Matthews International Corporation
Q2 2016 Earnings Call Transcript

Published: 29 Apr 2016

[Operator:]

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your patience and standing by. Welcome to the Matthews International Second Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all of your participant phone lines are in a listen-only mode. And later there will be an opportunity for questions. [Operator Instructions]. And just as a reminder, today's conference is being recorded. I’d now like to turn the conference over to Chief Financial Officer, Steven Nicola.

[Steven F. Nicola:]

Thank you, Justin, good morning. I’m Steven Nicola, Chief Financial Officer of Matthews. Also on the call this morning is Joe Bartolacci, our company’s President and CEO. Today’s conference call has been scheduled for one hour and will be available for replay later this morning. To access the replay, dial 1-320-365-3844, and under the access code 390969. The replay will be available until 11

[Joseph C. Bartolacci:]

Thank you, Steve. Good morning. We are very pleased with our results for the quarter. Despite challenging market environment in several of our businesses, our synergy capture and good cost containment allowed us to exceed market expectations for the quarter. Continued higher volume in our cemetery products group and good synergy achievement in our Aurora acquisition all contributed to offset lower death rates. Similarly with regard to our brand business, softness in the North American and European markets and significant currency headwinds were offset by execution which captured the expected synergies. Good cost management and stronger performance in our merchandising UK and Asia operations all benefited as well. Meanwhile our automation group which is contending with a difficult year-over-year comparable still continues to deliver good results and is expected to have yet another strong year. All in all we are headed in the right direction and we are excited about the many things happening throughout our business. With regard to the two significant integration efforts that we have underway, we remain on track to deliver our targeted cost synergies and maybe more. As we have communicated in the past we began the most significant part of our ERP launch on April 1st, for our SGK brand segment and I'm happy to report it is going very well. A special thanks goes out to the team across the world who have dedicated a lot of time and effort to make this a successful launch. Assuming the continued success of the ERP implementation, we remained very confident in our ability to deliver our projected synergies of $45 million which is at the high end of the range which was previously communicated. With regard to Aurora our plans are finalized and the integration has begun in earnest. We are very confident that we will deliver all of the projected benefits of this acquisition and perhaps more as well. As I've stated before, we must and will continue to provide seamless service to our valued customers so our detailed integration plans include significant investments to assure exceptional service levels. Even with these investments however, we still expect to add over $40 million of incremental EBITDA from this transaction over the 24 month period after acquisition. As we have previously stated, expected synergies – dissynergies, excuse me, have impacted the immediate benefits of this acquisition but during the quarter we began to see the benefit of early synergy capture. During the quarter we have chosen to rename our industrial segment to better reflect the true nature of the underlining business. Many of you may recall this segment to have been our marketing products division at historical roots of our business. Today, given the evolution of this business and the scope of its current and future product lines there's no better descriptor that encompasses the core of this business other than industrial technologies. With that our industrial technologies segment continued to see great performance despite high R&D spending which totaled $1.4 million during the quarter. Expanded products, creative solutions, and great people who focus on innovation every day will allow us to continue to grow this business well beyond its current size. From a financial standpoint, we generated over $40 million of operating cash flow for the quarter and we are very confident in our full year target of approximately $100 million of free cash flow which includes substantial investments in both of our integration efforts. With regard to those integrations, we believe that we are peaked in our integration cost and the amounts are expected to decline significantly during the next six months. Thus we expect free cash flow on a forward basis to approach $140 million beginning next year, which will push our free cash flow yield at the current stock price to over 8%. We also expect to generate around $245 million of adjusted EBITDA for this fiscal year all while keeping our capital expenditures in check at around $40 million to $45 million. With this strong cash generation, we have and we will continue to focus on reducing our outstanding debt. To that end we are proud to announce that we have made over $100 million of debt repayments since closing on SGK in late 2014. Keep in mind that we made those debt repayments despite having incurred significant integration cost and those costs are waning. To that end we are targeting an additional repayments of up to $40 million for the balance in 2016. Clearly the addition of the SGK and Aurora and continued strong performance from our historical businesses had allowed us to materially change the financial picture of the company. As we look to the balance of 2016 we remained confident of our ability to achieve our operating objectives that have been communicated including the amount of synergies that we expect to achieve. We exceeded market expectations of the first two quarters and feel very comfortable with our target of $3.25 per share adjusted and possibly more. We remain cautious in the economies in which we operate but optimistic about our own ability to manage through those difficulties as we have demonstrated this quarter. We remain proactive in taking actions to mitigate the potential effects of these and other challenges as we move throughout the balance of the year. Also, as we have communicated in the past we have recently made permanent through a term loan a portion of our bank revolver debt adding further stability to our balance sheet and affording us the opportunity to lock in favorable interest rates for years to come. For all of these reasons we are proud of our results for the quarter and optimistic about our internal opportunities and those opportunities that are created by improving ability to integrate acquisitions. With that let’s open it up for questions.

[Steven F. Nicola:]

For those of you who will be asking questions we request that you limit them to one question and a follow up question until all those who wish to participate in the Q&A session had an opportunity to do so. Justin?

[Operator:]

Thank you. [Operator Instructions]. Looks as if our first question comes from the line of Dan Moore. Your line is open sir.

[Daniel Moore:]

Good morning, thanks for taking the questions.

[Joseph C. Bartolacci:]

Hi Dan.

[Daniel Moore:]

Joe, can you perhaps quantify -- you talked about the synergies you realized obviously significantly confident in getting to the high-end, how much of those synergies for Shark and Aurora you have realized in the quarter and year-to-date and are you achieving them faster than you expected?

[Joseph C. Bartolacci:]

Let’s talk about SGK first. SGK we have communicated a range $35 million to $45 million. Today we have confirmed for you that we are at the high end of that range and maybe a little bit more beyond that. The run rate at this point in the fiscal year we are running at about a little more than half of that. We expect it by the end of the year. We should be pushing 30 million of that 45 million at a run rate. So we’ve communicated historically that’s going to take 24 to 36 months to get through. We’re still right on track with respect to SGK. On the Aurora side we’re pleased to report we’re slightly ahead but -- and it is modest because frankly right now that dis-synergies are still outweighing the synergies that we are achieving. Having said that we’ve only recognized several million dollars worth of the cost synergies we expect. There is still a lot more to come. We think we have stabilized the dis-synergy portion of it and it should be upside from here.

[Daniel Moore:]

Very helpful. By year end for Shark you said 30 million did I hear that or higher?

[Joseph C. Bartolacci:]

30 million by the end of the year.

[Daniel Moore:]

Got it, okay, that’s helpful. And you called out bronze and then granite memorials obviously first, seeing some decent growth year-over-year, how much of a factor was the mild weather in placements during the quarter versus a more sustainable uptick, what's your view there?

[Steven F. Nicola:]

The factor is we can't tell how much that is, but we can't deny that a mild winter is going to make placements a little better but we also know some other things. As you all -- for many who have been around shareholders for a while we had a challenging ERP implementation in that segment of the business a few years back. As we suggested at that time we lost some of our more regional accounts and that team right now has done a wonderful job of going back after those accounts and we are picking up market share that we had lost during that time period. On along the same line, the team on our stone side of the business is doing great work. We’re seeing double-digit increases that we think are going to continue for a while. We’ve always proposed that we think we can be a significant player in the stone business which is a good adjunct to what we have on the bronze and we’re seeing that come to fruition as we speak. So great performance, that challenging ERP implementation is paying its benefits now. Service levels are beyond anything we’ve had in the last 100 years from a delivery standpoint. So we’re pretty proud of what we done and that’s how the business and that team has done a great job for us.

[Daniel Moore:]

Okay and then and I’ll jump back in the queue brand solutions any signs of an improved climate either in North America or in Europe and when do you think we might start to see some benefit from the changes of packaging regulations and legislation?

[Joseph C. Bartolacci:]

We think Europe is turning as we speak. We've had some information from customers and clients over there that suggests that we should see some upside tick in volumes as marketing dollars are being freed up a little bit more. In North America frankly, I mean our historical customers could remain very, very stable but at lower run rate. But we did see the beginnings of what we think are what the food market -– Food Modernization and Labeling Act, a tongue-twister there. That as we look at Vermont, Vermont has pushed several of our large consumer product companies on the food side to do GMO labeling as many of you may be aware. And we’ve seen good volume coming through as a result of that. So its early but we think that there's some pent up demand associated with that regulation and you’ll that come through over the next 12 to 24 months.

[Daniel Moore:]

Excellent, appreciate the color.

[Operator:]

[Operator Instructions]. Our next question comes from the line of Liam Burke. Your line is open.

[Liam Burke:]

Yes, good morning, Joe. Good morning, Steve.

[Steven F. Nicola:]

Morning, Liam.

[Joseph C. Bartolacci:]

Hi, Liam.

[Liam Burke:]

Joe, on the Aurora acquisition, on the revenue side have you been able to stabilize that side of the business and have you seen the integration on the revenue side come through okay?

[Joseph C. Bartolacci:]

Actually, the revenue side is just starting to turn, Liam, as we speak. Much of the dissynergies occurred prior to our closing on that acquisition in the time period where the Federal Credit Commission doesn’t allow us to speak neither to customers nor too much about the inside of the business. We've stabilized that and I would tell you Liam, that today we fully expect to most – to be the most cost effective manufacturer of caskets in the United States, and we don’t think that long-term that this would be a challenge for us to be able to maintain that revenue going forward.

[Liam Burke:]

Okay. And in the old marking business, how has -– how did that part of the business perform in terms of consumables?

[Joseph C. Bartolacci:]

The consumables are below what our expectations were but still at a higher rate than historically it has been. As we've said in the past, the marketing portion of our of what we are calling our industrial technologies business is really the bell weather for us in economic conditions around the world. Consumables are the part of that, that really tells us pretty early on what the economy is doing. And as you’ve read in the papers, Liam, they’re reporting a slow first quarter. We felt that slowness in our consumables but at the same time this team has demonstrated year-over-year-over-year for the last 10 years that they find ways to create new solutions. We have great promise in that division and good people doing it. So I think it’s just a blip in the quarter, and frankly it wasn’t a bad quarter.

[Liam Burke:]

Great. Thank you, Joe.

[Operator:]

At this point sir, we have no further questions in queue.

[Steven F. Nicola:]

Alright, well, we’d like to thank everyone for participating in our call this morning and we look forward to our third quarter earnings release and conference call in July. Thank you and have a great day.

[Operator:]

Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude the conference for this morning. We do thank you very much for your participation. The replay of today’s recording will be available by dialing 320-365-3844 and using the access code of 9 -– 390, I apologize, 390969. It will be available from 11 AM today through May 12, 2016. So once again you can dial 320-365-3844 using the access code of 390969. You may now disconnect.