Jan Siegmund
Analyst · First Analysis
Thank you, Carlos. ADP reported 7% revenue growth for the quarter, which was nearly all organic. Focusing on continuing operations, we achieved 6% growth in both pretax and net earnings and 7% earnings per share growth on fewer shares outstanding compared with 1 year ago. The quarter's results were as anticipated, and each of our business segments performing well. Employer Services grew total revenue 6%, PEO grew 15%, and Dealer grew 7%. In Employer Services, overall growth was good across-the-board. I do want to remind you that we anticipate a slower revenue growth in Employer Services as we entered into the second half of fiscal year, of this fiscal year, as a result of lower revenues from our tax credit services business that helps our clients receive certain employment-related tax credits. These revenues were lower than 1 year ago because a program that began in last year's third fiscal quarter has expired and has not been reviewed yet. As many of you know, our third fiscal quarter is an important retention period in our business, and I'm pleased that Employer Services' worldwide client revenue retention increased 80 basis points, bringing us to a 10 basis points improvement on a year-to-date basis on top of historically high retention rates. We are pleased to see continued strength in our same-store pays per control with Employer Services in the U.S., with an increase of 2.8%. However, in Europe, same-store pays per control declined 0.6% as anticipated. Although the decline has lessened throughout the fiscal year, the economy across Europe is still mixed. Average client fund balances were stronger than anticipated during the quarter, increasing 9%. Lower state unemployment tax rates were offset by increases from wage growth, including bonus payments by our clients; standalone tax filing; new business growth, especially in the small and mid-sized markets; as well as pays per control. The PEO had a strong quarter with 15% revenue growth, driven by 18% average worksite employee growth and strong revenue retention. Moving on to Dealer Services. Revenue growth was 7%, driven by new business installed and digital advertising revenues. Margin improvement benefited from nonrecurring items. I would now like to take you through a few of the items that negatively impacted ADP's earnings growth and margin expansion in the quarter. The decrease in high-margin revenues I spoke about a moment ago relating to certain employment tax credit programs we administer for our clients -- for our Employer Services clients, also created a year-over-year margin pressures. New bookings expense increased as anticipated from the strong bookings growth in the quarter. High-margin client fund interest revenues declined more than we anticipated due to lower interest rates, and the 10% increase in systems development and programming expense was higher than revenue growth and in line with our expectation. This increase is a result of our continued focus on innovation. Carlos gave some examples of these innovations in his opening remarks. And before we leave the discussion on the quarter's results, I want to point out that the decline in client interest revenues resulting from low-interest rates continues to be the most significant drag on ADP's result. ADP's revenue growth was muted almost 0.5 percentage points as the lower yields more than offset the benefit from the 9% growth in balances. Pretax margin was negatively impacted 60 basis points, and diluted earnings per share was lower by almost $0.02, or 2 percentage points, for the quarter Excluding this impact, it is evident that the leverage in ADP's business model is strong and intact. Now I will give you our updated full year forecast, which excludes any onetime expenses in connection with the Dealer Services spinoff and the results of discontinued operations as shown in this morning's press release. We are now anticipating revenue growth of about 8% for total ADP. We continue to anticipate slight pretax margin improvement for total ADP from 18.8% last year, which excludes the goodwill impairment charge recorded in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2013. We expect the effective tax rate will be about flat with fiscal year 2013's effective tax rate of 33.9%. We anticipate about 9% growth in diluted earnings per share from continuing operations compared with the $2.88 in fiscal year 2013, which excluded the goodwill impairment charge reported in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2013. As it is our normal practice, no further share buybacks are contemplated in the forecast beyond anticipated dilution related to employee equity comp plans, though it is clearly our intent to continue to return excess cash to our shareholders, depending on market conditions. And for all segments, in Employer Services, we continue to forecast revenue growth of about 7%, with pretax margin expansion of about 100 basis points. Consistent with our prior forecast, we are still anticipating an increase in our pays per control metric in the U.S. between 2% and 3%. For PEO Services, we are now forecasting about 14% revenue growth with slight pretax margin expansion. We continue to forecast about 8% growth in the dollar value of ES and PEO worldwide new business bookings from the $1.35 billion sold in fiscal year 2013. And for Dealer Services, we continue to forecast about 8% revenue growth with about 100 basis points of pretax margin expansion. We have narrowed our forecast for the client funds investment strategy, and the detail is available both in the press release and in the supplemental slides on our website, but I will provide the highlights. We anticipate client fund balances for fiscal year 2014 will be about $20.7 billion, which was -- represents about 8% growth. We anticipate a yield on the client funds portfolio of about 1.8%, down about 40 basis points from fiscal year 2013. We anticipate a year-over-year decline in client funds interest of $45 million to $50 million, and a decline of $55 million to $60 million for the total impact of the client funds investment strategy. And now, we also wanted to take a few minutes on the call today to talk with you about the expected impact of our client funds investment strategy on fiscal year 2015. Keeping in mind that we are still in our operating plan cycle and that these numbers are preliminary, our expectation is that the impact of the strategy to earnings will be about flat through fiscal year 2014, that is, these are adding to or subtracting from earnings. Let me walk you through the slide to provide a way for you to think about this for the purposes of your model. The chart on the left side of the slide should be familiar to most of you. Here, we show the detail of our client funds available for sale portfolios as of March 31, 2014, including the balances and the embedded interest yields for the remainder of fiscal year '14 and beyond. We included full year fiscal year '14 on this chart to give you some perspective on the rate pressure we continued to experience this year with an average embedded yield of 4% for the maturing balances compared with this year's average reinvestment rate of about 1.8%. For fiscal year 2015, based on current yield curves, we anticipate an average reinvestment rate of about 1.9%, which is still below the embedded rate of 2.7% for the securities that will mature during this fiscal year. This delta between the rates is not as wide as we have experienced over the past several years, and we believe that balance growth will help offset the rate pressure that we anticipate for fiscal year 2015. For illustrative purposes, because our forecasts for next year are not yet completed, we are assuming an increase in average client fund balances of about 5%, which at this point, in our operating plan process, is reasonable. We therefore, anticipate that the overall year-over-year impact in fiscal year 2015 from the client funds investment strategy will be about flat compared to the $55 million to $60 million drag we expect to experience this year. And remember, the interest earned in our investment portfolio flows into 2 separate lines of the earnings statement. The chart on the left represents ADP's client funds available for sale portfolio. The interest we earn on these portfolios is recorded as revenues on our earnings statement as interest on funds held for clients. With the exception of the interest earned from the extended portfolio on borrowing days, which is recorded as a portion of interest income on corporate funds within other income net. This is illustrated on the right-hand side of the slide. I hope this slide helps to make the point that both revenues and other income net are impacted by the client fund investment strategy for your modeling. And before we take your questions, I want to state that although our share repurchases in the quarter were less then you may have anticipated, ADP remains committed to returning cash to shareholders. We repurchased 0.5 million ADP shares in the quarter for a total cost of $42 million because we did not repurchase shares for a period of time prior to the announcement of the Dealer Services spinoff. Our commitment to return excess cash to shareholders has not lessened as a result of the spinoff. And I now turn it over to the operator to take your questions.