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Text: Joining the call today are Tom Ferguson, chief executive officer; Philip Schlom, chief financial officer; and David Nark, senior vice president, marketing, communications, and IR.
Those risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited, to, changes in customer demand and response to products and services offered by the company, including demand by the power generation markets, electrical transmission and distribution markets, the industrial markets and the metal coatings markets; prices and raw material costs, including zinc and natural gas, which are used in the hot-dip galvanizing process; changes in the political stability and economic conditions of the various markets that AZZ serves, foreign and domestic; customer-requested delays of shipments; acquisition opportunities; currency exchange rates; adequate financing; and availability of experienced management and employees to implement the company's growth strategies.
In addition, AZZ customers and its operations could potentially be adversely impacted by the ongoing COVID pandemic.
We continue to gain momentum in the third quarter and completed our fifth consecutive quarter of solid performance after the disruption from COVID in the first half of last year.
Their perseverance continues to allow us to achieve these kinds of results.
Consolidated sales of almost $232 million improved 2.3% versus the prior year or 4.1% when adjusted for the divestiture of SMS last year.
metal coatings generated another excellent quarter with sales up 15.4% to over $133 million and infrastructure solutions sales down 11% at about $99 million.
We are pleased to have completed another strong quarter of performance.
We continue to generate solid cash flow and returned capital to our shareholders during the third quarter.
We generated net income of over $21 million and earnings per share of $0.85 per diluted share, reflecting the resiliency of our businesses and the dedication of our people.
Our businesses leverage the realignment actions taken last year to improve profitability while maintaining their focus on providing outstanding quality and service to our customers.
We also benefited from lower interest expense and a lower tax rate of 22% for the third quarter.
In line with our strategic commitment to value creation, we repurchased over 148,000 shares for $7.6 million and distributed $4.2 million in dividends.
In metal coatings we achieved 24.5% in operating margins on sales of $133 million.
This resulted in operating income being up over 14% from the previous year.
The margin improvement was primarily due to driving operating efficiencies and productivity, while realizing improved pricing in the face of rapidly rising zinc, labor and energy costs.
In spite of the ongoing challenges of COVID, our team succeeded in completing the acquisition of Steel Creek Galvanizing in South Carolina.
This site was completed in 2019 and includes a lot of automation, making it the newest and most modern in our fleet.
Our team is excited about the growth opportunity it presents in a region we were not present in.
Our metal coatings team continues to demonstrate their ability to perform and deliver great results while managing labor shortages and the increasing costs.
Our infrastructure solutions segment demonstrated continued profitability improvement in the quarter, leveraging the cost reduction actions that they took last year.
We were down about 8% when considering the impact of the SMS divestiture.
The infrastructure solutions segment delivered operating income of over $9 million, with operating margins improved 140 basis points to 9.3% as compared to the prior year.
The segment did face growing labor constraints and delays in materials due to supply chain disruptions resulting from COVID, including components from customers.
One WSI international project was significantly impacted by COVID outbreak, which was managed well, that resulted in lower profitability.
We remain focused on strategic selling initiatives across both the electrical and industrial platforms and we believe we are well positioned to finish this fiscal year well.
For fiscal year 2022, while COVID continues to generate some uncertainty in many sectors given our strong performance in the first three quarters and due to seeing more opportunities than risks the balance of this year, we are tightening our earnings per share guidance.
We anticipate annual sales to be in the range of $865 million to $925 million and earnings per share at $3 to $3.20 per diluted share.
We do not anticipate any material impact in the fourth quarter from the recently announced acquisition as we're focused on integration these first couple of months.
Metal coatings is continuing to focus on sales growth, including leveraging our spin galvanizing operations at several sites, operational execution and customer service as labor and operating expenses increase due to inflation.
Our infrastructure solutions segment is cautiously optimistic as it enters the fourth quarter with some momentum in bookings activity, particularly in the electrical platform.
Our WSI business is seeing good results from the expanded Poland facility, although internationally, the business continues to experience some intermittent project delays due to COVID outbreaks at some customer sites.
As we noted on the last call, some of the fall season projects will now be completed in the fourth quarter.
We also have some spring projects that look to kick off a little earlier than normal.
The electrical platform is focused on operational execution and growing its e-house and switchgear businesses.
Due to the project extensions from the third quarter, we expect a better-than-normal performance in the fourth quarter.
I will note that our outlook for the spring turnaround season is quite good based upon the level of quotations, but we remain cautious due to the ongoing battles with COVID outbreaks at customer sites.
For the balance of fiscal year 2022, AZZ will continue to execute on our strategic growth initiatives to drive shareholder value while positioning for a strong start to fiscal 2023.
Our commitment to superior customer service is unwavering.
Our ability to generate strong cash flow is based on initiatives that drive operational excellence, tightly manage costs, ensure pricing discipline and emphasis on receivables collection within our operating platforms.
We are confident that our businesses remain vital to improving and sustaining infrastructure, so we continue to drive profitable growth and enhance shareholder value.
Bookings or incoming orders in the third quarter were $248 million, a $53.6 million or 28% increase over the third quarter of the prior year.
Our bookings-to-sale ratio remained consistent with last quarter, 107% and well above the book-to-sales ratio of 0.86 for the same quarter last year.
As Tom had alluded to, we have seen consistently strong markets for our metal coatings segment and continue to experience improving markets in our infrastructure solutions segment.
Third quarter fiscal 2022 sales were $231.7 million, $5.1 million or 2.3% higher than the prior-year third quarter sales of $226.6 million.
Year over year, for the third quarter, metal coatings segment sales were up $17.8 million and were partially offset by lower sales in the infrastructure solutions segment, mostly in the industrial segment where we took significant actions to restructure the business in the middle of last year.
The business generated gross profit of $57 million compared with gross profit of $54.7 million in the third quarter of the prior year.
Our gross margin was 24.6% for the third quarter compared with gross margin of 24.1% in the third quarter of last year as business in both the segments continue to improve.
Operating income for the quarter was $30.1 million compared with $27.9 million in the third quarter of the prior year, a $2.2 million or 8% improvement year over year.
Our earnings per share was $0.85 or $0.09 higher than last year's third quarter reported earnings per share of $0.76 and adjusted earnings per share of $0.80 in the prior-year third quarter.
The prior year was impacted by our loss on the divestiture of southern mechanical services or SMS. Third quarter EBITDA of $39.8 million was flat compared with EBITDA in the third quarter of the prior year.
Year-to-date sales through the third quarter of fiscal 2022 were $678 million, a 5.4% increase from last year's third quarter, year-to-date sales -- from last year's third quarter year-to-date sales of $643 million.
Excluding the impact of SMS divestitures, sales would have increased 8.6% year over year on a pro forma basis.
Fiscal 2022 year-to-date net income of $62.4 million was $38.9 million or 166% above the prior year-to-date reported net income of $23.5 million and $23.1 million or 58.9% above the adjusted net income from the prior year-to-date period, wherein the company had recorded impairment and restructuring charges net of tax of $15.8 million.
EPS on a year-to-date diluted share basis is $2.48 compared with $0.90 reported in the prior year and $1.50 on an adjusted basis.
Current year-to-date earnings per share improved $0.98 or 65.3% over the year-to-date 2021 results.
While we continue to return capital to our shareholders through dividends and share repurchases, our balance sheet remains strong.
The following are capital allocation highlights for the year.
On a gross basis, outstanding debt at the end of the quarter was $192 million, consisting of $150 million on our 7- and 12-year senior notes and $42 million outstanding on our revolving credit facility.
This reflects a $13 million increase in borrowings from the end of the last fiscal year.
Borrowings have increased, primarily as a result of our continued share repurchase activity, higher receivables and higher inventories as the business volumes improve.
Year to date, we have deployed $19.1 million in capital investments and anticipate capital investments of roughly $32 million this year, slightly below our previous estimate of $35 million.
Supply chain constraints have continued to impact and delay the timing of spending on our planned capital expenditures.
We repurchased 7.6 million in outstanding stock during the quarter and year-to-date have repurchased 712,000 shares or $28.9 million.
We declared and continue to make quarterly dividend payments.
Through the nine months ended November 30, 2021, cash flows generated from operations was $49.7 million, down $9.7 million or 16.4% from the same period in the prior year.
Operating cash flows were positively impacted by the higher earnings but were more than offset by higher receivables on increased sales and increased inventories, primarily as a result of higher zinc costs in our metal coatings.
We continue to remain active on the merger and acquisition front and completed the acquisition of the galvanizing operation in South Carolina that will expand our Southeast footprint and should be accretive during the first year of operation, as Tom had noted earlier.
Here are some key indicators that we are paying particular attention to.
For the metal coating segment's Galvanizing business, we are carefully tracking fabrication and construction activity and material and labor cost inflation as well as OSHA's COVID vaccine mandate.
For the surface technologies platform, we are primarily focused on expanding our customer base and benefiting from improved operational performance.
For infrastructure solutions, domestic turnaround and outage activity has returned to a normal level.
The spring season is currently looking to be good, although we remain cautious due to COVID, particularly for international customers.
The electrical platform is benefiting from transmission distribution and utility spending and growing data center and battery energy storage activity.
In regards to the strategic review of infrastructure solutions and stated desire to become predominantly a metal coatings company, we have meaningfully advanced our work on a couple of strategic options that are designed to achieve this commitment.
Unfortunately, due to related NDAs, we are not able to comment further at this time.
We remain committed to our growth strategy around metal coatings and achieving 21% to 23% operating margins with galvanizing performance being quite steady, while we continue to improve Surface Technologies.
We will remain acquisitive, particularly in metal coatings and hope to complete one more acquisition before the end of this fiscal year.
For infrastructure solutions, we are focused on profitability and cash flow.
This segment's business unit should benefit from more normalized turnaround outage seasons and a solid market for renewables, transmission and distribution, utility, battery energy storage, data center e-houses and switchgear.
We did issue our first ESG report this past quarter and we'll continue to pursue improvement in these areas.
And finally, our normal cadence would be to issue guidance for fiscal year 2023 later this month, but we will not be doing so.
While we are committed to providing sales and earnings per share guidance, we may not be in a position to do so until our work on the strategic options can be factored in.

user
compname reports results for third quarter of fiscal year 2022 generates earnings per share of $0.85.
compname reports results for third quarter of fiscal year 2022; generates earnings per share of $0.85.
q3 earnings per share $0.85.
q3 sales rose 2.3 percent to $231.7 million.
reaffirms fy earnings per share view $3.00 to $3.20.
sees fy sales $865 million to $925 million.
compname reports results for third quarter of fiscal year 2022; generates earnings per share of $0.85.
azz inc - qtrly sales of $231.7 million, up 2.3% versus last year.
azz inc - reaffirming fiscal year 2022 sales guidance and anticipate annual sales to be in the range of $865 million to $925 million.
azz inc - sees earnings per share to be in the range of $3.00 to $3.20 per diluted share for fiscal year 2022.

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