Prepared remarks
Greetings, and welcome to the TriMas Corporation Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce Sherry Lauderback, Vice President of Investor Relations and Communications. Sherry, please go ahead.
Thank you, and welcome to TriMas Corporation’s Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. Joining me today are Thomas J. Snyder, President and CEO, and Paul A. Swart, our Chief Financial Officer. We will begin with our prepared remarks discussing our second-quarter results, followed by our outlook for the remainder of 2026, after which we will open the call for questions from our analysts. To help you follow along with today’s discussion, both the press release and our presentation are available on our website at trimas.com under the Investors section. A replay of this call will also be available later today by dialing (877) 660-6853 and using meeting ID 13761489. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that today’s comments may include forward-looking statements, which are inherently subject to various risks and uncertainties. Please refer to our most recent Forms 10-K and 10-Q for a discussion of the factors that could cause our results to differ from those anticipated in any forward-looking statements. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise such statements except as required by law. We also encourage you to visit our website for more information. In addition, please refer to the appendix of our press release or presentation for reconciliations of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures. Throughout today’s call, our discussion of financial results will be on an adjusted basis, excluding the impact of special items. And unless otherwise noted, the financial results discussed today will reflect continuing operations. At this point, I will turn the call over to Tom. Tom?
Thank you, Sherry, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us today. Before discussing our second-quarter results, I would like to highlight the continued progress we are making against the strategic priorities we outlined at the start of the year. Following the successful divestiture of TriMas Aerospace, our focus has been on building a more streamlined, customer-focused company while improving profitability, operational performance, and shareholder returns. While there is still more work ahead, we are encouraged by the progress we have made and believe TriMas is well positioned for continued improvement. At TriMas, our strategy is grounded in three core pillars: customer success, our people, and operational excellence. These pillars guide how we allocate resources, set priorities, and execute across the organization. And they are the foundation for long-term value creation. Beginning with operational excellence, we remain focused on driving greater efficiency, consistency, and performance across the company. Our previously announced cost-reduction actions totaling $10.5 million in 2026 and $16 million annually remain on track and are contributing to improved profitability. At the same time, we continue to drive safety, quality, and on-time delivery, with a focus on productivity improvements across our operations while maintaining a strong commitment to serving our customers. Our teams are also continuing to work closely with customers and suppliers to navigate tariffs, supply-chain pressures, and broader macroeconomic and geopolitical challenges. Executing against these priorities requires the right talent and leadership to accelerate our transformation. During the second quarter, we strengthened the TriMas Packaging leadership team with two key additions. We welcomed Gil Arrow as Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing. With more than 20 years of global packaging industry experience, Gil is leading our commercial strategy across sales and marketing and elevating the customer experience, with a focus on strengthening relationships, driving profitable growth, and expanding market opportunities through customer-focused, innovative solutions. This customer-focused approach and global perspective will enhance our commercial execution and support focused innovation across the Packaging group. We also welcomed Angel Fernandez Carbonell as Vice President of Global Operations. With more than 25 years of operations and supply-chain leadership experience across the packaging and manufacturing industries, Angel is leading our global operations with a commitment to safety and a focus on manufacturing excellence, operational performance, and delivery on our customer-service commitments. His experience will help strengthen our operational capabilities and accelerate performance improvements across the Packaging platform. Together, these additions strengthen our leadership team and reinforce our focus on customer success and operational excellence. Just as importantly, both leaders bring a collaborative approach to talent development and team building that will further support our commitment to our people. In addition to strengthening our team, we continue to improve alignment across the organization through the implementation of a strategic planning framework, initially across TriMas Packaging and soon to be deployed within Norris Cylinder. This process helps translate our long-term strategy into actionable operating plans by aligning teams around a common set of priorities with clear ownership, measurable objectives, and specific timelines. This framework is again built around our three strategic pillars, helping to align resources and priorities around the objectives that will have the greatest impact on our performance. This is now an important component of our operating system, helping translate strategy into actions that drive measurable results. Beyond improving execution and accountability, we are also focused on strengthening alignment across the organization and enhancing the customer experience. During the quarter, we implemented our One TriMas initiative, including the integration of our legacy packaging brands under a unified TriMas Packaging identity. This effort is strengthening commercial alignment, simplifying the customer experience, and enabling us to bring the full breadth of our packaging solutions to customers through a single global organization. As we continue executing these strategic and operational initiatives, our approach to capital allocation remains consistent and disciplined. We continue to invest in organic growth initiatives and pursue disciplined, high-quality acquisitions that can elevate and expand our packaging and life sciences platforms. At the same time, we remain committed to returning capital to shareholders when appropriate while preserving the flexibility to invest in future growth opportunities. Since announcing the Aerospace transaction in November, we have repurchased more than 5 million shares, reducing our share count to approximately 35.9 million shares outstanding at quarter-end. We believe these repurchases represent a meaningful return of capital to shareholders while enhancing the long-term earnings power of our business. While we do not have a significant update regarding the planned use of the remaining Aerospace proceeds, our Strategic Investment Committee and management team remain actively engaged, evaluating opportunities to deploy that capital in a manner that maximizes long-term shareholder value. We are carefully assessing opportunities through a disciplined strategic and financial lens, and we remain committed to being patient and selective as we evaluate our opportunity pipeline. In the meantime, our strong balance sheet provides significant flexibility, and the proceeds continue to generate meaningful interest income while we evaluate opportunities. This preserves our financial strength and positions us to act when the right opportunities arise. Let’s now turn to our second-quarter and year-to-date results on Slide 4. Overall, we delivered another quarter of solid execution, highlighted by continued profitability improvement and strong earnings growth. Second-quarter net sales increased 1.6% year over year to $174.6 million, benefiting from favorable foreign currency translation. Organic sales were essentially flat compared to the prior-year period, as growth in certain end markets was offset by softer sales in others amid continued macroeconomic uncertainty and consumer spending pressures. Despite modest sales growth, we delivered meaningful improvement in profitability and earnings through focused execution of our cost-reduction initiatives. Second-quarter adjusted operating profit increased 29% to $14.9 million, while adjusted operating margin expanded 180 basis points to 8.5%, reflecting progress in simplifying our cost structure and improving operating efficiency across the organization. Adjusted earnings per share increased to $0.52 compared to $0.20 in the prior-year period, driven by stronger operating performance, higher interest income from invested proceeds, and the benefits of share-repurchase activity, which more than offset a higher tax rate. The first six months of the year tell a similar story, reflecting stronger organic growth and the increasing benefit of our operational and cost-reduction initiatives. Net sales increased 5.8% to $342.9 million, including organic growth of 3.4%, while adjusted operating profit increased more than 30% and adjusted earnings per share more than doubled to $0.75. Overall, we are encouraged by our first-half performance and the progress we are making across the business. With a stronger balance sheet, a more streamlined portfolio, and increasing benefits from our improvement initiatives, we believe TriMas is well positioned to continue building momentum through the balance of 2026 and beyond. And with that, I will now turn the call over to Paul to review the financial results in more detail. Paul?
Thank you, Tom, and good morning, everyone. I will begin on Slide 5 with an overview of our balance sheet and capitalization. Following the Aerospace divestiture, we continue to maintain a strong financial position, ending the second quarter with more than $1.2 billion in cash and a net cash position of $846 million. This balance-sheet strength provides significant flexibility as we continue to evaluate opportunities to invest in organic growth, pursue targeted, high-quality acquisitions, and return capital to shareholders. Since announcing the Aerospace transaction in November through the end of the second quarter, we have spent $175 million on share repurchases, reflecting our commitment to enhancing shareholder value. In addition, we began funding the estimated $200 million in income taxes owed related to the transaction gain, with payments of $30 million in the second quarter. We expect to pay half of the remaining taxes on the transaction in the third quarter, with the rest of the payment split between the fourth quarter and the first quarter of 2027. As discussed previously, the majority of our cash remains invested in interest-bearing accounts and continues to generate attractive interest income as we thoughtfully evaluate capital deployment opportunities. During the quarter, these investments earned an average yield of 3.7%. In addition, our $400 million of 4.25% senior notes due in 2029 continue to provide stable, low-cost financing with no near-term maturities. Second-quarter free cash flow was a use of approximately $12.9 million compared to a source of $7.7 million in the prior-year period. The use of cash was driven primarily by the timing of sales and collections during the quarter, with a higher concentration of sales in June as activity increased from levels earlier in the quarter, when there was greater uncertainty about the impact of events in the Middle East. Consistent with historical seasonal patterns, we generally expect stronger cash generation in the second half of the year, and we anticipate improved free cash flow performance as collections convert and operational improvements continue to take hold. Overall, our balance sheet remains in a position of strength and provides substantial flexibility as we continue to evaluate opportunities to create long-term shareholder value. Turning now to Slide 6 and our Packaging segment. Packaging continued to demonstrate improving operating performance during the second quarter as our cost-reduction actions and operational excellence programs gained further traction. These efforts contributed to higher adjusted operating profit and margin expansion despite a mixed top-line environment. Second-quarter net sales were essentially flat year over year at $143 million, as demand continues to vary by end market, customer, and region. Growth in industrial and life sciences end markets, along with favorable foreign currency translation, largely offset lower sales of beauty and personal care applications and food and beverage products. Note that food and beverage sales were impacted, as expected, by the timing of the Atkins facility consolidation, where capacity was taken down for a period of time during the move before ramping back up late in June and into July. Despite relatively flat sales, adjusted operating profit increased 3.7% to $21.2 million, while adjusted operating profit margin expanded 50 basis points year over year to 14.8%. These results reflect further traction from our cost-reduction and operational-improvement actions, which more than offset inflationary pressures and the temporary lag in recovering rising raw-material costs. In addition, the Packaging team completed the closure and consolidation of our Atkins, Arkansas, facility, positioning us to realize additional cost savings and margin benefits in the second half of 2026. On the topic of price-cost, resin costs escalated beginning in the mid-to-late first quarter and through much of the second quarter. As many of our customer contracts have quarterly adjustment provisions, we under-recovered the higher material costs in Q2, generally as expected, pressuring margins by around 100 basis points. As resin costs have recently stabilized or, in some cases, even declined, we expect to generally recover the cost on a cumulative basis between the third and fourth quarters, which would be typical for our business to recover costs over time, subject to any future market volatility. Regarding tariffs, we continue to view their impact as generally neutral over time. During the second quarter, we did not experience any significant effects from court rulings or changes in tariff levels. We will continue to monitor the situation and evaluate the impact of any replacement tariffs or policy changes on our business, including the potential for cost recovery and future tariff exposure. Looking ahead, we continue to expect Packaging to deliver full-year sales growth of 3% to 6%, with operating profit margins in the 14% to 15% range. And while sales are generally lower in the third quarter than the second quarter due to seasonality factors, we continue to anticipate sequential margin expansion in the third quarter as previously implemented cost actions and price-cost recovery may flip into a net positive position, as well as our continued execution of operational excellence initiatives. Turning now to Slide 7 and our Specialty Products segment. Second-quarter net sales increased 10.2% year over year to nearly $32 million, driven by stronger demand and continued market-share gains at Norris Cylinder. Operating profit was $0.7 million compared to $1.3 million in the prior-year period, and operating margin declined to 2.2% from 4.4% last year. Although demand remains healthy, profitability during the quarter was impacted by challenges in ramping up staffing and throughput to meet customer demand. As a result, we incurred significantly higher temporary labor, overtime, and overhead costs, as well as manufacturing inefficiencies, all in an effort to ensure customer commitments were met. We have begun implementing changes to rightsize the labor force, overhead spending, and production scheduling to match the available machine capacity to attain improved efficiency and throughput. We are also evaluating further automation and process improvements to drive operational efficiencies. Despite these near-term challenges, we remain encouraged by the underlying demand environment and order activity at Norris Cylinder. Looking forward, we now expect Specialty Products to deliver full-year sales growth of 6% to 9%, higher than the previous 3% to 6% guidance, given continued strength in order activity as well as support from the Made in USA designation. Operating margins are expected to be in the 6% to 8% range, which reflects the higher costs incurred in the second quarter. In summary, Packaging continues to demonstrate solid operating performance and margin expansion, while Specialty Products continues to benefit from healthy demand despite temporary operational challenges. Together, both segments remain aligned with our full-year expectations and, when combined with achieving our committed corporate cost-reduction targets, support our outlook for continued improvement in profitability. With that, I will turn the call back to Tom to discuss our outlook and priorities for the remainder of the year.
Thank you, Paul. Turning now to our outlook on Slide 8. Overall, our total company outlook remains largely consistent with the expectations we outlined earlier this year. We continue to expect full-year sales growth of 3% to 6% and operating profit margin improvement of more than 300 basis points compared to 2025. While demand remains mixed across certain end markets, business performance is tracking in line with our expectations overall, and we continue to realize the increasing benefits of our operational improvements, price-over-cost recovery, and cost-reduction initiatives throughout the year. Given our first-half performance, as well as increased confidence in the balance of the year, we are raising the lower end of our full-year adjusted earnings per share guidance range by $0.10 to $1.60 to $1.70 per share, compared to our previous range of $1.50 to $1.70. This increase reflects continued progress on our cost-reduction initiatives, along with stronger-than-expected interest income. As a reminder, we have not assumed any significant redeployment of the remaining Aerospace divestiture proceeds during the balance of the year in our outlook. We continue to expect improvement in sales, earnings, and adjusted earnings per share in each quarter of 2026 compared to the prior year and remain confident in our ability to deliver a meaningful step-change in performance this year. Overall, we believe our outlook appropriately balances the positive momentum we are seeing across the business with the continued uncertainty present in portions of the broader macroeconomic environment. Before we conclude, I will briefly revisit Slide 9, which is unchanged from last quarter and outlines the key levers we believe will drive long-term value creation. While the framework remains the same, our conviction continues to grow as we make progress across each of these areas. We are advancing our operational excellence initiatives, realizing the benefits of our cost-reduction actions, strengthening our leadership team, investing in customer-focused innovation, and maintaining a disciplined approach to capital allocation. We also continue to believe we are well positioned to enhance our portfolio over time through a combination of organic growth initiatives and targeted acquisitions that elevate and expand our packaging and life sciences platforms. In short, our strategy has not changed. We remain focused on executing these priorities, converting strategy into results, and creating long-term shareholder value. Overall, we believe we are off to a solid start in 2026, with encouraging progress across our strategic priorities and improving financial performance. With a strong financial position, a more focused portfolio, and multiple opportunities ahead of us, we remain confident in our ability to continue building a stronger TriMas. Thanks. And with that, I will now turn the call back to Sherry.
Thanks, Tom. At this point, we would like to open the call to questions from our analysts.
Questions and answers
Thanks. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press star, then one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star, then two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. It may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. And our first question comes from the line of Kenneth Newman with KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please proceed.
Hey. Good morning, guys. This is Zach Sherman on for Kenneth. First, is there an expectation for beauty and personal care or food and beverage to ramp back up in the second half? Do you guys have any visibility on project timing, or did TriMas lose out on any projects this quarter? Just any additional color on what drove the soft manufacturing?
I will start with food and beverage. The demand that we see there is pretty good. The issues that we had in the quarter were largely around the relocation of assets, consolidation of the Atkins facility into a couple of other facilities, and we were not able to materialize the kind of sales that were in front of us for the quarter. I expect that we will have that behind us for sure. We have those assets all relocated. The Atkins facility is now done. The door is locked. And we are proceeding with working all the bugs out and continuing to move forward on the demand that we have across that business. So I feel pretty good about where we are at. We had a one-time pause in our revenue as a result of that. On the beauty and personal care side, we feel good about the back half of the year as well. That business has been a little lumpier. We were up in Q1 and a little softer in Q2. We anticipate the back half of the year is going to return to more of a normal pattern. We have some visibility around that that we feel good about. So I think we are in pretty good shape as we look across those two categories.
Okay. Yeah. Thanks. That is very helpful. And then I know you guys have mentioned life sciences a couple of times for potential M&A deals. Could you help us understand other characteristics that you guys would be looking for? Maybe the size of the deal, margin profile, and how quickly you can move on a deal.
Sure. I think all options are available at the moment based on our current balance-sheet positioning. So, as you will be able to tell in our disclosures in the press release, we are actively spending money with third parties evaluating potential deals, particularly in the packaging and life sciences end markets. We're looking for higher-quality companies that would elevate our products, our geography, our positioning, and give us something we do not have. Anything that strengthens the company, strengthens customer relationships, and strengthens IP to be stickier from a revenue and growth perspective, as opposed to just from a margin perspective. Those are the kinds of companies we are looking at. We are actively evaluating a number of different companies that would fit those attributes. The pipeline has companies in it. There are lots of companies that we understand may be coming to market that are not available at the moment. So we are preparing for what we think may be actionable in the near future and actively assessing. I cannot give you more at the moment relative to exact timing, but it is extremely active for the Strategic Investment Committee and management.
We have a disciplined lens that we are evaluating opportunities through. We have a pipeline of opportunities, and we are not going to rush. We know what we're looking for, and we will make sure we check as many of those boxes as we possibly can.
Okay. Yeah. Thanks. That is helpful. Just a quick follow-up. In the absence of a deal, is there a potential opportunity to accelerate share repurchases? How do you think about the tier of importance across share repurchases, investing more in organic growth initiatives, et cetera?
The most immediate and highest return typically would be organic growth investments, which we are actively looking at. After that, as we have said since announcing the Aerospace transaction, it will be a balanced, disciplined approach. We have spent $175 million on repurchases and still have $76 million remaining under the current authorization. It will continue to be a balanced approach depending on what the pipeline looks like, what actionability and timing look like, and balancing that with stock performance to give the best return for shareholders.
Awesome. Thanks.
The next question comes from the line of Hamed Khorsand with BWS Financial. Please proceed.
Hi. Good morning. Could you talk about your expectations on the Packaging side? You are guiding for growth for the full year, but that would imply sales growth in quarters that seasonally do not see that kind of sequential growth. I am trying to put the numbers together as to how you are seeing that develop for you.
We are guiding on a year-over-year basis, not sequentially. The first half of 2025 was a stronger half than the back half of 2025, so the comps are slightly easier. Year to date, we are in the middle of our guidance range. That is predicated on currency exchange that benefited us in the front half of the year and is getting replaced with organic growth in our end markets. As Tom mentioned, beauty and personal care and food and beverage were down in Q2; that is not our expectation in the back half of the year. We expect to get growth in those end markets, so the full-year guidance reflects organic growth year over year and the markets where we participate.
And given the commentary about the growth, is this just coming from your customers ordering more? Or are you benefiting from the strategies you have implemented to make the customer experience better with you?
Part of our approach was to measure what our customers thought of us through a voice-of-the-customer survey. We gathered a lot of data and have been putting those items into actions to drive and improve that side of our business. We have placed the right leadership in key roles, and we have made progress. I am confident about elevating the customer experience and that it will help long term. On the product side, some customers and markets are doing very well, and we expect continued strong results from those areas. For food and beverage specifically, the Q2 issue was self-inflicted by the facility relocation and will recover. I am encouraged about the back half of this year and the visibility beyond that.
Okay. Thanks.
The next question will come again from the line of Kenneth Newman with KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please proceed.
Hey, guys. Just one last quick follow-up. Paul, at our conference you mentioned identifying a number of additional internal improvement opportunities beyond what is already underway. Could you give us a sense of how you are going to sequence those, when we could expect benefits and the cadence of those, and how you are thinking about those moving forward?
There continue to be a number of items on the list. Part of it is the ability, personnel, and timing to execute some of those versus continuing with the operational performance we are already getting. Similar to M&A, there is a decent pipeline and list of other things we are considering. The Atkins facility was a major one in Q2. There are other items on the list that I think will be actioned in the back half of the year that will add to the $10.5 million we have discussed for the current year and run rate. Nothing to announce at the moment, but I do think as we go through Q3 and Q4 there will be other items. They will be more in the magnitude of what we announced for Atkins as opposed to the initial number announced earlier in Q1. These items will continue as we move through the rest of the year; they are just not quite as low-hanging fruit as the ones done earlier in the year.
I would add that the operational excellence program and standardizing systems across the organization are driving best practices. We are implementing procedures, putting in metrics and dashboards that measure everyone against the same expectations. I see plenty of opportunities to enhance our cost base and modernize through automation on both the Norris side and in Packaging. There are good opportunities ahead on the cost-structure side.
Got it. Thank you very much.
Thanks. This concludes the question-and-answer session. And I would like to turn the call back over to management for closing remarks. Thanks.
Once again, thank you for joining us today and for your continued interest in TriMas. We appreciate your ongoing support, and we look forward to updating you on our progress next quarter. Thanks.
Thanks.
Thanks.
This concludes today’s conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and we thank you for your participation.