Part I

 

Item 1.    Business

 

Overview

CIRCOR International, Inc. was incorporated under the laws of Delaware on July 1, 1999. As used in this report, the terms “we,” “us,” “our,” the “Company” and “CIRCOR” mean CIRCOR International, Inc. and its subsidiaries (unless the context indicates another meaning). The term “common stock” means our common stock, par value $0.01 per share.

Strategies

Our objective is to enhance shareholder value by focusing on growth, margin expansion, strong free cash flow, and disciplined capital deployment. We have a four-point strategy to achieve these objectives.

In addition to organic growth, we expect to acquire businesses over time. We are primarily focused on companies with differentiated technologies in complementary markets that we already understand and where we expect substantial growth. In addition to strategic fit and differentiated technology, the main criterion for an acquisition is return on invested capital.

Business Segments

The Energy segment remained unchangedsignificantly changed in 2019, reflecting CIRCOR's move away from the 2017 reporting structure except forupstream oil and gas markets, as well as the additiondivestiture of thenon-core assets. The Reliability Services business, ("Reliability Services"). We acquiredwhich was added to the Reliability Services business as part ofEnergy segment in 2018 after the Fluid Handling acquisition, that took place in 2017 and subsequently sold the businesswas divested in January of 2019. Reflecting our strategic shift away from upstream oil and gas, the EV business was divested in July 2019, Refer to Note 19, "Subsequent Event," ofand the consolidated financial statements includedDV business has been classified as held for sale. Additionally, in this Annual report for additional information regarding this disposition.January 2020, we sold our non-core Instrumentation and Sampling business.

The remaining Energy is a global provider ofbusinesses provide highly engineered integrated flow control solutions, valves, pipelines products and services for the Oilmidstream and downstream oil & Gasgas and Process Instrumentationrefinery markets.

We are focused on satisfying our customers’ mission-critical application needs by utilizing advanced technologies. Our flow control solutions can withstand extreme temperatures and pressures, and as such are used in the most critical and severe service applications. Our installations include land-based, topside, and sub-sea oil and gas production, refining and petrochemical process control, oil sand processing, critical pressure control and cryogenic applications.midstream pipeline engineering solutions and services.

Energy is headquartered in Houston, Texas and has manufacturing facilities in North America, the United Kingdom, Italy,India and the Netherlands.United Arab Emirates.

Energy serves an increasinga range of energy-focused global markets. Key to our business strategy is targeting additional markets that can benefit from our innovative products and system solutions. MarketsThe primary markets served today include Oiloil & Gas: upstream (on-shore and off-shore), mid-streamgas: midstream and downstream, as well as petrochemical processing. The upstream and mid-streammidstream markets are primarily served by our large international project and North American short-cycle businesses,pipeline engineering business, and downstream and petrochemical markets are served primarily by our refinery valves, instrumentationRefinery Valves, Instrumentation and sampling businesses,Sampling business, and Reliability Services business until its salethe latter two were sold in January 2020 and January 2019, the Reliability Services business.respectively.

Energy provides its flow control solutions and services through the following significant brands:

Energy offers a range of flow control solutions (distributed and highly engineered) and services, including:

Energy’s products and services are sold to end-user customers, such as major oil companies, EPC companies, and distributors, through sales channels that include direct sales, sales representatives, and agents.

Competition

The domestic and international markets for our products are highly competitive. Some of our competitors have substantially greater financial, marketing, personnel and other resources than us. We consider product brand, quality, performance, on-time delivery, customer service, price, distribution capabilities and breadth of product offerings to be the primary competitive factors in these markets. We believe that new product development and product engineering also are important to our success and that our position in the industry is attributable, in significant part, to our ability to develop innovative products and to adapt existing products to specific customer applications.

New Product Development

Our engineering differentiation comes from our ability to offer products, solutions and services that address high pressure, high temperature, and caustic flow. Our solutions offer high standards of reliability, safety and durability in applications requiring precision movement and zero leakage.

We continue to develop new and innovative products to enhance our market positions. Our product development capabilities include designing and manufacturing custom applications to meet high tolerance or close precision requirements. For example, our Energy segment operation can meet the tolerance requirements of sub-sea, cryogenic environments as well as critical service steam applications. Our Aerospace & Defense segment continues to expand its integrated systems design and testing capability to support bundled sub-systems for aeronautics applications, as well as acoustically superior motors for marine applications. These testing and manufacturing capabilities enable us to develop customer-specified applications. In many cases, the unique characteristics of our customer-specified technologies have been subsequently used in broader product offerings. The Industrial segment provides unique fluid handling products for viscous and critical fluids with specific design and engineering capabilities, as well as highly differentiated smart technology for specific applications.

We maintain a Global Engineering Center of Excellence in India with a capable technology and engineering team that complements the engineering resources in a business unit.

Customers

For the years ended December 31, 2019, 2018, 2017, and 2016, we had2017, no customers from which we derive revenues that exceedaccounted for more than 10% of the Company’s consolidated revenues. Our businesses sell into both long-term capital projects as well as short-cycle demand. As a result, we tend to experience fluctuations in orders, revenues and operating results at various points across economic and business cycles. Our Energy businesses can be cyclical in nature due to the fluctuation of the worldwide price, supply and demand for oil and gas. When the worldwide demand for oil and gas is depressed, the demand for our products used in those markets decreases as our customers with higher production costs will cut back investment and reduce purchases from us. The number of active rigs and wells drilled in North American short-cycle Oil & Gas market is a strong indicator of demand especially for our distributed valves products. In addition, the level of capital expenditures by national oil companies or the oil majors in exploration and production activities drive demand for our long cycle, engineered valves products. Maintenance expenditures during refinery turnarounds drive demand for our refinery valve products. Similarly, although not to the same extent as the Oiloil & Gasgas markets, the aerospace, military and maritime markets have historically experienced cyclical fluctuations in demand.

Selling and Distribution

Across our businesses we utilize a variety of channels to market our products and solutions. Those channels include direct sales, distributors, commissioned representatives, and our service centers. Our distribution and representative networks typically offer technically trained sales forces with strong relationships in key markets.

We believe that our well-established sales and distribution channels constitute a competitive strength. We believe that we have good relationships with our representatives and distributors. We continue to implement marketing programs to enhance these relationships. Our ongoing distribution-enhancement programs include reducing lead times, introducing new products, and offering competitive pricing, application design, technical training, and service.

Intellectual Property

We own patents that are scheduled to expire between 2019 and 2030 and trademarks that can be renewed as long as we continue to use them. We do not believe the vitality and competitiveness of any of our business segments as a whole depends on any one or more patents or trademarks. We own certain licenses such as software licenses, but we do not believe that our business as a whole depends on any one or more licenses.

Raw Materials

The raw materials used most often in our production processes are castings, forgings and bar stock of various materials, including stainless steel, carbon steel, bronze, copper, brass, titanium and aluminum. These materials are subject to price fluctuations that may adversely affect our results of operations. We purchase these materials from numerous suppliers and at times experience constraints on the supply of certain raw material as well as the inability of certain suppliers to respond to our needs. Historically, increases in the prices of raw materials have been partially offset by higher sales prices, active materials management, project engineering programs and the diversity of materials used in our production processes.

Employees and Labor Relations

As of January 31, 2019,2020, our worldwide operations directly employed approximately 4,4004,000 people. We have 9671 employees in North America who are covered by two collective bargaining agreements. We also have the following employees covered by governmental regulations or workers' councils:

We believe that our employee relations are good at this time.

Available Information

We file reports on Form 10-Q with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") on a quarterly basis, additional reports on Form 8-K from time to time, and an annual report on Form 10-K on an annual basis. These and other reports filed by us, or furnished by us, to the SEC in accordance with section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, are available free of charge from the SEC on its website at http://www.sec.gov. Additionally, our Form 10-Q, Form 8-K, Form 10-K and amendments to those reports are available without charge, as soon as reasonably practicable after they have been filed with, or furnished to, the SEC, on our Investor Relations website at http://investors.CIRCOR.com. The information on our website is not part of, or incorporated by reference in, this Annual Report.

 

 

 

 

 

We completed the acquisition of FH on December 11, 2017. The success of the acquisition, including the achievement of anticipated benefits and cost savings of the acquisition, is subject to a number of uncertainties and will depend, in part, on our ability to successfully combine and integrate FH's business into our business in an efficient and effective manner. Potential difficulties that we may encounter in the integration process include the following:

Any of these factors could result in us failing to realize the anticipated benefits of the acquisition, on the expected timeline or at all, and could adversely impact our business, financial condition, cash flows and results of operations.

During the second quarter of 2019, we became subject to an unsolicited tender offer to purchase all outstanding shares of our acquisition strategycommon stock. At the time the tender offer expired on July 19, 2019, approximately two-thirds of our issued and outstanding shares had been tendered and, as a result, we have and expect that we will continue to receive additional attention and scrutiny from investors, potential acquirors, activist stockholders and others. Various actions to seek to effect change are available to such persons, including private engagement, public campaigns, proxy contests, litigation and other efforts to force transactions not supported by our board of directors or to acquire control over our Company. Responding to such actions is costly and time-consuming, may not be successful, whichalign with our business strategies and could affectdivert the attention of our board of directors and management from the management of our operations and the pursuit of business strategies. In addition, perceived uncertainties as to our future direction, strategy or leadership created as a consequence of any such actions may result in the loss of potential business opportunities, harm our ability to increaseattract new investors, customers and employees, and cause our revenuesstock price to experience periods of volatility or stagnation.

 

 

 

 

We may use forward contractsderivatives to help manage the currency risk related to certain business transactions denominated in foreign currencies. We primarily utilize forward exchange contracts with maturities of less than eighteen months. To the extent these transactions are completed, the contracts minimize our risk from exchange rate fluctuations because they offset gains and losses on the related foreign currency denominated transactions.derivatives. However, there can be no assurances that we will be able to effectively utilize these forward exchange contracts in the future to offset significant risk related to fluctuations in currency exchange rates. In addition, there can be no assurances that counterparties to such contracts will perform their contractual obligations to us in order for us to realize the anticipated benefits of the contracts.

 

 

 

 

 

We rely on information technology networks and systems, including systems of third parties and the Internet, to process, transmit and store electronic information, and manage or support a variety of business processes, including operational and financial transactions and records, personal identifying information, payroll data and workforce scheduling information. We purchase some of our information technology from vendors, on whom our systems depend. We rely on commercially available systems, software, tools and monitoring to provide security for the processing, transmission and storage of companyCompany and customer information. Although we have taken steps to protect the security of our information systems and the data maintained in those systems, no such measures can eliminate the possibility of the systems' improper functioning or the improper access or disclosure of confidential or personally identifiable information such as in the event of cyber-attacks. Security breaches, whether through physical or electronic break-ins, computer viruses, ransomware, impersonation of authorized users, attacks by hackers or other means, can create system disruptions or shutdowns or the unauthorized disclosure of confidential information. Additionally, outside parties frequently attempt to fraudulently induce employees, suppliers or customers to disclose sensitive information or take other actions, including making fraudulent payments or downloading malware, by using “spoofing” and “phishing” emails or other types of attacks. Our employees have been and likely will continue to be targeted by such fraudulent activities. Outside parties may also subject us to distributed denial of services attacks or introduce viruses or other malware through “trojan horse” programs to our users’ computers in order to gain access to our systems and the data stored therein. Because the techniques used to obtain unauthorized access, disable or degrade service, or sabotage systems change frequently and continuously become more sophisticated, often are not recognized until launched against a target and may be difficult to detect for a long time, we may be unable to anticipate these techniques or to implement adequate preventive or detective measures.

If company,Company, personal or otherwise protected information is improperly accessed, tampered with or distributed, we may face significant financial exposure, including incurring significant costs to remediate possible injury to the affected parties. We may also be subject to sanctions and civil or criminal penalties if we are found to be in violation of the privacy or security rules under federal, state, or international laws protecting confidential information. Any failure to maintain proper functionality and security of our information systems could interrupt our operations, damage our reputation, subject us to liability claims or regulatory penalties and could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, cash flows and results of operations.

 

 

There is currently significant uncertainty about the future relationship between the United States and China, including with respect to trade policies, treaties, government regulations and tariffs. The current U.S. administration has called for substantial changes to U.S. foreign trade policy and has implemented greater restrictions on international trade and significant increases in tariffs on goods imported into the U.S. Under the current status, we expect that tariff increases will primarily impact [our] Distributed Valves product lines.our Industrial segment. We are unable to predict whether or when additional tariffs will be imposed or the impact of any such future tariff increases.

Our ability to make payments of principal and interest on our indebtedness when due, including the significant indebtedness that we incurred in connection with the acquisition of FH, depends upon our future performance, which will be subject to general economic conditions, industry cycles and financial, business and other factors affecting our consolidated operations, many of which are beyond our control. If we are unable to generate sufficient cash flow from operations in the future to service our outstanding debt, we may be required to, among other things:

Such measures might not be sufficient to enable us to service our debt, which could negatively impact our financial results. In addition, we may not be able to obtain any such financing, refinancing or complete a sale of assets on economically favorable terms. In the case of financing or refinancing, favorable interest rates will be dependent on the health of the debt capital markets.

Our significant existing indebtedness could also have the effect, among other things, of reducing our flexibility to respond to changing business and economic conditions, reducing funds available for working capital, capital expenditures, acquisitions and other general corporate purposes or creating competitive disadvantages relative to other companies with lower debt levels.