Roper Technologies, Inc.
Q2 2020 Earnings Call Transcript

Published: 28 Jul 2020

[Operator:]

Good morning. The Roper Technologies Second Quarter 2020 Financial Results Conference Call will now begin. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Please note this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Zack Moxcey, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

[Zack Moxcey:]

Good morning and thank you all for joining us as we discuss the second quarter financial results for Roper Technologies. We hope everyone is doing well. Joining me on the call this morning are Neil Hunn, President and Chief Executive Officer; Rob Crisci, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; Jason Conley, Vice President and Controller; and Shannon O’Callaghan, Vice President of Finance.

[Neil Hunn:]

Good morning, everyone. And thanks for joining us. We hope that everybody listening or reading are doing well and enjoying the summer. With that, let's go ahead and start with their agenda. As usual, we'll start with the enterprise highlights from the quarter, which are quite good given the health and economic challenges associated with the current pandemic. I'll then walk through our key financial and operational levers on a segment basis, and compare how we did versus what we thought heading into the quarter. Rob will then than discuss our P&L, our balance sheet, our cash position. We find ourselves in a very fortunate position to have well over a $1.5 billion of cash on the balance sheet, and a completely undrawn $2.5 billion revolver. Following Rob's remarks, I'll walk through our detailed segment review and out Look, followed by our Q3 and full year guidance. And finally, I'll conclude with the highlights for the quarter and discuss our outlook for continued capital deployment. We'll then look forward to your questions.

[Rob Crisci:]

Thanks, Neil. Good morning, everyone. We appreciate your interest in Roper Technologies as always. So turning to page seven, looking at our Q2 income statement performance, Q2 organic revenue declined 3% versus prior year with total revenue coming in at 1.306 billion. We had positive organic revenue growth in both Application Software and Network Software and Systems, while sharp declines and our smallest segment Process Technologies pulled our overall organic growth into low single digit negative territory for the quarter.

[Neil Hunn:]

Thanks, Rob. Let's go ahead and turn to our Application Software segment. Revenues here were 398 million up 1% on an organic basis, and EBITDA was 172 million or 43.1% of revenue. To start, our retention rates and other recurring revenues remain strong in the quarter. In addition, we saw better than expected software license sales in the quarter broadly across Deltek, Aderant and PowerPlan. Of note, sales pipeline bill that occurred prior to the quarter converted at a higher than anticipated rate. In addition and discussed earlier, we saw better service utilization rates and revenues than expected. Our laboratory software businesses Sunquest, Data Innovations and Clinisys all grew and performed nicely aided by the global demand to deploy diagnostic testing software interfaces and laboratory software associated with combating COVID-19. Specific to Sunquest, we received the termination fee payment for the Queensland project in the quarter. As a reminder, last quarter, we noted that the customer opted to terminate this implementation in the face of COVID-19 related challenges. CBORD, which is our software business that sells nutrition and food management software, as well as campus access solutions to hospitals and universities did decline, given their very limited access to both hospital and university clients. Broadly across this segment and of note, we are absolutely seeing an increased desire from our customers to migrate to our cloud or SaaS offerings, one of several trends that COVID appears to be accelerating. This should be a long-term growth driver for our business, as we have a large installed base of customers who will over time migrate to the cloud.

[Operator:]

We will now go to our question-and-answer portion of the call. The first question comes from Deane Dray of RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

[Deane Dray:]

Thank you. Good morning, everyone.

[Neil Hunn:]

Good morning, Deane.

[Rob Crisci:]

Hey, Deane.

[Deane Dray:]

Can we start with the congestion tolling project? Can you just give us some context of this latest push out? It would be fair to assume that just logistically COVID is presenting issues in terms of being able to work on the project. But is there been any change in scope that's being considered?

[Neil Hunn:]

No. Hey, Deane. No change whatsoever in the scope, the contract value that we talked about a few quarters ago remains the exact same. And so the only thing that is happening here is the project is pushing a bit to the right into 2021 for the reason you said, a little bit access to personnel related to COVID and a little bit just at the election of the customer line to paste the project a little bit. And I think also we highlighted last quarter, I mean, the motivation of the client is never been higher. I think it was just around this time last quarter. The proceeds from the project for 2021 and '22 could be used in MTAs operating budget where the initial project that was going to be used for capital only, so there is a clear motivation to get the – by the customer to get the project up and running. It's just slipping to the right a little bit.

[Deane Dray:]

Just to clarify, there was a discussion of push outs in the first quarter. So this $0.20 of EPS push out. This is new and incremental, correct?

[Neil Hunn:]

That's correct.

[Rob Crisci:]

Yeah, that's – yeah, that's correct Deane. So the project was originally around 200 million for this year, and now we've got about 110 or so million in for 2020. And as Neil mentioned, the rest is pushed to the right, and we expect to be completed in '21.

[Deane Dray:]

Got it and then second topic would be the net COVID impact across your businesses. And I'm sure this is a fair question to ask. But you listed a number of ways that Roper is positioned to help between the labs support system witnesses , data innovations, the Verathon incubation systems, those would be the positives, but the negative is it all related to just the deferrals of non-emergency procedures. So how do those to net out if?

[Neil Hunn:]

If your question is relegated to the medical product businesses versus price, if you relegate to that as a broader to Roper, I want to make sure I'm answering the question –

[Deane Dray:]

No, just the medical related, sorry.

[Neil Hunn:]

Okay. Yeah. So it's a net – a meaningful net grower, right, when you look at the benefit of those of Verathon and IPA good guy against the bad guys of the other four or five medical product businesses aggregated together, it's a very meaningful positive, good guy. It's worth noting though, the Verathon demand while it certainly surged in the quarter, the team worked really well to work down the backlog a little bit more to go in the second half of the year. The team that Verathon believes that the demand is – will endure a bit right. It's about the number, the percentage or the market share of global incubations that are being done with video assistance versus not. Going into the pandemic, it was somewhere in the 15% of all intubations were done with video assistance and 85 direct. And that market share video is going – it's meaningfully higher now and it will stay. It'll be meaningfully above 15% on the backside of this, so the market just grew, we believe, for these products that Verathon has.

[Deane Dray:]

That's real helpful. Thank you.

[Neil Hunn:]

Thank you.

[Operator:]

The next question comes from Scott Davis of Melius Research. Please go ahead.

[Scott Davis:]

Hi, good morning, guys.

[Neil Hunn:]

Hey, Scott, good morning.

[Rob Crisci:]

Hey, Scott.

[Scott Davis:]

I was trying to get a sense and a little bit of follow up on Deane's question, but trying to get a sense of ConstructConnect. You commented out the pandemic, perhaps helped – is helping catalyze some growth there. I mean, very few of us are experts in many of these businesses. I'm certainly not an expert in ConstructConnect by any stretch of imagination. But can you give us a sense of how that business grows in this type of environment? Is it – well, I'll just leave a little bit of that just open ended, how does it grow and how much does it impact? Is there any way to – the magnitude, the pandemic really helping get word of mouth or otherwise out there on the product.

[Neil Hunn:]

Yeah, happy to talk through that, so just to remind you and everyone ConstructConnect, the primary part of the business all for non-residential or commercial construction in the United States and Canada that's in the planning phase. So once a shovel goes in the ground, other constituents in the value chain pick up that. This is about planning. It allows general contractors, subcontractors, building product manufacturers to be aware of the projects are being planned, so they can bid for and win those projects and we have software that organizes all of that activity. So when the market is raging hot, right, all the subcontractors have more work and they can possibly do the value of leads or what new projects is lower, right. And so we've always sort of said, if there's five market conditions, five is white hot and one is there's basically zero construction, that constructing that value proposition is best in positions two, three and four, right, where there's work and activity going on, but not so much work that contractors have so much to do, right. And so, what's essentially happened here and ConstructConnect reports on this and Zach can give it to you is, nonres construction activity is down 28% versus prior year. It was up a little bit in June versus May. But that's the exact environment where the value proposition of leads and project awareness sort of thrives. And that's why you saw more contractors come into the ConstructConnect market and grow in the quarter.

[Rob Crisci:]

I would just add to that it's a SaaS business, Scott. So there's not huge swings in the revenue like you get with a perpetual license bid. We're seeing increased activity in the network and that leads to a little bit of more subscriptions, more customers, and then over time, that drives additional growth with the business.

[Scott Davis:]

Right and those custom customers, I mean, do they come in and then they generally stick around or they come out when economic conditions get weaker?

[Neil Hunn:]

Really appreciate the question. So history, if you go way back in the ark of ConstructConnect, some of them will stay and some of them will leave. But since our ownership in '16, the ConstructConnect team has worked really hard to build habituation into the product, if you will. So now there's integrated takeoff which is the estimation process and directly linked and so we believe the customers when we look at the utilization of the product, they're in the product on a multi time a day basis now, where five, six, seven years ago, they'd be in the product only when they needed to look for any project. And so we believe based on that the sort of the long-term retention rates of the business go up.

[Scott Davis:]

Okay. Okay, super helpful. Okay. Congrats guys. Good luck this quarter.

[Neil Hunn:]

Yeah. Congrats on the book as well.

[Scott Davis:]

Thank you.

[Operator:]

Please go ahead, sir with your question.

[Unidentified Analyst:]

Hey, can you hear me okay?

[Neil Hunn:]

We can Steve. Hey, I think its Steve, right? Yeah, okay.

[Unidentified Analyst:]

Yes. Sorry. Sorry guys, just managing some things here. Like eight different calls. Just on the acquisitions you recently did. Can you just give us some color on the revenues and what you paid for those, just general multiples for some of the ones you've done?

[Rob Crisci:]

Yeah. Sure, Steve. So there's the two acquisitions in the quarter, combined purchase price about 150 million. And we've got about 25 million or so revenue in the model for '21. And EBITDA margins there in the mid to high 40s. So pretty good cash, but each business is being integrated into a business. So there was not a lot added for the second half, but there's some integration going on, but that built a real good strategic adds to the Roper businesses.

[Unidentified Analyst:]

Got it and then just a last one on the – on some of the – I think you guys had expected a bit weaker performance in some of the software businesses. I know you went through some of this in the prepared remarks. But is there anything that kind of gives back a little bit in the second half that notable and it's material in any of those software businesses that just perhaps some differed downside relative to what you would have expected in the second quarter, some timing items?

[Neil Hunn:]

So in the second quarter, I mean, yeah, I think the second quarter software for the reasons we said on Application Software, I mean, it was the better utilization rates on the service side. And we expected more deferral or push outs of the license activity. And that proved to be a little conservative. And so that was broad that license activity was brought across Deltek, Aderant, PowerPlan. We saw good performance across the diagnostic businesses that we just talked about. Excuse me, some of that – a lot of that was COVID related.

[Rob Crisci:]

Right, yeah, there's a lot of good – good things that happened in acute care software in the quarter which are driven by the demand around COVID. Right, so that's – some of that stuff happened in the second quarter that we didn't expect. And we'll see what continues into the second half, but that's difficult to predict.

[Operator:]

Steve, was there a follow up?

[Neil Hunn:]

Sounds like he went on, okay.

[Operator:]

Understood, the next question comes from Julian Mitchell of Barclays. Please go ahead.

[Unidentified Analyst:]

Hey, good morning, everyone. This is Jeff Alvaro on for Julian.

[Neil Hunn:]

Okay Jeff.

[Unidentified Analyst:]

Maybe just to start Application Software margins came in pretty strong for the quarter, can you just give some color on what contributed there? And maybe as part of that, just your thoughts on how margins look there in – at other segments for the second half?

[Neil Hunn:]

I'll take the first part of that. Let Rob take a second. Hey, it's directly – the Application Software margin performance in the quarter is directly tied to better license activity as you know, perpetual licenses in quarter are super high margin, 90 plus percent, 85%, 90%, so when they perform an expectation on license, and you tend to have better margin performance.

[Rob Crisci:]

And then we also received the Queensland payment for Sunquest, which put revenue and large high margin net revenue in the second quarter as well, which helped. And then as we look at the second half the margins don't move around a lot in the other segments, which is a great thing, right. It's high recurring revenue, very stable business models you don't get this sort of swaying, so we certainly expect EBITDA margins to be sort of flat or a little bit better year-over-year in the software segment.

[Unidentified Analyst:]

Perfect. And then some interesting comments you guys mentioned, municipal budgets seemed to be intact so far. Any thoughts on how much this holds in the second half? And then maybe thoughts on what level of potential cuts you guys are dialing in for kind of your outlook next year? I know that's a bit early. And then maybe just as part of that, can you just remind us kind of what percentage of sales within M&A as it's kind of tied to municipal budgets?

[Rob Crisci:]

Very low dollars percent of revenue, I mean, it's going to be the part of Neptune that swings around with budgets. And Neptune's a pretty stable high recurring revenue business. So it's a real small percentage of the segment in single digits, it's going to really be driven by swinging budgets.

[Neil Hunn:]

Yeah, and more broadly coming – this time last quarter in the height of the shutdown, a risk item that we – or were flagged was our Neptune's customers budgets going to be intact as they rolled into their New Year's because a large percentage of these customers have a July 1 fiscal year just given the broader economic challenges that municipalities and cities are experiencing. The good news is the budgets appear to be largely intact, so that high – the first risk item appears to be mostly retired. Remaining risk item is now the spend against the budget, right and that's to be determined, but the first step is a checkmark and we'll see how things unfold the rest of the year.

[Unidentified Analyst:]

Got it, thank you guys.

[Neil Hunn:]

Yeah, thank you.

[Operator:]

The next question comes from Joe Ritchie of golden. Please go ahead.

[Joe Ritchie:]

Thanks. Good morning, everyone.

[Neil Hunn:]

Hey, good morning.

[Rob Crisci:]

Hey, Joe.

[Joe Ritchie:]

Hey, Neil, maybe just some commentary on the elective procedure impact in the quarter and obviously, like things are still incredibly fluid with the virus, but I'm just trying to understand, maybe how much of this pushes out into 2021 and whether there's like a revenue boost in 2021 once hopefully, elective procedures come back.

[Neil Hunn:]

Yeah. So the products – the companies that we have that are somewhat indexed to procedure volume, its one derivative behind it, right. So very little of our businesses are consumable in a procedure, but our capital and products are used by other companies who are – and used in a procedure. And so we're buffered a little bit by what our customers are seeing. We did see a little bit in the second, maybe the June time period, some of the true consumables sort of pick back up. And that's just going to be evolved for the balance of the year. We would expect, as I mentioned, the open continent the prepared remarks, I mean, this group of businesses going back for many, many years grows like clockwork at mid-single digits, and that assumes a patient volume yet that are normalized and so to the extent volumes are normal in 2021, then we would see a pickup in that group of businesses.

[Rob Crisci:]

Just to give you a sense Joe, so the sort of other medical products businesses which exclude Verathon and IPA, which have a huge COVID benefit, so everything else, those businesses were down double digits in the quarter, and they would normally be mid-single growers. And so I think we will catch up some of that at some point, but it's very difficult to predict when.

[Joe Ritchie:]

Got it, that's helpful, Rob and then just maybe my quick follow up. I thought your commentary around like the acceleration into cloud-based solutions was interesting. I guess, Neil, if you could maybe just provide some context for what that opportunity could be for you guys, either qualitative or quantitative that would be helpful.

[Neil Hunn:]

Yeah, I'll leave it. It's sort of on the qualitative basis, right. So as we said for a long time, we – as a guiding principle, we allow our customers to pace the transition to the cloud, we don't force it or have a force product migration or just they're waiting for that to occur. We have some businesses like Strata that are born in the cloud. We have other businesses like Aderant and PowerPlan that are still vast, vast majority on-premise. And then we have companies like Deltek that are somewhere in between, right, sort of in the middle in their journey of the migration. What we've seen at Deltek is that that migration is a net growth driver. And we can talk about that in more detail later to the extent you're interested. But you basically are taking a large installed base of customers who pay you annual maintenance and you're uplifting them to the cloud. So you're providing all the backbone and IT sort of management services, but also, you're doing all the release management, getting them on the most recent release. They're more micro releases. And so the customers get to take advantage of what you're actually developing. And that has real value associated within the mind's eye of the customers. And so for that reason, as they migrate from on-premise to cloud, there's an uplift in recurring, a pretty meaningful one and that's a that's a multiyear growth driver for our enterprise on Application Software or an Application Software.

[Joe Ritchie:]

Got it, that's super helpful. Thanks, guys.

[Neil Hunn:]

Thank you.

[Operator:]

The next question comes from Joe Giordano of Cowen. Please go ahead.

[Joe Giordano:]

Hey, guys good morning.

[Neil Hunn:]

Good morning.

[Joe Giordano:]

Can you talk about maybe some of the implications of a potential infrastructure bill that might have maybe on, I'm guessing Deltek would be the most maybe PowerPlan, I'm not sure? But how that might impact the overall portfolio?

[Neil Hunn:]

It's not – I think it would have a slight impact. And the reason I say that I'm looking at Rob and Shannon, it's not something we talked about right. And so about an infrastructure bill, we're not rooting for one so I think we're –

[Rob Crisci:]

Yeah, I think the government contractors are always betting money on whatever there is to spend money on.

[Neil Hunn:]

Yeah, Rob's point there is a very good one, right, so the contractors go where the fast flow is in a government spend. And so maybe you get a few more government contractors that could be dealt like customers, but that's not over yet .

[Joe Giordano:]

Okay, fair enough. Can you kind of just set a range kind of for us, I's assume like within – your software businesses did better than expected, obviously, but I'm guessing there's huge differences between businesses like CBORD where you couldn't go? Like people were on site like, can you kind of scale what are the – even if you don't want to get into the specific business names or like how big were some of the biggest declines and how big were some of the biggest gainers in the in flight?

[Neil Hunn:]

Well, I'll set it up. I'll give you some context and let Rob sort of give you his view. So as we mentioned, last quarter in this segment, about 70% of revenues are recurring, 20% are tied to services and that's generally coming – working off some sort of six to 18 month backlog and then 10% of the revenue is that perpetual license. So the most short-term impacted is that 10%, so that tends to mute the magnitude of the swing in any given period of time, assuming that the in flight implementation projects don't stall. We see a lot of that block, if any of that activity in the quarter. So with that Rob?

[Rob Crisci:]

Yeah, they are just very stable businesses. So I'm just looking through all the software businesses and sort of they're all kind of between a low single digit gain or low single digit decline, with the exception of CBORD, which is a little bit worse than that. So again, that a little bit better than expected because you know a huge part of the businesses are stable. The question is are you going to get any of these license wins in the quarter? Are you able to look to deliver services? And we were. And so to the extent that continues, that certainly helps us, there's just aren't big swings in these businesses, which of course, we had huge swings in the product businesses where there's more issues with not being able to access customers, et cetera.

[Joe Giordano:]

Better, thanks, guys.

[Neil Hunn:]

Thank you.

[Operator:]

The next question comes from Alex Blanton of Clear Harbor Asset Management. Please go ahead.

[Alex Blanton:]

Hi, good morning.

[Neil Hunn:]

Good morning, Alex.

[Alex Blanton:]

I wanted to ask about the push up in the TransCore business in New York City. You mentioned $0.20 going into 2021 from '20, a new $0.20. And then I think you said I want to confirm this, a 110 million now in this year versus 200 million before. So that's a $90 million push, is that – are those the right numbers?

[Rob Crisci:]

They are Alex. So there was an interim step in there that last quarter with the 200 became 175. And now it's 110, so the move from 175 to 110 is your $0.20.

[Alex Blanton:]

Okay, that's what I wanted to know. So that's a $65 million push out, generated $0.20 per share, push out, so we can calculate the incremental margin there. That's what I'm getting at.

[Neil Hunn:]

These are all rough numbers, but yeah, go ahead.

[Alex Blanton:]

Yeah, I know. Yeah. We don't need percentage. The second thing is, we haven't really – I don't think anyone asked about the acquisition pipeline. You've got max $4.1 billion of spending power for acquisitions. What does that look like? What are you working on, big, small, what's the timing? Is some of that getting pushed out because of COVID? What's the situation there?

[Neil Hunn:]

Alex, appreciate the question. So I'll give you a little bit of context and color. So we had a pretty – the activity coming into COVID. I mean, it was as busy as we had been that I can recall since being here in 2011 in terms of what the funnel activity looked like. Obviously, everything shut down. I mean, when the credit markets shut down, everything shut down in April and May. It was there was really no activity anywhere. No sellers were selling anything for obvious reasons. But the end of May, first part of June we saw some green shoots, we obviously got these two bolt-on's complete, which are sort of in the pipeline pre-COVID. And really here since the middle of June, until now, it's almost as if we're back to January, February in terms of private equity seller interest in activity. The private credit markets aren't fully back, but they're back enough to give sponsors confident that they can run a process or processes. And so we're encouraged by all that because we're sitting here with what you just said a large amount of cash and borrowing capacity to sort of continue this – our long-term CRI driven sort of compounding strategy. I will note the things that we see that – obviously, the things that come out of the shoot first after a slowdown are the very best assets, right, the ones that have the best niches, the best competitive position, the best highest level of recurring revenue, durability, things like that. And those tend to be fairly valued, right. There's not a lot of bargains that we would say we see in the software space, but values – valuations consistent with what we saw coming into the pandemic.

[Alex Blanton:]

What accounts for the pickup? The COVID situation is actually worse than was in April. There's spikes all over the place and the government doesn't have control over at all. They're not even trying. So what accounts for the opening up of acquisition activity?

[Neil Hunn:]

We can only speculate what's in the mind's eye of the sellers, right, but a couple of things. First is, the types of – everything I just said I should have qualified by saying our M&A pipeline is 100% software focused, right and so these are businesses even in the public markets that are proving to be resilient, sort of the comparables if you will and so that is – colors my comments on what a funnel activity looks like. The other thing is private equity sellers, which is where we buy 100% of our assets from have to return capital. They have limited sort of pressures. That's a constant drumbeat. And then finally, and this is me certainly speculating about private equities view of what might happen in election and taxes, but that certainly may be a motivating factor to get some things done by the end of this year.

[Alex Blanton:]

Taxes, okay. Yeah. I don't remember the question, but now it slipped my mind.

[Neil Hunn:]

Happens to me all the time.

[Alex Blanton:]

Yeah. You said 100% software focused. I know what it was. Your sister company Dover Corp used to say that – one of the favorite things they said was that during recessions, they always gained market share because they had the dominant positions in their companies and their markets. And so weaker competitors would lose out some business and even go out of business during recessions. So Dover actually benefited from market share standpoint during economic downturns. How would you characterize Roper in that regard? And what is happening now, are you gaining share overall from people having a lot worse time than you are?

[Neil Hunn:]

So we would echo those comments that companies like Roper in our history is we continue to invest in product through cycle, especially in the down cycle because your competitors oftentimes are not able to. We also stay super close to our customers, the vast majority of what we – our companies have direct channel access or a sap to work through a distributor so you stay super close to the customers and almost certainly on the back end, you can gain share either because of customer intimacy or because you develop or launch some new product or product capability, so 100% that is the case for Roper in this current environment.

[Alex Blanton:]

Okay. And this is a tough one, but what percentage of this 4.1 billion do you think you might deploy this year?

[Rob Crisci:]

That's real hard. Yeah, that's really impossible to predict. We're going to do the work we always do and we certainly have the capacity, but we only do the best deals and we never feel pressured. But certainly the balance sheet has never been stronger. So we feel good about our ability to deploy capital this year.

[Neil Hunn:]

As our – my predecessors said many years ago, our discipline is only outmatched by our patience.

[Alex Blanton:]

Okay, thank you very much.

[Neil Hunn:]

Thank you.

[Rob Crisci:]

Thanks.

[Operator:]

This concludes our question-and-answer session. We will now return back to Zack Moxcey for any closing remarks.

[Zack Moxcey:]

Thank you, everyone for joining us today. We look forward to speaking with you during our next earnings call.

[Operator:]

Conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.