Trinity Industries - Q2 2023

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good day. Welcome to the Trinity Industries Q2 and six-month ended June 30, 2023 results conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing Star then zero on your telephone keypad. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press Star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press Star then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. Before we get started, let me remind you that today's conference call contains forward-looking statements as defined by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, and includes statements as to estimates, expectations, intentions, and predictions of future financial performance. Statements that are not historical facts are forward-looking.

Participants are directed to Trinity's Form 10-K and other SEC filings for a description of certain of the business issues and risks, a change in any of which could cause actual results or outcomes to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements. I would now like to turn the conference over to Leigh Mann, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Leigh Anne Mann (VP of Investor Relations)

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us for the company's Q2 2023 financial results conference call. Our prepared remarks will include comments from Jean Savage, Trinity's Chief Executive Officer and President, and Eric Marchetto, the Company's Chief Financial Officer. We will hold a Q&A session following the prepared remarks from our leaders. During the call today, we will reference slides highlighting key points of discussion and certain non-GAAP financial metrics. The reconciliations of the non-GAAP metrics to comparable GAAP measures are provided in the appendix of the supplemental slides, which are accessible on our investor relations website at www.trin.net. These slides are under the Events and Presentations portion of the website, along with the Q2 earnings conference call event link. A replay of today's call will be available after 10:30 A.M. Eastern Time through midnight on August 8, 2023.

Replay information is available under the Events and Presentations page on our investor relations website. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Jean.

Jean Savage (CEO and President)

Thank you, Leigh. Good morning, everyone. Our Q2 results reflect positive trends in our business, despite some downside in our broader operating environment. We'll provide more details on how those factors impacted our financial performance. Still, we remain confident in our business's continued momentum and growth as we enter the year's second half. We have line of sight to higher revenues on both sides of our business, with increased deliveries, rising lease rates, and continued improvement in our operating margins. Please turn with me to slide three to discuss today's key messages. We are reporting Q2 consolidated revenue of $722 million, a 73% year-over-year improvement. Our Q2 EPS from continuing operations was $0.23, up $0.16 sequentially and $0.09 year-over-year on an adjusted basis.

Our leading indicators for our business, namely the FLRD on the leasing side and the manufacturing side backlog, are favorable and give us visibility into strong revenues in 2023 and beyond. Despite these favorable indicators, we are reducing and tightening our 2023 adjusted EPS guidance to $1.35-$1.45. This adjustment is primarily due to the outsized impact of the strengthening Mexican peso on our manufacturing business, higher interest expense, and continued inefficiencies. Our revised guidance assumes a substantial improvement in the back half of the year from better efficiency. However, we do not have line of sight to our previously issued guidance range without a significant pullback in the strength of the Mexican peso, which we are not anticipating in 2023. Let's turn to slide four and discuss the rail market and a commercial overview.

Like last quarter, overall rail traffic trends are negatively impacted by intermodal volumes. Through the first 26 weeks of the year, rail carload volumes improved just 2% year-over-year, outperforming the 4% decline in total traffic shown in the slide. While the increase in railcar storage in the quarter is consistent with expected seasonal trends, the North American fleet ended June with the lowest active rate since early 2022. Fleet storage levels remain well below the five-year average, but improving network fluidity prompts some normalization. We're willing to take this trade-off, as we believe a more efficient rail network will benefit from gaining modal share and driving longer-term sustainable growth. Moving to the bottom of the slide, we continue to see high fleet utilization and a very strong future lease rate differential, or FLRD, which are good predictors for rising lease rates in the future.

Our fleet utilization was 97.9%, and the FLRD was 29.5%, with lease rate strength, especially in pressure tank cars and large covered hoppers. While rail traffic trends are important in our business, the critical driver is lease fleet utilization and rising lease rates, which have seen significant improvement. Put more directly, the strength in our business has been supply-led, which provides confidence in the durability of cash flows. On the manufacturing side, orders and deliveries were strong in the quarter. We delivered 4,985 rail cars in the quarter and booked orders for another 4,770. These numbers and new railcar inquiry levels align with expectations and are consistent with our view of replacement level demand.

Our backlog of $3.6 billion and current inquiry levels give us confidence in our expectations well into 2024. Moving to slide five, I'll briefly discuss the cash flow, with Eric providing more details later in the call. Our quarterly cash flow from continuing operations was $38 million, up $128 million year-over-year. Additionally, our adjusted free cash flow was $45 million, up $50 million year-over-year. Our business can consistently and predictably generate a lot of cash, which is evident in today's results as we see the effect of increased production and higher lease rates flowing through our cash balance. Let's turn to slide six and talk a little bit more about the drivers of our business segments.

Starting with leasing, I've already talked about our FLRD and fleet utilization, which indicate momentum and increasing lease rates and revenue. Because it takes a while to reprice the fleet, revenue increases are slower but more durable. We are starting to see several quarters of increased rates take effect. We are encouraged to see the top line rising. Our renewals are coming in about 30% higher than expiring rates year to date. When considering the whole fleet, our average lease rate for the quarter was the highest since 2018 and 9% higher than a year ago. It's worth noting that we have only repriced about 30% of our fleet since the FLRD hit double digits in the Q2 of 2022, so we expect to see this number continue to rise as we reprice more of the fleet upward.

While lease rates are still growing, the growth rate is starting to moderate. Our renewal success rate was an impressive 91% in the quarter, the highest since 2018, showing a sign of a healthy and balanced lease fleet. Year to date, our average renewal term is 55 months, which allows us to hold on to higher lease rates longer. Our leasing and management operating margin was 39.7% in the quarter, up 430 basis points sequentially, but down year-over-year due to increased maintenance expense and depreciation expense. Additionally, as we have begun integrating some of our recent acquisitions, those businesses have a different margin profile and slightly decrease the overall leasing margin. Overall, we are incredibly pleased with the performance of the leasing business and expect to see continued strength in both revenue and margin through 2023.

Moving to rail products at the bottom of the slide, quarterly revenue was up sequentially and year-over-year due to a higher volume of railcar deliveries. Our operating margin of 3.3% in the Q2 was down slightly, which was disappointing. In the Q2, foreign exchange, persistent rail service issues, and efficiency negatively impacted our rail products margin. Rail products efficiency has not gotten where we want it as quickly as we'd like. We are seeing improvement in the metrics we track, but we still plan to continue the improvement. Supply chain issues have eased, but there are still negative surprises more frequently than we have expected. The strength of the Mexican peso impacted rail products operating margins by approximately 90 basis points in the quarter.

We hedge a portion of our peso spending, our revenue is in the US dollar, but we pay our Mexican workforce and several suppliers in pesos. We are evaluating options to reduce our exposure to the peso. A persistently high exchange rate will be an ongoing drag on the rail products margins until we can adjust our pricing and cost structure. The challenges persist, many indicators give us optimism. Labor attrition has reached a much more manageable level in Mexico. The second half of the year requires fewer and less complex changeovers. This will lead to the resumption of production more quickly, with the additional benefit of longer runs. To give some context on the progression of improvement, our rail products June operating profit was above 5% in the segment, the highest this year. This included the foreign exchange impact.

As we said on the call last quarter, we can still expect to exit the year with a rail products margin in the high single-digit range, even after accounting for the impact of exchange rates. This has been a focus of mine, and we have been aggressive in taking the necessary steps to improve the business's overall efficiency and financial results. I'll conclude my remarks on slide seven and turn the call to Eric. Trinity's pre-tax ROE for the last twelve months has improved to 10.6%, progressing toward our long-term goal of a mid-teen ROE. We announced our third acquisition last quarter and are focused on integrating these businesses into Trinity. Across the board, we're pleased with the performance of our acquisitions. Holden continues to outperform our expectations, with solid demand for autoracks and supporting parts.

We are early in the integration of our recent acquisition of RSI Logistics. By combining our equipment expertise and innovation with RSI's customer-centric, well-respected logistics services, we can make rail a more approachable mode of transportation. These integrated service offerings will be an important step in our strategy to position the industry for modal share growth with our railroad partners. Before I turn the call to Eric, I wanted to quickly congratulate the team for successfully completing the financing of our senior notes and our TRL-2023 term loan this quarter. I'll let Eric provide more details on these events. Eric?

Eric Marchetto (EVP and CFO)

Good morning, everyone. I'll start my comments on slide eight, discussing our income statement and cash flows. Starting with the income statement, our revenue in the quarter of $722 million reflects higher external railcar deliveries and improved lease rates. Our earnings per share from continuing operations were $0.23 in the quarter, a $0.16 increase over the Q1 on an adjusted basis. We benefited from $129 million in lease portfolio sales in the Q2. Year to date, our net lease fleet investment is $214 million. Our lease portfolio sales allow us to optimize our fleet and achieve our target for lease fleet investment. Year-to- date, cash flow from continuing operations is $140 million, and adjusted free cash flow is $81 million after investments and dividends.

We've returned $43 million to shareholders through our dividend. Turning to slide nine, as Jean just mentioned, we have seen a $225 million increase in our outstanding debt this year from the completion of a new corporate senior notes offering and the TRL 2023 term loan, offset by reductions in the revolver and warehouse, as well as normal amortization. As you are all aware, the debt market has changed significantly, which is reflected in higher interest expense. Ultimately, we executed these deals effectively given the current environment. For our senior notes, we used the proceeds to repay outstanding borrowings under our revolver credit facility. We intend to use the remainder of the net proceeds for general corporate purposes, which may include repayment of other debt, including the senior notes due in 2024. Moving to slide 10 for an update on our guidance.

We remain confident that North American railcar deliveries will be approximately 45,000 this year. This supports our ongoing view of replacement level demand. As mentioned, we have a backlog that gives us visibility into future deliveries and are now receiving orders well into 2024 for most railcar types. We are affirming our net lease fleet investment guidance of $250 million-$350 million for the full year, supporting our three-year outlook. Year to date, our net lease fleet investment is $214 million, and along with investment in the fleet in the second half of the year, we also expect to complete a significant railcar sale in the Q4 of this year. Our guidance for manufacturing CapEx for the year remains unchanged at $40 million-$50 million.

Moving to our EPS guidance, as Gene mentioned, we are lowering our full year guidance range to $1.35-$1.45, driven by the economic headwinds Gene outlined. Namely, the strength of the Mexican peso and a higher interest expense, and slower than expected improvement in efficiency, partially offset by better than expected leasing profits. We set our operating plan assuming an exchange rate based on the rates in the Q4 of 2022. Since then, the peso has strengthened by about 17% against the dollar and continues to gain momentum. Given the nature of our business, we have no other material currency exposure except for the Mexican peso. We do have hedges in place, even after accounting for the hedges, the exchange rate variance impact has been about $10 million in the first half of the year and pulls down our forecast...

full year forecast by an additional $18 million, for a combined impact of $28 million to the downside. This flows through our rail products margin and will impact our margin as compared to our original guidance. We have limited our downside exposure, exposure to the Peso for the balance of the year. We are also reducing our guidance to account for higher than expected interest expense, given the higher levels of working capital and higher borrowing costs. Finally, while improvement in efficiency is evident, it has been slower than we anticipated. We expect to exit the year with rail group margins in the 8%-9% range. Our full year products, rail products margin average is forecast to be between 6%-7% after considering year-to-date performance, exchange rate impact, and expectations in the second half of the year.

As Gene said, we expect significantly stronger performance in the second half as compared to the first half on the manufacturing side of our business. Year-to-date, we have earned adjusted EPS of $0.30. In the back half of the year, assuming the midpoint of our adjusted guidance, this still implies significant EPS growth in the second half of the year, aided by improving margins, continued top line growth, and railcar portfolio sales in the Q4. We are confident this is achievable given the strength of our forward-looking metrics in both of our businesses. Please turn to slide 11 before we open the call for Q&A. I want to emphasize the positive trends we see in our business. Our leasing business continues to improve, and we believe there is room for growth.

We expect continued revenue growth in our leasing business as we reprice more of our lease fleet and extend the term so we can retain the higher lease rates longer. This will also drive up the margin in the business. The supply and demand dynamics of the North American fleet remain very positive. On the manufacturing side, we've increased production over the last year, evident in the growth in deliveries and revenue, with margin growth soon to follow as this business continues to improve. Now, operator, we are ready for our first question.

Operator (participant)

We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question comes from Allison Poliniak with Wells Fargo Securities. Please go ahead.

Allison Poliniak (VP)

Hi, good morning.

Jean Savage (CEO and President)

Good morning.

Allison Poliniak (VP)

Just want to get back to thanks, Gene. I want to go back to the rail products group margin. The labor inefficiencies that you talked to, were they purely driven by sort of the, the complex line changeovers? Was there something more to that? Just trying to get a sense of the confidence that you guys have in that back half in terms of those efficiencies sort of moving away from you. Thanks.

Jean Savage (CEO and President)

Sure. Why we have a lot of confidence in the back half is we're carrying a lot of momentum into that half. The first half of the year, we were ramping. If you look at year-over-year car production, Q1, we were up 64%, Q2, 99%. Large ramp there. In June, even with the FX headwinds, we were above 5% on the operating margin. If you look at the changeovers, remember in the past, we talked to you about 65% of the changeovers were occurring in the first two quarters. That relates to about 200 basis points for us as we're looking at the effect. Next is we talked to you also about the first half of the year, we had hired the employees.

They were going through training, that by the end of the Q2, they should start coming out, and we would see the efficiency start to rise. That is occurring. If you take all of that into effect, we see a lot of momentum going forward into that second half to get into the operating margins we've talked about. Leaving the year at 8%-9% for the Q4, and, you know, the FX is still in that. A lot of improvement.

Allison Poliniak (VP)

Got it. That's helpful. Thank you. Then on the lease rate environment, leasing, you know, very strong. It seems like it's a very constrained environment right now. Any verticals that you're getting incrementally more concerned of, or you're, you're starting to hear a little bit of weakness of, understanding the whole, the whole lease fleet is actually quite strong for you, but just want to understand if there's any sort of weak points within that? Thanks.

Jean Savage (CEO and President)

Okay. Well, remember, the, this, this cycle is really supply driven, and there's not a single market that's driving it. The other point to remember is there's 250,000 cars that are going to have to retire in the next five years. Overall, we do have cars or markets that are stronger. Autoracks are going to be built, a lot of those box cars, grain cars that we're looking at. If you're looking for the weaker side, the chemical is adjusting to the economic outlook that's there. That one's probably one of the weaker ones. I'll go back to a stronger one. Construction and ag remain strong, especially as the funds are starting to now flow through from the stimulus that's out there.

Allison Poliniak (VP)

Perfect. Thanks. I'll pass it along.

Jean Savage (CEO and President)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Matt Elkott with TD Cowen. Please go ahead.

Matt Elkott (Transportation OEM Analyst)

Good morning. Thank you. Jean, just to follow up on your comment about the 250,000 cars that need to be retired in the next few years. Also, the tightness in the fleet overall continues to be, you know, pronounced. Like, you're still continuing to expect replacement level demand, despite all these dynamics that you would assume would be favorable for a manufacturer. Also, there's the potential for a pull-forward effect on the tank car replacement, even though it's not regulatory driven, but it could happen anyway.

Jean Savage (CEO and President)

Really, it's the underlying fundamentals that we see they're remaining strong. Utilization, 97.9, renewal rate, 91% in the quarter, term, 55. Scrapping is continuing. It's not at the pace we've seen in the prior years. So far this year, we've had about 16,000 cars scrapped, and we expect about 35,000 to come out of the fleet. We're still seeing the inquiry levels to support 40,000-50,000 cars a year. If you look at our backlog, we ended the quarter with just under 50% of the industry backlog sitting on our books. We have good visibility well into 2024 right now.

Matt Elkott (Transportation OEM Analyst)

Yeah, I, I was just surprised that, like, I think if this had been any other cycle with the, with the current tightness in the, in the fleet, we would have already seen, you know, a 50 to possibly even 55,000 car a year. I, I, I guess it's just a more smoothed out cycle, so we might have solid builds for, you know, two or three years to come. On, on the order side, your orders were solid in the quarter. Can you talk about, you know, where they came from? Was there, like one or two big orders included, and can you talk about the order activity after the end of the quarter?

Jean Savage (CEO and President)

Sure. When we look at the orders, it's really spread out. We're not seeing very large orders. We're seeing consistent orders of car types that we talk about. They may be in smaller quantities than you've seen in the past, when you've had a single market that is driving the demand. Overall, for us, this is really good, because it gives us the ability to stabilize our manufacturing facility. To your other point, real quick, I really think that this cycle, everyone's being disciplined. There's not a lot of speculative orders, and that's why the tightness is remaining, and that's a good thing, not only from a manufacturing standpoint, but from a leasing standpoint, it's really good. We're hoping that continues.

Matt Elkott (Transportation OEM Analyst)

Got it. And just one last high-level question. You know, the Class I seem determined to continue to improve velocity on other service metrics, which could be a headwind to equipment demand in the intermediate term. In the absence of volume, you know, given that the volume outlook continues to be pretty anemic, that's basically one of the few levers they have. How concerned that this might start affecting actual underlying demand for equipment, and, and if it does, where would we see it first, in manufacturing orders or lease rates?

Jean Savage (CEO and President)

Again, remember, there's not one single commodity driving this demand. It is actually supply driven. When we're looking across the board, we're still seeing good orders. You know, if you want to pick a area where it's lighter, it's tank cars right now. Someone had mentioned before that maybe the upcoming rule change in 2025 would affect some of that. We've not seen a large increase in tank car orders. There's still some there, but it's a freight car-driven demand and recovery that we're seeing. If you look at if you look at the biggest downside, it's intermodal. Luckily, we don't have any intermodal in our fleet, for our lease fleet. Yeah, we built some, but it's not a major car type that we build.

Overall, we're still seeing very positive signs, and again, our, our outlook is well into 2024.

Matt Elkott (Transportation OEM Analyst)

That's good to hear. Thank you very much, Jean. Appreciate it.

Jean Savage (CEO and President)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Justin Long with Stephens. Please go ahead.

Justin Long (Managing Director of Equity Research)

Thanks, and good morning. Building on the question about orders, if you look at the industry order book, it took a pretty big step up in the Q2 versus the Q1. How much of that would you attribute to an acceleration in the demand environment versus just the timing of orders? I know there can be a lot of lumpiness quarter-to-quarter, and I'm curious if you have any updated thoughts on industry order flow as we move through the back half.

Jean Savage (CEO and President)

Justin, as you know, the orders can be lumpy to quarter to quarter, and I think that's what you're seeing. It's never really smooth. As we look at what we believe the industry will order, we still believe it's gonna be the replacement level demand. It's gonna be equivalent to getting that 40,000-50,000 rail cars a year. If you look at intermodal, there were about 10,000. Go ahead.

Eric Marchetto (EVP and CFO)

Justin, going back to what we talked about, 10,000 orders a quarter, is kind of that replacement level demand. Q1 was a little bit lower than 10,000. Q2 is higher than 10,000. When you go back over the last six quarters or so, and even if you remove our long-term agreement that we have with GATX, which you shouldn't, but if you did, you'd still average 10,000 cars a quarter. We would expect that going forward. There may be a quarter where it's lower, but I think the long-term trend is at 10,000 a quarter, and we see that, we see that going out into 2024 and beyond.

Jean Savage (CEO and President)

One thing to go with that again, is that 250,000 cars that have to be scrapped, either from regulation or age over the five years, so there's gonna be some consistent demand there.

Justin Long (Managing Director of Equity Research)

Okay, got it. Secondly, I wanted to follow up on manufacturing margins. It was good to hear that we've seen some improvement in June. I was curious if you could comment on July and if that improvement in margins has continued. Then, Eric, on gains on sale, that can be such a big swing factor in the model. I'm curious if you can give us any color on how the second half could look versus the first half, and particularly the Q4, because it sounds like there's a big sale coming.

Jean Savage (CEO and President)

I'll go ahead and start a little bit. When you're looking at manufacturing, a couple things that we've seen, I talked about the changeovers. In the first half of the year, that was about 200 basis points of headwind that we saw, that we won't see in the second half. If you look at the efficiency improvement, we are seeing that flow over into the Q3. The fact that we're not going to have as many changeovers, the fact that we have less turnover in our employees in the second half, that we're, we saw in June, less turnover, and also the fact that we pretty much got to our ramp point. We got to the volume. I think you're gonna see that level out and the performance come through.

The last thing I'm going to say is, the reason we lowered the overall operating margin coming out in the third and Q4, was the fact that you're gonna have FX headwinds of about 120 basis points in there. The FX is a driving factor in the fact that we had to lower the guidance. Eric, if you wanna?

Eric Marchetto (EVP and CFO)

Yeah, and so Justin, and following up on the second part in terms of gains on railcar sales. Yeah, in the in the Q2, the, the, there was significant gains, about $29 million, which, you know, and we've and my prepared remarks have talked about in the Q4, certainly there are gains embedded in our forecast, but the, the, when you get back to we're getting to that net fleet investment of $250 million-$350 million, and you'll see in our Q, you know, the leasing backlog is about $380 million. We still have deliveries to our fleet, and so we're, we are managing that net fleet investment.

In terms of the size of the gains, you know, I'm not gonna get into specifics, but, you know, the, the, first half of the gains, our gains on sale have been pretty significant. From a directional standpoint, we're expecting fewer gains in the second half of the year.

Justin Long (Managing Director of Equity Research)

Okay, great. That's helpful. Thanks for the time.

Jean Savage (CEO and President)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Bascome Majors with Susquehanna. Please go ahead.

Bascome Majors (Senior Industrials Equity Research Analyst)

Good morning. I appreciate all the quantitative framing of how FX is weighing on both the quarter and the second half outlook. Qualitatively, though, you know, we followed you for about 12 years now. I don't recall FX coming up as a major driver of unexpected upside or downside, really ever, historically, and, you know, apologies if we missed that. I'm just curious if something has changed in the way that you either manage the business or hedge that risk, where this is going to be a more meaningful driver of volatility going forward, because, you know, the Mexican currency has always been pretty volatile, and we just haven't seen it show up in your results, at least at the conference call sort of level. Thank you.

Eric Marchetto (EVP and CFO)

Yeah, Bascome, this is Eric. You're right, they have not come up. Part of it is pre-spin. We had, we had some natural hedging in place because we were generating revenue in pesos with the non-rail businesses, so that always neutralized some of the impact. Then if you go back over, as you referenced, the last 12 years, generally, the peso has weakened against the dollar. You know, but it hasn't had the volatility where you've had 17%, 18% changes in over a two-quarter period. We've had some significant strengthening of the peso this quarter or over this year. Through the first half, it started there, we put our guidance in around 20. It's now down to below 17, so that has had an impact. It strengthened in the Q1.

We mentioned it was about a $3 million impact. The Q2, that accelerated to about a $6 million impact. And then as, as we looked at our guidance for the balance of the year, we didn't see the peso getting weaker, and so we adjusted our guidance to reflect kind of the current level of the peso. We put some hedges in place to protect any downside from that if it strengthens further. And then if the, if the peso does weaken, which some forecasts say it will weaken, but if it weakens, that would we'd benefit from that, and we would benefit from the peso. We have a lot more of our production in Mexico, so most of our new car production is in Mexico.

Most of our overhead costs are peso-denominated, and so that does come through. We're not immune to changes in currency, you know, especially now that more of our production's in Mexico, it has an impact. That comes through in both the balance sheet, and it comes through in the operating margin of the rail segment.

Bascome Majors (Senior Industrials Equity Research Analyst)

I appreciate that. That does make a lot of sense. Maybe taking a step back, if we go back to the Investor Day from almost three years ago, you know, some of the messaging was on a, you know, variabilization in, in some ways, of the cost structure in the manufacturing business, where you might have, you know, higher lows and lower highs through the cycle and margins there. Now, clearly, that's been difficult to achieve in the supply chain disruption environment that you and all of your competitors have been operating in, over the last two and a half years. I'm curious, does the strategy still have an opportunity to work as designed, or, or is there a need to change some of the calculus that went into that? Do you have the right procedures, people?

Just, just curious if, if, if looking forward on the environment you're operating in today versus the one you planned to operate in on three years ago, if the manufacturing business could be done a little differently. Thank you.

Jean Savage (CEO and President)

We do believe that we still have the opportunity to do what we said in the three-year plan. You mentioned some of the headwinds, the change in the environment, everything from COVID, the war in Russia, the inflationary period, all of those have mitigated the results coming through. I think, the second half of this year, you're going to see the manufacturing results start to shine, even with some of the FX headwinds that we've talked about. We expect going into next year, we won't have quite, the headwinds on the FX that we have now, but as you go through, we're always gonna be looking to optimize our operations. They've taken a lot of the steps.

We're still working on some of those programs, so look for those results as you look at the second half of the year moving into next year.

Bascome Majors (Senior Industrials Equity Research Analyst)

Thank you for that. Maybe just to bookend that conversation, we're in year three of that period. Do you have a sense of how and when you'd like to, to share your, your next mid or long-term vision for the business?

Jean Savage (CEO and President)

Right now, we're looking at later this year, most likely, in the Q4. You'll hear us announce that Investor Day and give you the update on the strategy.

Bascome Majors (Senior Industrials Equity Research Analyst)

Thank you for the time.

Jean Savage (CEO and President)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Steve Barger with KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Jacob Moore (Analyst)

Hi, good morning. This is Jacob Moore in for Steve this morning. Thanks for taking my questions. My first one is just, with the balance sheet getting to your leverage targets, can you just talk about how you're thinking about capital allocation priorities, given the current environment? Where do you see the best opportunities for value creation?

Eric Marchetto (EVP and CFO)

Yeah, Jacob, this is Eric. In terms of capital allocation, you know, that, that calculus continues to change. What's, what's good is we do see opportunities to invest. We have still returned a lot of capital to shareholders. We've grown our dividend. We've done a lot of share repurchases. We've not done any yet this year, but it's certainly been a big part over our track record. The other piece is, you know, yields are up. We're seeing the returns better, so lease, leasing investments, the yields are looking better. We're seeing opportunities in the secondary market. We're also seeing the opportunities to sell assets in the secondary market. It's a very balanced approach.

It's one of the, one of the good things about our business, is that, we have opportunities to deploy capital, and we're gonna do right by the shareholders. I think that nothing changes there. We'll continue to deploy capital as the business generates significant cash flow.

Jacob Moore (Analyst)

Got it. That's helpful. Thank you. Then just my second one's on back to your guidance. It looks like you've increased industry deliveries to the high end of the range, the lower EPS a bit. That implies second half industry deliveries down a bit, then on the same math, EPS up a lot. Can you just talk about the factors that you think are gonna drive that sort of starkly contrasting performance? I think some of that's probably implied in margin improvement, do you think that your deliveries are gonna trend differently than what you're implying for the industry?

Eric Marchetto (EVP and CFO)

Yeah. The first half of the year, I think the industry delivered right at 23,000 units. We're talking about 45,000. You know, I, I would say that we see it kind of leveling off, not, not reducing, as implied in that. When you look at, we do see significant margin improvement coming through. That's a factor, and we have visibility of the orders taken, and we've also have confidence in improving the, our performance in terms of realizing those margins into operating profits. None of that has really changed. I wouldn't read too much into our, our the, my 45,000 railcar comment. We expect the, the deliveries to kind of be at that level for, for a longer term.

Jacob Moore (Analyst)

Okay, understood. Thank you. Then one just quick one, if I could: Could you provide any clarity on expectations for cadence as we head into 2024, after what's likely a lopsided 2023?

Jean Savage (CEO and President)

Overall, as we're looking into 2024, we're not giving overall guidance. I guess the only thing I would say is we still expect the 40,000-50,000 railcars for the industry, is about as far as I'll go there. We'll get into 2024 guidance later in the year.

Jacob Moore (Analyst)

Okay, understood. Thank you very much for taking the questions.

Jean Savage (CEO and President)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Jean Savage for any closing remarks.

Jean Savage (CEO and President)

Well, thank you for joining us today. Despite some downside factors in the quarter, we're continuing to feel positively about the operating environment and our company's ability to execute on substantial revenue, margin, and EPS growth in the back half of the year. We look forward to sharing our progress with you.

Operator (participant)

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.