Hayward Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:HAYW) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Hayward Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:HAYW) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript February 28, 2023

Operator: Welcome to Hayward Holdings Fourth Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. My name is Daniel and I will be your operator for today's call. Please note, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Kevin Maczka, Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Maczka, you may begin.

Kevin Maczka: Thank you, and good morning, everyone. We issued our fourth quarter 2022 earnings press release this morning, which has been posted to the Investor Relations portion of our website at investor.hayward.com. There, you can also find an earnings slide presentation that we will reference during this call. I'm joined today by Kevin Holleran, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Eifion Jones, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that during this call, the company may make certain statements that are considered forward-looking in nature, including management's outlook for 2023 and future periods. Such statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties, including those discussed in our most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Q filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that could cause actual results to differ materially.

The company does not undertake any duty to update such forward-looking statements. Additionally, during today's call, the company will discuss non-GAAP measures. Reconciliations of historical non-GAAP measures discussed on this call to the comparable GAAP measures can be found in our earnings release and the appendix to the slide presentation. I would now like to turn the call over to Kevin Holleran.

Kevin Holleran: Thank you, Kevin, and good morning, everyone. It's my pleasure to welcome all of you to Hayward's fourth quarter earnings call. I'll start on Slide 4 of our earnings presentation with today's key messages. As we continue to navigate a very dynamic operating environment, I'm pleased that our fourth quarter performance was in line with expectations. Consistent with the outlook we communicated a quarter ago, our results reflected the continued reduction of channel inventory days on hand. I'll make additional comments on our expectation for channel inventory in a moment. Second, we took proactive steps during the second half to realign our cost structure to current market conditions while maintaining our strategic growth investments and productivity initiatives.

This includes successfully executing the previously announced enterprise cost reduction program, which was designed to drive substantial variable cost reductions and structural SG&A savings of approximately 10% on an annual basis. Under this program, we delivered approximately $9 million in SG&A savings in the fourth quarter and are on track to deliver the full annual savings of $25 million to $30 million in 2023. Third, Hayward has a long-standing commitment to lean manufacturing and continuous improvement. We view operational excellence as a significant competitive advantage. We demonstrated our agile manufacturing capabilities throughout the year, continuing to ramp production in the first half to deliver on a record backlog, then reducing production in the second half to support structural margins during a period of declining volume and reducing channel inventory days on hand.