Anthony Scaglione
Analyst · C.L. King. Your line is now open
Thanks Scott, and good morning, everyone. Before I delve into the results for the quarter, I’d like to give some additional details surrounding the divestiture of our Government business. As we saw on our earnings release, we close the sale of Government Services on May 31 for pretax cash proceeds of $35.5 million. The proceeds from this transaction will be used to pay down debt. The results we are discussing today include the impact of our Government operations for the second quarter as it did for the first quarter of this fiscal year. Please note the second quarter results for Government include the recovery of $17.4 million of previously impaired assets. As we move through the rest of the fiscal year, our topline results will reflect one more month of Government operation. In addition, our GAAP results may continue to reflect the impact associated with our retention of certain assets and liabilities. We expect this to occur for the next 12 months to 18 months. Now turning to our second quarter results from continuing operations, which are described in our earnings presentation. Total revenues for the quarter were $1.3 billion, up 4.2% versus last year driven by organic growth of 3.6% or 4.4% excluding FX. Acquisitions added approximately $9 million of incremental revenues during the quarter, which are reflected in our Aviation and Technical Solutions segment. Organic revenue growth was primarily driven by Aviation, Technical Solutions and are now sold Government Services segment. Our income from continuing operation was $31.6 million or $0.56 per diluted share versus $6.8 million or $0.12 per diluted share last year. On an adjusted basis, our income from continuing operations was $27.8 million or $0.49 per diluted share versus $17.7 million or $0.31 per diluted share. The year-over-year increase in the EPS was primarily due to two less working days during the quarter, higher revenue contribution and the impact of 2020 Vision or saving and procurement initiative. During the quarter, we delivered adjusted EBITDA of $60.5 million, an increase of 31.3% versus last year and adjusted EBITDA margin of 4.6% compared to 3.7% last year. Turning to Slide 6 of today’s presentation, I’ll now discuss our operating segment performance. As a reminder, these operating results reflect two less working days, which predominantly impacted – and the impact of our 2020 Vision initiatives. For B&I, revenues increased to $733 million versus last year primarily driven by organic growth stemming from expansion of jobs with existing clients. Operating profit for the quarter was $41 million, leading to operating margins of 5.6%, which in addition to two less working days during the quarter also benefited from cost control measures stemming from our 2020 Vision initiative. As referenced earlier, Aviation continued to see strong topline growth with revenue increasing 14.4% to $232 million. Domestically growth stem from expansion of our passenger services, cabin cleaning, parking and transportation services. Internationally, we saw new business growth in our UK operation. However, we were disappointed with our domestic aviation operating profit, which impacted the segment. Our overall operating profit was $7.6 million, which led to a blended margin of 3.3%. These results demonstrate the occasional bumps we face from running a complex and dynamic business. The institution of operational changes that Scott discussed earlier will benefit areas like Aviation, where we'll have a greater opportunity to normalize new win startup and expansion through the eventual implementation of standard operating practices. While we firmly believe the Aviation segment will yield rewarding results, it will take time to drive improvement as we continue our rollout. Moving on to emerging industries, we saw revenues of $192 million, which covered our Healthcare, Education, and High-Tech businesses. The decrease versus last year was primarily attributable to the loss of a high-tech janitorial contract in certain education facilities service contracts some of which we alluded to last quarter. Operating profit for the quarter was $12 million for a margin rate of 6.3%. So loss of the aforementioned contracts impacted the segment negatively. As both Scott and I discussed in detail last quarter, the Emerging Industry segment is composed of a highly concentrated portfolio of customers, which could lead to short-term volatility when we experienced losses or additions to contract. Having said that, we continue to target growth in this segment as we’ve – now we aligned our teams and management focuses on growing these industry groups over the long-term, we see tremendous whitespace for each of these industries. Moving to Technical Solutions, this segment recorded $110.8 million in revenue for the second quarter, growing approximately 10% versus last year with operating margins of 9.6%. Higher project revenues in addition to $3 million incremental revenue from acquisitions drove this performance. Speaking of Technical Solutions, I too would like to congratulate both Scott Giacobbe, on his appointment as our new Chief Operating Officer and Jim McClure, on his announced retirement following a long inspiring career. These next few months will be better suite for many of us as we wish Jim well, but also an exciting time as we work with Scott Giacobbe to scale his talent to the entire enterprise. Now turning to liquidity. We ended the quarter with total debt, including standby letters of credit of roughly $407 million and our total debt to pro forma adjusted EBITDA was approximately two times. Before I discuss our capital allocation activity during the quarter, I wanted to provide an update on the Augusta settlement, which we announced last quarter. In April, the Superior Court granted preliminary approval of the settlement, and we are currently anticipated final approval hearing by the end of June. Due to the impending settlement, we continue to reevaluate the timing of share repurchase. As such, we did not repurchase during the quarter and do not anticipate additional repurchases for the remainder of the year. During the quarter, we paid a quarterly cash divided of $0.17 per common share for a total distribution of approximately $9.5 million. And as stated in our release, I am pleased to announce the Board has approved ABM’s 205 consecutive dividend of $0.17 per share. Now turning to our guidance outlook. We now expect GAAP income from continuing operations to be in the range of $1.63 to $1.73, which is primarily driven by the impairment recovery related to our Government sale. In addition, we are raising guidance due to better than expected overhead expenses and the recognition of tax benefits related to tax incentivize, energy-efficient project in our Technical Solutions also referred to as 179B credits. On an adjusted basis, we are raising our guidance outlook to $1.85 to $1.95 per diluted share compared to our previous range of $1.80 to $1.90. As a reminder, our full-year adjusted EPS outlook did not anticipate a significant contribution from our Government operation. In addition to the revision, we made to our overall full-year outlook we are taking the opportunity to revise our Industry Group operating margin guidance to reflect our performance for the first half of the fiscal year and our outlook for the next six months. As you recall, we provided operating margin guidance at the end of last year to help you assess our business given all of the current year and prior year remapping that has taken place within our reorganization. Based on the year-to-date results of Aviation and Technical Solutions, which I discussed earlier, we are revising our expectations for these specific segments for the full-year. Overall, we are pleased with our results for the first half of fiscal 2017. As Scott discussed, we've embarked on the most critical phase of our 2020 Vision and we are more in line on our path to EBITDA margin improvement and how we will achieve those goals. Now that we are structured to focus on the needs of each customer, we have come to understand that priorities vary by customer. We have begun to – and we have tailored our solutions based on metrics and qualitative input. Through the institution of standard operating practices, we’ve recently launched an account planning process, which involved customer segmentation based on attributes related to revenue, margin and growth potential. There is no longer a one size fits all approach our business and we are beginning to put in place plans to prioritize retention, expansion and accounts that need quick fixes for underperforming. This isn't going to be linear or quick and easy, but we are establishing the foundational processes through standard procedures for near and long-term margin expansion. We are becoming more sophisticated on ways to drive long-term profitable growth. I am also acutely focused on empowering our teams with the tools and resources they need to execute. As you recall, when we first established our new structure last year, we benefited from timing related to investments in IT and HR because we were taking the necessary time to evaluate our investments to be sure our decisions were right for the newly realigned business. 2017 mark the year when we began to move steadily from the evaluation phase to the project base, which starts ramping up as we progress through the year. As such, we are revising our CapEx outlook for the full-year to a range of $50 million to $60 million compared to our original expectation of $60 million to $70 million. Taking a more prudent approach to how we look at our business has led to some exciting and promising decision. As we announced last quarter, we have kicked off the project with sales force, develop a customized solution involving software and applications to accelerate sales, monitor our pipeline, and manage our customer engagement. Moving through this year and into next year, we'll continue to focus on evaluating the evolution of our IT infrastructure and organization as we look further into opportunities with cloud-based solutions, such as Anaplan for planning, Human Capital Management for HR and other Software-as-a-Service among our IT initiative. As a result, our approach to building technology in-house will only be for instances where we cannot leverage a best-in-breed software package or where customization drive differentiation. So as you can see, we have a lot of work ahead of us that relies on partnerships across IT, Finance, HR, Risk and Safety, as well as operations throughout Phase II. So we are confident that all of our execution and implementation over the next 12 months to 18 months will ultimately unlock the true potential of our margin improvement and have the most powerful impact on our overall long-term success. I'm so proud of the partnerships I've seen across the organization and we remain committed to sharing our findings with you at each juncture and providing more insights as they become available, just as we've done over the past two years. Operator, we are now ready for questions.