Operator
Operator
:
AllianceBernstein Holding L.P. (AB)
Q4 2009 Earnings Call· Thu, Feb 11, 2010
$38.44
+0.96%
Same-Day
+4.04%
1 Week
+4.71%
1 Month
+14.71%
vs S&P
+7.05%
Operator
Operator
:
Philip Talamo
Management
Thank you, Stephanie. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our fourth quarter 2009 earnings review. As a reminder, this conference call is being webcast and is supported by a slide presentation that could be found in the Investor Relations section of our website at www.alliancebernstein.com/investorrelations. Presenting our results today are our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Peter Kraus; our Chief Operating Officer, David Steyn; and our Chief Financial Officer, Bob Joseph. I would like to take this opportunity to note that some of the information we present today is forward-looking in nature and is subject to certain SEC rules and regulations regarding disclosure. Our cautionary language regarding forward-looking statements can be found on page two of our presentation as well as in the MD&A section of our 2009 10-K, which we expect to file later today. In light of the SEC's Regulation FD, management is limited to responding to inquiries from investors and analysts in a non-public forum. Therefore we encourage you all to ask questions of material nature on this call. I'll now hand the call over to Peter.
Peter Kraus
Management
Thanks very much, Phil. As we’ve noted with all of you in our discussions during the course of the year, ’09 was really about three important things. One is, restoring performance across our platform, and from that, flows will flow; two, enhancing the operating leveraging and restoring the operating margins in the business, both the average margins and mark to margin contributions; and three, building and enhancing the resource-oriented culture and earning the trust of our clients. We made good progress in all accounts. I’m going to spend a little bit of time talking about performance, flows, and then turn over to David to go further into the details. You will see on the first slide that we have arrayed the performance for the year, three years, five years, and ten years, and the fourth quarter ’09 for the major value services. Each of the slides on performance are arranged similarly. The one year performance was outstanding across the board for the US – for the global value services, the international value services, and also positive for the US diversified service. Turning to the next slide, we look at growth. The US large cap growth broke even, but the GRG product and the international large cap growth, both drove gains for the year. Importantly, the fourth quarter of ’09 for both GRG and international large cap growth showed significant gains and real progress towards continued performance above the benchmark. On the blend side of the world, solid performance for one year and for the fourth quarter in all major categories, emerging markets leading the parade. On the institutional fixed income business, outstanding performance in the year across Corporate Bonds, Strategic Core Plus, and Global Plus, all had absolutely excellent years, including the fourth quarter as well. When we look at flows, we still see net outflows for the businesses, although fixed income by the third quarter of ’09 was beginning to reflect some of the positive performance that we had during the year and has continued to show positive flows in that space. Value, although negative outflows did not have any significant deterioration between the third quarter and the fourth quarter, was slightly better. And growth, pretty much the same picture as value. Looking at the net flows by distribution channel, we see basic improvement. However, the fourth quarter in the institutional space saw greater outflows in the third quarter However, I’ll let David explain some of the reasons for that. It will become clear to you that the performance is basically consistent in the third quarter and the fourth quarter.
David Steyn
Management
Thank you, Peter. I’m going to, in the next few minutes; drill down into the business conditions of our three main channels. And whilst each of them is at a different stage of recovery and is dealing with the different challenges and experiencing a different environment, in my remarks, I hope it will become clear that there are some common denominators to what is going on across our business. The first is the one which Peter has already alluded to. Improved performance across the board driven by our three global research platforms; value, growth, fixed income. The second common factor or common phenomenon is the sort of renewed sales focus, exploring the depths and breadths of our distribution footprint. The third one is the greater product innovation or greater focus on product innovation, but of two types. One, filling in the gaps in our product range, the areas where we don’t have the appropriate services. That’s the obvious one. Perhaps the slightly more subtle one is what I call – we call, the innovative expressions or iterations of our existing outer platforms, but packaging them up into new dynamic products. So with that said, let me start with our Private Client business. Here, the business momentum has continued to improve in Q4, manifested by the metrics of gross sales and net flows, which you can see in the bullet points and in the graphic at the bottom of the page. What you can’t see is another metric we follow very closely and which is in our experience a very good indicator of future activity. A key component of our engagement model with high net worth clients and high net worth products is what we call Well Forecasting Analysis, WFA. WFA is where we analyze the needs of the clients and…
Bob Joseph
Management
Okay. Thanks, David. So as we reported today and as shown on the next slide, net income attributable to AllianceBernstein unitholders for the fourth quarter of 2009 was $192 million, more than the $92 million earned in the fourth quarter of 2008. Operating income increased by 180%, driven by a 35% increase in net revenues and also by a 14% increase in operating expenses. Our operating margin increased to 25.7% from 16.2% for the fourth quarter of 2008. Although a significant portion of this improvement is due to a large positive variance in deferred compensation investment gains and losses, which I’ll discuss later, the remainder is attributable to improve operating results. While on this slide, I’d like to point out that the operating partnership’s effective tax rate declined to 6.8% compared to 9.8% for the last year’s fourth quarter, as a higher proportion of our consolidated pretax earnings was generated from the operations of our US partnership. This mix shift also explains a similar decline in the tax rate for the full year. Fourth quarter 2009 diluted net income per unit and the distribution per unit for AllianceBernstein Holding, the publicly traded partnership, were both $0.62, each more than double that of the prior year quarter. Moving to the full year 2009, net revenues and operating expense for the operating partnership declined 17% and 11% respectively compared to full year 2008, resulting in a 36% decline in operating income. Finally, full year diluted net income per unit for both the operating partnership and AllianceBernstein Holding declined by 35%. The next slide provides details of the $201 million or 35% increase in net revenues of the operating partnership. Base fees increased by $14 million or 3% due to higher retail fee revenue, which is partially offset by modest declines in our…
Operator
Operator
(Operator instructions) Your first question comes from the line of William Katz with the Buckingham Research Group. William Katz – Buckingham Research Group: Good evening, everyone. Just a discussion on the expense outlook on a go-forward basis. Just sort of curious, it seems like that, with. David, your comments, the headcount is sort of stabilizing some initiatives in Private Client, et cetera. Should we be thinking just conceptually that margin improvement from this stage forward would be more a function of top-line improvement? Or are there other things you could do? And so I'm wondering within that, maybe an update on the commercial real estate disposition.
David Steyn
Management
Bill, you’re quite right. Margin improvement from this point forward will be driven from the top-line. The expense side was ’09 story. The top line will have to be in the story going forward. William Katz – Buckingham Research Group: Okay. And then the second question is, just in terms of the institutional pipeline, just sort of curious – I know you mentioned it’s ticked up a little bit, but still relatively nominal in the scheme of things. Where are you seeing the puts and takes? If you will, where is the strength? And then secondarily, where the weakness is?
David Steyn
Management
I think it’s much of the picture we have described over past quarters. We are seeing interest coming out of the Middle East, interest coming out of Asian markets. UK continues to be somewhat depressed. And the United States of America, patchy story. William Katz – Buckingham Research Group: Okay. Thank you.
David Steyn
Management
I’m sorry. To clarify, that’s for Institutions. William Katz – Buckingham Research Group: Right.
David Steyn
Management
Retail, every country administrator is moving in the right direction. William Katz – Buckingham Research Group: Okay, thank you.
Operator
Operator
Your next question comes from the line of Marc Irizarry with Goldman Sachs Marc Irizarry – Goldman Sachs: Great, thanks. Can we just talk about institutional for a second in terms of where you are on the consultant’s watch-list? So you’re still getting put on watch lists. Where does that stand? Thanks.
David Steyn
Management
It’s a very difficult question to generalize, because the consultants obviously aren’t homogeneous, either worldwide or even in one country. And so we have continued advocacy for some of our services to some consultants worldwide. I think we had very long and very deep relationships and they have been supporters of this firm for a decade. And there are other consultants who behave and react in a way often consultants are characterized by.
Peter Kraus
Management
Yes. Marc, let me just add to David’s comments. One of the things the consultants were quite focused on was voluntary turnover. And we’ve seen in the last year plus, the voluntary turnover actually declined from levels of ’07 and ’08. In fact, the levels in ’09 were 30% lower than ’08. And we’ve had quite a bit of stability – and that’s investment professionals by the way. We’ve had quite a bit of stability in the investing teams. And so I think that’s a big positive momentum shift for the consultants as they continue to look at ’09 outperformance, the historical outperformance of the company, and the stability of the investment teams. That isn’t to say that – because we’ve said this before that we’ll never have here another investment person leave because, of course that’s going to happen, we have a big organization. But if you look at it on a percentage basis and even if we apply that to the levels of seniority up and down the organization, we actually are trending in a substantially better direction than we were in ’07 and in ’08.
David Steyn
Management
And Marc, if I could just come back to my earlier answer, I’m thinking about particular a consultant’s illustrated difficulty of generalizing. One consultant, I know well, put us on the watch list for equities and then put us on the buy list for fixed income. So very, very hard for us to say where we are with our consultants. What I would tell you is we continue to have a very deep dialog with all consultants. Marc Irizarry – Goldman Sachs: Okay, great. And then just – I know January AUM is out, so maybe you could talk a little bit about the flow turns that we saw – that we’re seeing in the month of January, particularly on the institutional side.
David Steyn
Management
I think it’s no different story to what I said earlier about Q4 and Q3. No change in pattern. And as Peter sort of alluded to and then I went into slightly greater detail, if you actually look to the redemption picture, stripping out that one $5 billion cash flow, ’04 and ’03 sort of level-pegged each other. Marc Irizarry – Goldman Sachs: Okay, great. Thanks.
Operator
Operator
Your next question comes from the line of Cynthia Mayer with Bank of America/Merrill Lynch. Cynthia Mayer – Bank of America/Merrill Lynch: Hi, good afternoon. Just a follow-up on the flows, I’m just wondering given the really strong fixed income performance in the last year and the strong flows industry-wide, if you can give any color on why you think the fixed income flows haven’t picked up more. It looks like they have been positive the last two quarters but not accelerating. And then also when you look inside, the pipeline you have, is it concentrated in any particular area?
Peter Kraus
Management
I think, Cynthia, we were a bit victims of our own success. So in the ’04, ’05, ’06, ’07 time period when the equity allocations to this firm were growing quite rapidly and fixed income was a solid contributor to performance, both the client relations personnel and the clients themselves thought of us and thought about equities. And so when ’09 occurred – ’08 difficult performance, ’09, really positive performance, there needed to be an educational process, both with client facing personnel and clients themselves, and for that matter, consultants, really starting to think deeply about where is AllianceBernstein in the spectrum of fixed income managers. Now, this is a, as you know, longer game. And we think we’ve got a substantial amount of momentum in the fixed income world. And yes, I agree that it would be nice if we had the visibility today in 2007, we would have had more flow in 2009 and in late 2008, because the world is clearly shifted in that direction. But there is plenty of fixed income market out there. We are essentially [ph] a few hundred billion dollar shop. There is plenty of market share for us to grab. And I think the fact that flows have slowed down, they are still net positive in the fixed income state. And investors are still comfortable in lower risk portfolios than higher risk portfolios. Cynthia Mayer – Bank of America/Merrill Lynch: Okay, great. And I think in the last call you gave guidance on base salaries, and I’m wondering if that guidance still holds. And on the incentive comp, how should we think about that if markets improve and the top-line grows? How variable is that, say, with advisory revenues?
Peter Kraus
Management
I’ll let Bob comment on the salaries. But on incentive compensation, we will pay our people pretty much in line with the way revenues grow. I mean, that’s a total comment. Obviously the allocation of compensation to individuals is different than that. But we are looking to pay our people who we think are the best, the best.
Bob Joseph
Management
In my earlier remark, Cynthia, I mentioned that we are sort of stabilized now at a run rate of just over $100 million per quarter for base salaries. Cynthia Mayer – Bank of America/Merrill Lynch: Great. Thanks a lot.
Operator
Operator
(Operator instructions) Your next question comes from the line of Robert Lee with KBW. Robert Lee – KBW: Thanks. Good afternoon. I’m just curious – I think, Peter, in the past, you’ve – I think maybe it was you, but that characterized in the institutional channel the outflows kind of being – kind of LIFO, kind of the most recent clients have been kind of the first to leave in many cases. Is it possible to kind of update us on the characterization? Is that kind of still the case? Is it really kind of the people who are newer to the organization who are leaving, or are you starting to see more longer-term clients on the equity side of the business also redeem?
Peter Kraus
Management
Rob, I know that that question has been asked in the past. I think we’ve sort of (inaudible) avoided being specific about that because I actually don't think that we do a detailed study of it. And we don’t really have a precise answer. I think that there is no doubt that the assets grew rapidly in the latter part of ’05, ’06, and ’07. And clearly, those clients had weaker experience with us than clients that were with us for longer periods of time. And so that certainly could have a bigger impact on how people think about retaining us as an advisor – as a manager over time. Having said that, I don’t – I think that that probably doesn’t give you the story on what’s actually going on in institutional redemption.
David Steyn
Management
Maybe if I add color and sort of illustrate the difficulty of answering that question, let’s take a market like the United Kingdom, which was certainly one of our fastest growing markets and have seen significant redemptions on the institutional side. It’s very hard to say, is that because it was the most recent (inaudible) or is it because of the role of the consultants or is it because the UK more than any other market anywhere in the world is closing down its defined benefit schemes and therefore moving to liability-driven investment solutions in fixed income, or is it a bit of all of those things? That’s the difficulty of answering that question. Robert Lee – KBW: Yes.
Peter Kraus
Management
And just to add more to that point is a great example was – and how much of that is also plans taking lower risk having nothing to do with performance. As we all know that the risk trade is going in the opposite direction. That, of course, will change at some point. And there will be – it will enter into our benefit. And it refers back to the point that Cynthia made of, well, you could have benefited from that if the fixed income sort of brand awareness was more pervasive, but that’s something we are building. Robert Lee – KBW: Okay. And then – thanks. Maybe just a quick modeling follow-up question. As you shifted deferred comp I guess more towards restricted stock and away from I guess reinvesting in mutual funds or other alliance products, from a share count perspective, it’s been creeping up. Should we expect that it’s going to kind of continue to kind of creep up at the rate it’s been, or should we expect to maybe going to try to use some cash flow to kind of repurchase units and kind of keep it relatively stable? Just kind of curious what the general goal would be there.
Peter Kraus
Management
Good question. We’ve certainly considered that. And we will, in the matter of course, use some of our financial resources to repurchase shares over time. And don’t forget that for each share issued to an employee, that one-half of those shares is basically retained for access and effectively since the government doesn’t take shares and replace it with holding taxes, we have to pay them cash like everybody else. We are actually retiring that half share. Robert Lee – KBW: Okay, great. Thank you.
Operator
Operator
(Operator instructions) Your next question comes from the line of William Katz with the Buckingham Research Group. William Katz – Buckingham Research Group: Couple follow-ups. Just curious of your thoughts, Peter, particularly on M&A. I guess there has been – one of your larger competitors make a big bet on passive and one of the smaller franchises make a reasonable sizeable bet on private equity in the last couple days. I’m just really curious if you could talk a little bit about how you sort of see yourself in the industry. Is what you have good enough or are you kind of playing any way to sort of externally expand the platform?
Peter Kraus
Management
Bill, thanks for asking that question because I love answering that M&A question. William Katz – Buckingham Research Group: (inaudible) for you.
Peter Kraus
Management
Okay, thank you. Look, I continue to believe and we continue to believe that there may be will opportunities in the M&A market, but they are going to be places where we either don’t have a service or where we have a substantial consolidation opportunity. And that size is generally an inhibitor to doing a deal, because culturally it’s very hard to merge large organizations. That isn’t to say others won’t try it or do it or be successful at it, but I think we have a very strong and integrated culture and to acquire something that would effectively require us to merge into that culture is challenging. So look for us to be opportunistic where we think we can be because that can happen for sure. But it’s going to be characterized by either places where we are not or financially attractive transactions that add scale. William Katz – Buckingham Research Group: Okay. That’s helpful. And then just couple of technical follow-ups. In the fixed income this quarter, how much was that – excuse me, of that was related to the PPIP initiative? And then I asked you earlier, but you didn’t get to answer it. On the commercial real estate opportunity around the world, so where do you stand in terms of potentially downsizing some of that, which might add a little opportunity on G&A I guess?
Peter Kraus
Management
Yes, you did ask that question, and no, we didn’t answer it because we moved on to something else. That is the commercial real estate. So – PPIP, I think, was $1.64 billion if I remember the number properly. And I think that was raised in between the third quarter and the fourth quarter. So I don’t know exactly where it splits out. So that’s answer to question number one. Answer to question number two is, yes, we have some space. We’ve continually reviewed those opportunities, and we will continue to do that. And we will make economically rational decisions with regard to this phase.
David Steyn
Management
: William Katz – Buckingham Research Group: Sorry, the fourth quarter?
David Steyn
Management
All three were fourth quarter; one October and two in December. William Katz – Buckingham Research Group: Perfect. Thanks so much for taking all my questions.
Operator
Operator
At this time, there are no further questions in queue.