1
Yes. Ross $9,000,000 of currency hit us from AWP and that's a big difference just there. So the biggest delta versus our expectations was really cranes, but we didn't expect the $9,000,000 in currency. Had the $9,000,000 in currency not happened, yes, we'd be talking a little bit about margin erosion in AWP, but not nearly to the degree.
Speaker 13
But then in material processing too, I mean did you find that it just got worse as the quarter went on
Speaker 1
or No. Materials processing we knew had some weakness embedded in it and and that was built into our view and it wouldn't have been that significant overall. So it really the majority of the change was crane related, but you got pluses and minuses in this business all day long. And frankly MHPS came in a little bit better. Construction came in as expected.
Construction is a business that's hard to handicap. So I think there's a few million dollar difference and there's 10,000,000 or $15,000,000 difference. And the crane situation was more in the double digit. And because we were expecting three months earlier perhaps the market was starting to improve in cranes and we would see a lot more orders in the third quarter. Our third quarter orders in cranes were weak.
There's no way around it and it was really weak in July and August.
Speaker 7
The only thing I would add to
Speaker 2
that Russ is, it wasn't just about the third quarter, right? We were looking at all the segments and where we were as a company from the remaining part of the year and versus our internal expectations where we were looking after a couple of strong months of orders in cranes, we were inflecting much higher. Obviously that wasn't going to be the case and it was the primary driver of the change.
Speaker 13
Okay. Thanks guys. And then I just want to explain understand a little bit better the start up issues in Oklahoma City. And did that result in any market share arose or anything like that as you had some difficulties? Maybe you could just flesh that out a little bit, but could that have been related at all to some of the modest demand slackening you saw in AWPs later in the quarter?
Speaker 1
No, not at all. We are moving production of a new product to Oklahoma City. We weren't hitting our production rates at Oklahoma City and we were shutting down and moving some other new products into Moses Lake. So we had an efficiencies in both Moses Lake and in Oklahoma City and that we that had nothing to do with market share
Speaker 13
Okay. Thanks very much guys.
Speaker 0
We have reached the allotted time for questions. I will now turn the call back over to the presenters for closing remarks.
Speaker 1
Okay. Well, we apologize apologize if we didn't get to your questions. Please follow-up with Tom or Kevin or myself. I hope you understand that we are very dedicated to improving the company and improving on the things that we laid out, which we think is the right set of assumptions and actions as we go forward. Thank you for your support.
Speaker 0
This does conclude today's conference call. You may now disconnect.
