Good morning, welcome to Cervus Equipment's fourth quarter 2020 results conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. This call is being webcast, a replay will be available on Cervus' website. You may access the accompanying presentation now by going to the investor page of Cervus' website at cervusequipment.com. Cervus will conduct a question and answer session for analysts and institutional investors as part of today's call. Instructions will be provided for you to queue up for questions. If anyone has difficulties hearing the call, please press star zero for operator assistance. I will now turn the call over to Cervus' Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Adam Lowther. Please go ahead, Mr. Lowther. Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today to discuss the results of Cervus Equipment for 2020. On the call with me is Angela Lekatsas, Cervus' President and Chief Executive Officer. Also joining us today is Scott Johnston, Cervus' Chief Operating Officer, and Catie Busch, Cervus' Incoming Chief Financial Officer, who will be available for the question and answer portion of the call. Before we continue, I'd like to advise listeners that this presentation may contain forward-looking statements and information that is subject to certain risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. For a complete discussion of the factors, risks, and uncertainties that may lead to actual results or events differing materially from those expected, please refer to Cervus' most recent annual and quarterly MD&A, which are available on our website. Please note that during today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures, including results on an adjusted basis and key performance indicators. We have included reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measures in our MD&A. Turning to slide three, I will walk through the components of the year-over-year change in adjusted income before tax. Overall, adjusted income before tax increased CAD 40 million, which is seen in comparing the two gray bars on the far left and right margins of the chart. This increase in profitability was driven across revenue growth, improved gross margin, along with reductions in G&A expenses and net finance costs, which I will discuss in more detail. Underpinning the year was the strong performance of our agricultural segment, while our transportation and industrial segments also contributed improved adjusted income before tax despite experiencing the heaviest impact of adverse economic conditions presented by the pandemic. Moving left to right, the largest component of the year-over-year increase was the CAD 30 million increase in equipment gross profit, resulting from a 10% increase in overall equipment revenue, combined with a CAD 20 million reduction in inventory impairments. Product support gross profit increased at CAD 3.5 million year-over-year, driven by a 12% increase in our agricultural product support revenue, partly offset by the impact of the pandemic on our transportation and industrial product support activity. Sales commissions increased in line with accelerated equipment sales. General and administrative, or G&A expense, decreased CAD 6 million in the year. Excluding the year-over-year increase in performance incentives, G&A expense decreased CAD 13 million. These cost savings were the result of restructuring initiatives combined with variable expense management in response to the pandemic. Net finance costs decreased CAD 2.2 million related to a decrease in inventory financing, long-term debt, and interest rates. Together, the combination of these factors resulted in the CAD 40 million increase in adjusted income before tax for the year. Turning to slide four in the balance sheet. We were successful in reducing total inventory by CAD 90 million compared to the end of 2019, reflecting a CAD 58 million decrease in agricultural inventory and a CAD 30 million decrease in transportation inventory. With the net cash freed from this inventory, Cervus repaid all debt owing under its syndicated operating facility and its capital facilities. This improved discipline with our largest asset, inventory, has further increased our financial flexibility and strengthened our key lending ratios. At 31 December 2020, we had CAD 151 million of financing available, including CAD 110 million undrawn under our syndicated credit facility and CAD 27 million in cash. We are pleased with the strength and financial flexibility of our balance sheet. During 2020, we repurchased 290,000 shares under our normal course issuer bid at a cost of CAD 2.1 million and have subsequently increased our dividend to CAD 0.11 per share, payable to shareholders of record as of 31 March 2021. Turning to slide five. Our operations continue to generate strong cash flow across industry cycles. For the year ended 31 December 2020, we generated adjusted free cash flow of CAD 53 million, an increase over the CAD 21 million generated in fiscal 2019. Please refer to our MD&A for a more detailed discussion of this measure. I will now turn the call over to Angela Lekatsas, President and CEO of Cervus, for a discussion of our strategy and our outlook. Angela. Thank you, Adam. Good morning, everybody. Just as a reminder, before we dive into the next few slides, Cervus' strategy has three long-term strategic goals. Around product support growth, absorption rates, ROIC largely achieved through inventory improvement. As we look back on 2020, which was the first year executing our new strategy, our strategic initiatives withstood the assault of the global pandemic and delivered substantially increased profitability. While the path towards our long-term objectives will not be linear, over the past year, we made progress towards each of our priorities. Starting with the product support chart, focusing on our agriculture division, revenue increased CAD 19.5 million or 12%. This extraordinary growth was by design of expanded product offerings, increased capabilities for online parts, expansion of on-site inventory at our customer sites, and our new greenfield parts and service dealership in Nipawin, Saskatchewan. Moving to the transportation and industrial segments of the chart, we experienced a decrease in product support revenue, particularly in service revenues, as trucks were sidelined and industrial training and preventative maintenance programs were directly impacted by mandatory economic shutdown and physical distancing requirements. On a positive note, we did see some signs of recovery in the second half of the year. The profitable growth of product support, combined with sustainable cost reductions from a leaner organization, operational efficiencies, and variable expense management, contributed to delivering on our second priority of improving absorption. Absorption is the bellwether for dealerships to achieve break-even performance before selling any equipment. Agriculture absorption improved from 87% in 2019 to 94% in 2020, while transportation and industrial's effective management of activity-based costs contributed to improved absorption levels year-over-year, despite the impact of the pandemic on product support revenues. Turning to our third strategic objective, which is driving return on invested capital, we achieved 18.2% ROIC in 2020, largely driven by improvement in profitability for the year and the effective management of our largest asset inventory. Equipment sales and trade-in practices with a laser focus on improving the velocity of used equipment turns through the trade washout cycle resulted in agriculture delivering used equipment inventory turns of 2.87 at 31 December 2020, exceeding both our long-term objective of 2.5 turns and the prior year turns of 1.78. In our transportation and industrial segments, we significantly reduced equipment inventory levels through 2020, which has us well positioned to improve inventory turns in these segments through 2021. Moving to the outlook. Above average crop yield and quality in our Canadian geography is expected to produce record farm net income for 2020. Strong export demand and prices for canola and other principal field crops is forecast to further increase in 2021 for farm net income by 6.8%. As we approach the seeding season, moisture conditions in our Canadian geography currently look positive. This improvement in agriculture fundamentals and producer sentiment is expected to increase demand for agricultural equipment. Our ability to supply in-season customer demand will be impacted by the availability and timing of equipment deliveries from our manufacturers. In our Australia and New Zealand regions, producers have benefited from positive weather conditions, improved commodity pricing, along with positive relations with key trading partners. Both countries are experiencing longer lead times for equipment deliveries from manufacturers, while producers in New Zealand are also facing labor shortages resulting from the pandemic-related border restrictions. Moving to slide nine. PACCAR, the owner of Peterbilt, upgraded its estimated 2021 Class 8 sales in North America by 15%-30% over 2020 to a range of 250,000-280,000 units. In Ontario, we expect the release of pent-up demand accumulated during the province's pandemic contraction. Our ability to capture increased demand will be reliant on the availability and timing of truck deliveries from our OEM as strong U.S. demand and supply chain constraints have pushed out production timelines. Our Saskatchewan dealerships were more significantly impacted by general economy contraction from both the global pandemic and declines in the resource sector, particularly oil-related activities. While we have seen the start of a modest recovery, we anticipate customers will remain cautious on major capital expenditures. Turning to our industrial segment, our dealerships are providing training and preventative maintenance offerings to customers at reduced capacity in compliance with physical distancing requirements. We anticipate that a foundational level of demand will remain as consumer and industrial staples continue to move. As I reflect on the year that was 2020 and the challenges we faced, I am humbled by how successfully our team tackled those challenges. I'm proud of the agility and resilience of our employees as they rallied together to safely deliver the essential services that our valued customers depend on us to provide. As we look forward, we continue to invest in opportunities that support our strategy of achieving equilibrium between sales and product support, with a specific focus on our innovation and technology capabilities. In this regard, we are pleased to announce the new agriculture dealership planned near Penhold, Alberta, anticipated to be in service in early 2022. The new facility will offer increased parts availability and service capacity. As well, we recently acquired Vapormatic's distribution rights for the North Island of New Zealand. Vapormatic sells replacement parts for multiple brands of agriculture equipment, providing Cervus the opportunity to grow our product support offerings for this region. I'd like to take this time to thank Adam for his significant contributions over the last eight years. Cervus has become a better organization under his financial leadership, and I have valued his commitment to our growth and success. I am delighted to welcome Catie Busch as our new CFO. I have the utmost confidence in her capabilities and leadership skills demonstrated over the last seven years with Cervus Equipment. Operator, we are now ready for the question-and-answer portion of our call. We will now conduct a question-and-answer session for analysts and institutional investors. If you have a question, please press the star key followed by the one key on your touch-tone phone. Please ensure you lift the handset if you're using a speakerphone before pressing any keys. One moment please for the first question. Our first question comes from Cherilyn Radbourne from TD Securities. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Thanks very much, and good morning. Wanted to start with a few questions on the agriculture segment. Starting with the gross profit margin, and thank you for the transparency on the inventory impairments that you provide. That's very helpful. And that does allow you to see that there was about 100 basis points of year-over-year margin improvement excluding the decline in impairments on a sales mix that looks pretty similar year over year. Just hoping you could talk about what drove that 100 or so basis points. As we look at the impairments, Cherilyn, year-over-year, I think that's the discipline in turning the inventory from the margin, where we've seen that is again, discipline in what we have paid for the used equipment that we buy on trade essentially when we sell a new piece and ensuring that we price it right and it turns over. Scott talks the velocity of inventory, and certainly in the equipment business, it needs to be the right unit at the right time, in the right season, with the right specs. The discipline in that has made a difference in the financials. Scott's online. Scott, do you have any color that you'd like to add to the gross profit in agriculture? We introduced a sales compensation program in January of last year that basically put into place the disciplines, using our trade guide, reaching reconciliation, relative to actual versus anticipated. We have totally focused on velocity, making certain that we can turn that equipment, and at the same time have significantly reduced the amount of inventory on hand, at the same time. Okay. Perfect. Basically what you're saying is if you set aside the year-over-year change in the inventory impairment, you would say that most of the remaining margin improvement was attributable to better margins on used. Correct. In agriculture, there was a comment about accelerated marketing of new equipment, and I wasn't sure if that pertained to the year and related back to Q1 or if in fact, that was a comment that was also relevant to Q4. I was hoping for a bit of clarification there. The model, due to the high demand between 2008 and 2012, is basically became a push system where the OEMs were putting lots of on-ground inventory in the care and control of their dealers, for spontaneous sales. That model is changing to an early order program whereby we are selling equipment in advance, in the fall for delivery the next season. The accelerated advanced selling is last fall, we spent a lot of time focusing with large producers as to what their demands and requirements would be going forward and ordered that equipment, and that will be settled in 2021. Cherilyn, it's actually a full year of accelerated selling on sales. The part of that, Cherilyn, being that in 2019 we had to slow our new sales because we had a used equipment problem. Having dealt with that, we've stepped back in. Okay. Last one from me before I pass it over. Obviously, Deere's calling for industry sales to be up 15%-20% in 2021 in the U.S. and Canada. Can you just give us a feel for how much different you would expect the recovery to be in Canada versus the U.S., just given that they've been in a longer and more severe downturn? Yeah, I think the U.S. market is definitely driving their growth. Scott, do you wanna give some color on Canada specifically? Right now, due to exports and commodity pricing, there is a definite change in the sentiment of our producers. The only thing that I would qualify, though, at the same time is the pandemic is having some impact on production. The order boards are filling out for 2021 models, and the other is basically the extreme weather events that we've seen with regards to snowstorms impacting the supply chain and logistics in the U.S. as well as in Texas, the ice and snow storm that they suffered last month. That has an impact on production, given that PACCAR was down for one week from a production standpoint. Okay, that's helpful detail. I'll pass it over. Thank you. Thanks, Cherilyn. Thank you. Again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone handset. Our next question comes from Bryan Fast from Raymond James. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Thanks. Good morning, everybody. Just on the early order program, maybe, if you could just provide some color on the uptake that you've seen so far as you, as you've rolled it out. Good morning, Bryan. Yeah. Scott can talk about the early order program. Scott? Last year we had positive yields as well as quality, and then we've seen basically exports start to increase and certainly a run on commodity pricing. As a result, many producers responded positively and we are forward sold to a greater degree than what you saw in 2019. Okay. Thanks, Scott. Just there's commentary in the financials that you were seeing some customers restrict access for on-site service calls. Have we largely moved beyond that or are you still seeing that in the field? Sorry, you're a little muffled. Do you wanna repeat that, Bryan? Yeah. Just, are you still seeing customers restrict access for on-site service calls, or have we largely moved beyond that? There's a gradual improvement. We definitely are still seeing, as long as there's a requirement for social distancing and, regulations around mask wearing and customers are nervous about letting someone on site, that's still in place. But we are seeing gradual improvement, with customers allowing us on site, especially as customers, are starting to introduce their 2021 capital expenditure programs. Having pulled back in 2020, they're looking for new equipment on the industrial side. Okay, thanks. That's it for me. Thank you for joining us this morning. Angela, Scott and Katie look forward to speaking with you again following the release of our first quarter results. Thanks, everyone. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now disconnect the conference call and webcast. Thank you for participating today.
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