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Text: I'm William Prate, Senior Director of Global Financial Planning and Analysis and Investor Relations.
Our Chief Operating Officer, Dave Huml, is tending to a family matter today and is not able to join the call.
Chris will brief you on our operations and the progress we're making toward our enterprise strategy, then Andy will cover the financials.
After their remarks, we will open the call to questions.
These risks and uncertainties are described in today's news release and the documents we file with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
We encourage you to review those documents, particularly our safe harbor statement for a description of the risks and uncertainties that may affect our results.
Additionally, on this conference call, we will discuss non-GAAP measures that include or exclude certain items.
We hope that you and your loved ones are managing to stay safe through this pandemic.
As you may have seen, in September, we celebrated Tennant's 150th anniversary.
While our current operating environment could not be more different than what our founder George Tennant encountered in 1870, the Company has always maintained a tradition of innovation and resilience, demonstrated by our ability to adapt and stay relevant to our customers.
When the pandemic started, we were quick to respond and established three guiding principles; to keep our employees and customer's safe, to manage our costs and cash flow, and to stay in a position to ramp up quickly when markets recover.
At the same time we honored our commitment to provide our customers with the innovative solutions they needed to keep their facilities clean and safe.
We continued with that approach in the third quarter and saw encouraging signs of recovery across all of our regions.
Our global teams have worked hard in overcoming the unprecedented sales and operational challenges resulting from the pandemic, and we work closely with our customers, supply chain partners, and carriers to avoid operational disruptions.
Furthermore, the execution of our Enterprise Strategy yielded improvements in our operating performance with third quarter EBITDA growth, despite a year-over-year COVID-19 related decline in organic sales.
While the pandemic continues to pose considerable macro level uncertainty, especially as some markets see spikes in COVID 19 cases, we have a high level of confidence in our near-term business outlook.
As Andy will speak to in a few moments, we are reinitiating our full year guidance for 2020 which not only reflects our revenue and profitability expectations, but also our commitment to investing in our business to support our long-term enterprise strategy.
That strategy includes, winning where we have competitive advantage, reducing complexity and building scalable processes, and innovating for profitable growth.
While the global pandemic impact or the economic impact of the pandemic is nothing anyone could have predicted a year ago, it has not diminished our ability to execute on our enterprise strategy because the key elements are all within our control.
For example, while innovating for profitable growth might sound like a lofty ideal; for Tennant it represents how we take customer insights and leverage our tremendous engineering capabilities to solve real world problems.
A recent illustration of this commitment is our October 1st introduction of our new T380AMR, which complements our current robotic offering by providing a smaller-sized machine that enhances maneuverability and navigation to help customers with smaller footprints.
This new product and our continued partnership with Brain Corporation enabled us to finalize agreements in the third quarter to provide two national retailers and a separate regional retailer with our full suite of autonomous floor scrubbers.
Additionally, we are starting to achieve wins in additional verticals like logistics, education and aviation.
Following our initial roll-out with Walmart earlier this year, wins like these demonstrate how we're continuing to lead with innovation and deliver value to a more diverse customer base.
In support of our enterprise strategy, we recently hired Dan Glusick as our Senior Vice President of Operations, reporting directly to our COO, Dave Huml.
Dan has broad enterprise leadership and deep functional expertise across all aspects of manufacturing operations, supply chain management, and enterprise transformation and he brings more than 25 years of Global Operations leadership experience to Tennant.
Dan is an important hire and will play a critical role in the implementation of our Enterprise Strategy as we advance our supply chain and optimize our operations to support our product standardization and local for local initiatives.
In short, this is an important area of focus as we position Tennant for success in a post pandemic world.
Lastly, given the improving demand trends that we've seen since May and our confidence in the improved trajectory of our business, we recognize the need for strategic investments to support the continued execution of our strategy, to backfill key leadership roles, and to recognize and retain our best talent.
This is core to the guiding principles we outlined at the start of the pandemic.
We began making such investments in Q3 and we'll continue to do so in Q4.
They are essential to how we can support our customers, emerge strong as markets recover, and continue to drive shareholder value.
Please note that in my comments today, any references to earnings per share, both GAAP and non-GAAP, are on a fully diluted basis.
As Chris noted, while Tennant's third quarter results reflected the continuing impact of the pandemic, we did see some encouraging trends across all of our regions.
Overall, for the third quarter of 2020, Tennant reported net sales of $261.9 million, down 6.7% year-over-year.
Organic sales, which exclude the impact of currency effects declined 7.1%.
This represents the significant improvement in our sales trajectory when compared to the 27% decline we experienced in the second quarter.
For the third quarter, we reported net earnings of $11.7 million or $0.63 per share, down from $14.6 million or $0.79 per share in the year ago period.
Adjusted EPS, which excludes certain non-operational items and amortization, totaled $0.90 compared with $0.85 in the prior year.
We'll now take a closer look at our third quarter sales results by geography, which we divide into three regions; The Americas, which includes all of North America and Latin America; EMEA, which covers Europe, the Middle East and Africa; and Asia Pacific, which includes China, Japan, Australia and other Asia markets.
Sales in the Americas declined 9.9% year-over-year and were down 8.8% organically.
Declines in direct Industrial business sales and distributor sales were partially offset by the continued success of Tennant's AMR platform and strong growth in Brazil.
Sales in EMEA declined 0.3% or down 4.5% organically in the quarter as a result of market weakness across the region.
The declines were mainly in the United Kingdom and the Iberian Peninsula, which offset growth we experienced in France and Italy.
Sales in the APAC region declined 0.8%, down 2.3% organically.
Declines in Southeast Asia and Korea were partially offset by growth in direct sales in Australia.
Overall, the Company's service and parts and consumables business trends continued to be a bright spot.
While equipment sales were down approximately 12% year-over-year for the quarter, aftermarket revenue was up 6% over the same period last year, reflecting our efforts in helping customers meet their rapidly evolving cleaning needs during the pandemic.
Adjusted gross margins during the third quarters of 2020 and 2019 were 40.2% and 40.8% respectively.
The year-over-year decrease reflects a number of strategic investments and deleverage on lower volume which were partially offset by cost out actions driven by strategic initiatives.
Turning to expenses, during the third quarter, our adjusted S&A expenses were 29.8% of net sales compared with 31.2% in the year ago period, mainly as a result of cost containment efforts and adjustments to management incentives.
This included a number of strategic investments that we made during the quarter.
Given the macroeconomic uncertainties created by the pandemic, careful S&A management continues to be an important part of our response.
Combining these results, our EBITDA in the third quarter of 2020 was $32.6 million or 12.4% of sales compared with $31.4 million or 11.2% of sales in the third quarter of 2019.
The increase as a percent of sales was attributed to adjustments to management incentives and reductions in discretionary spending that were implemented in the quarter.
As for our tax rate, in the third quarter, the Company had an adjusted effective tax rate of 11.3% compared to 16.1% in the year ago period.
The lower tax rate primarily resulted from an increase in discrete tax items in the quarter and a favorable mix of earnings.
Turning now to cash flow, capital allocation and balance sheet items.
In the third quarter of 2020, Tennant generated $48.9 million in cash flow from operations, primarily driven by business performance and improvements in working capital.
Also in the third quarter, we repaid an additional $17 million of debt.
As of September 30th, we had $124.7 million in cash and cash equivalents, and approximately $172 million of undrawn funds on our revolver.
Lastly, turning to guidance.
As you may recall, in April, we withdrew the full-year guidance we had provided in February due to the uncertain nature of the pandemic.
While there is still uncertainty in the market, we do have a higher level of confidence in our near-term projections and we are reinitiating full-year guidance for 2020.
As included in today's earning announcement, our full year 2020 guidance is as follows; Net sales of $995 million to $1,005 million with organic sales declining 12.5% to 11.5%; GAAP earnings of $2.00 to $2.20 per share; adjusted earnings per share of $2.80 to $3.00 per share, which excludes certain non-operational items and amortization expense; adjusted EBITDA in the range of $116 million to $121 million; capital expenditures of approximately $35 million; and an effective tax rate of approximately 17%.
It's worth mentioning that our guidance does include approximately $5 million to $8 million of government benefits, which is primarily driven by the wage subsidies we received and mentioned in our second quarter results.
Also, and as Chris noted, this guidance incorporates continued investing in our business to support our enterprise strategy.
At the same time, while we believe the underlying business performance is improving and we expect our revenue will continue to increase sequentially quarter-over-quarter, it's important to note that organic sales would reflect a difficult year-over-year comparison as Q4 2019 was Tennant's second highest revenue quarter ever.
As a result, we are anticipating that our implied fourth quarter organic decline will be greater than the third quarter; and due to the continued strategic investments that I just mentioned, our anticipated EBITDA dollar and percent of revenue will be lower than previous quarters.
With that, we will now open the call to questions.

user
q3 adjusted earnings per share $0.90.
q3 earnings per share $0.63.
sees fy 2020 adjusted earnings per share $2.80 to $3.00.
sees fy 2020 gaap earnings per share $2.00 to $2.20.
sees fy 2020 sales $995 million to $1.005 billion.
q3 sales $261.9 million versus refinitiv ibes estimate of $237.7 million.
reinstates 2020 guidance for net sales, adjusted ebitda and eps.
sees 2020 capital expenditures of approximately $35 million.

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