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ADT Inc. (ADT)

Q3 2015 Earnings Call· Wed, Jul 29, 2015

$7.18

-0.55%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the ADT Corp. Q3 2015 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will follow at that time. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Tim Perrott, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Timothy J. Perrott - Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Thank you, Candice, and good morning to everyone and thank you for joining us for our call to discuss ADT's third quarter results for fiscal year 2015. With me on the call today are Naren Gursahaney, ADT's CEO and Mike Geltzeiler, ADT's CFO. Let me begin by reminding everyone that the discussion today contains certain forward-looking statements about the company's future performance, which are subject to the risks and uncertainties and speak only as of today. Factors that could cause actual results to differ from these forward-looking statements are set forth within today's earnings release, which we expect to furnish to the SEC in an 8-K report, and in our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2015, which we expect to file with the SEC later today. I once again, we wanted to apologize that our third quarter earnings release was posted later than usual due to factors that were beyond our control as the wire service had an outage that was causing the delay. In our third-quarter 2015 earnings release and slides which are now posted on our website at adt.com as well as on our Investor Relations app we have provided a reconciliation of the company's non-GAAP financial measures to GAAP. We urge you to review that information in conjunction with today's discussion. For those of you following on the webcast, we will be using this slide deck to supplement our commentary this morning. Please note that unless otherwise mentioned, references to our operating results exclude special items and these metrics are non-GAAP measures. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Naren. Naren? Naren K. Gursahaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thanks Tim and good morning everyone. Thank you for joining our call today. I hope you had a chance to…

Operator

Operator

And our first question comes from Charles Clarke of Credit Suisse. Your line is now open. Charles R. Clarke - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC (Broker): Hey, guys. Naren K. Gursahaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Hi Charlie. Charles R. Clarke - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC (Broker): Just again, just didn't know if you could talk about just net adds and whether or not we are going to start to see the change kind of early next year just kind of – as a goal for the year? And whether or not you think it's going to come more from the disconnect side or from the additions side? And whether or not just a bigger addressable market for you guys is really going to be the major source of new gross adds or whether or not that's going to come in the core business? Naren K. Gursahaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Charlie, I will echo some things Mike talked about it in our Investor Day. Because of the normal seasonality in this business with a higher number of disconnects in the back half of the year tied to the summer relocation, the first half of the year is generally better than the second half of the year on an actual basis, so clearly we are going to be – we're committed to being net add positive in 2016. You would expect us to stay favorable in the first half of the year and then kind of be able to offset or mitigate the impact of relocations in the back half of the year. Mike I don't know, if there's anything you want to add? Michael S. Geltzeiler - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: No, I think you said it perfectly. I mean…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from Ian Zaffino of Oppenheimer. Your line is now open. Ian A. Zaffino - Oppenheimer & Co., Inc. (Broker): Hi, great. Thank you. Trying to understand and I guess reconcile the comments that you made about the DIY system. The DIY system you're talking about in the press release is what you talked about in the slides as it relates to this LG kind of all-in-one camera? Is that correct? Because I have a follow-up to that? Naren K. Gursahaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yes, that is the product that we are referring to. Ian A. Zaffino - Oppenheimer & Co., Inc. (Broker): Okay. So now is there going to be I guess a true DIY product in your offering coming up anytime soon? How do you feel about that area? Because I know you have mentioned it before but we haven't really heard an update there and just curious where your guys heads are as it relates to like a fully robust self-installed home security system? Naren K. Gursahaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Ian I guess I'll refer to the Total Security Panel that we've talked about in our residential business which is an all wireless solution that significantly reduces the installation time and effort. As I mentioned we're rolling that out for our Pulse automation customers in our residential business, and then we will look to do that similarly on our dealer channel. I think what we have to get comfortable with and candidly the industry has to get comfortable with this is do customers really want to and are they comfortable installing a complex security system in their home? I think the DIY product we've been talking about is a plug-and-play really no installation or limited installation required. But again, we're continuing to look at ways to reduce our SAC creation multiple and one of the possibilities is more of a DIY type of solution for our traditional residential business. Ian A. Zaffino - Oppenheimer & Co., Inc. (Broker): Okay. Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from Jason Bazinet of Citi. Your line is now open.

Jason Boisvert Bazinet - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst

Thanks. I just had two questions. On slide 15, when you guys were going through the free cash flow, year-to-date you mentioned that it was essentially sort of on top of the full-year number that you gave at the Analyst Day of $240 million to $250 million. Is the inference that you're sort of anticipating not generating cash flow in the fourth quarter? Or is it more apt that you exceed that baseline? And if you do exceed the baseline does it change the base case CAGRs? Does it lower them in other words? Should people expect lower free cash if the base in 2015 is higher than what you said at the Analyst Day? Michael S. Geltzeiler - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Jason I can't thank you enough for asking that clarifying question. That was not our intention. So I think basically what we're saying is clearly we expect to generate cash flow in the fourth quarter. So we're just indicating that the cash flow was pretty strong this quarter and that we are with the $99 million that we did report, we happen to be above that baseline, so you can probably take it as – I don't want to add another forward-looking projection, but we're very confident of doing that – exceed those estimates we did. I think once you get that baseline, all the assumptions really build off that baseline. So I don't want to continue to update that model. I think there was a scenario that – when we report the full-year results, we will give appropriate guidance for 2016.

Jason Boisvert Bazinet - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. Michael S. Geltzeiler - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Suffice to say that there is definitely more cash in this business and I think as we continue to report higher cash flows from our existing customer base, offset by investments we make in new customer additions. I think what it really shows you is that was a model and a scenario. We took everything in that number as being a very concrete three year projection where I think – I'd like to believe that our intentions are do better than what we projected at the Investor Day and that was just really a sensitivity analysis kind of scenario.

Jason Boisvert Bazinet - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. And maybe a simpler question, the 1.4 million Pulse customers that you announced at the third quarter, is that as of June 30 or is that as of today? Naren K. Gursahaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: That is as of today.

Jason Boisvert Bazinet - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. All right, thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from Jeff Kessler of Imperial Capital. Your line is now open.

Jeffrey T. Kessler - Imperial Capital LLC

Analyst

Thank you. My first question is in conjunction with your page seven on the investor slides. Given the rise in DIY and a lot of the point product systems, we're getting a lot of feedback from police that and in towns that basically false alarms are going up because these customers don't know how to use them that well. And the question is, is what are you doing number one, to invest in your monitoring, the quality of your monitoring stations to differentiate yourself from other players in the industry to make sure that there's a higher trust factor between you and the police or the responders whether it would be healthcare or police and your competitors, whether they'd be your competitors in the alarm industry or your competitors that are coming in from telcos or from DIY? Naren K. Gursahaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yes, Jeff, we can probably spend a day on that topic. Our teams are [Technical Difficulty] (43:44-43:53)

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen please standby, your conference call will resume in just a moment. Your conference call will resume momentarily. Speakers, you may resume. Naren K. Gursahaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Okay. Jeff, are you here?

Jeffrey T. Kessler - Imperial Capital LLC

Analyst

Yes I'm here. Naren K. Gursahaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Sorry about that Jeff, we are not doing well with technology this morning. We've got a lot of initiatives underway in our monitoring centers. I will highlight a couple of them. First of all, we maintain very good local relationships with the local AHJs and we are working very closely with them. I'll highlight one. If you look at our Pulse Solution, you actually will get a notification on your cellphone or mobile device or via email even before the signal would go to our monitoring center because of the required delays in the panel. That gives the customer the opportunity to cancel an alarm if it's a false alarm and really gives us that chance to reduce those false alarms by having the customer know earlier that an alarm event was in their home and in some cases they can even look in on cameras. So that's one particular example. We continue to work through the call list and we're looking at multiple technologies for example a motion detector plus a glass break or a door and window contact breach to verify that it is a true – if it is a true alarm event. But again there's a lot of initiatives going on both technology related and process related.

Jeffrey T. Kessler - Imperial Capital LLC

Analyst

Okay. Second question is related directly to page seven, and that is keeping the customer for another couple of years and adding to the IRR is obviously what this business is all about, and what are you doing? Can you go through not point-by-point but give an idea of what you're doing maybe different or better or for that matter where you have to catch-up in the customer care and customer experience area and who you think you may have a leg up against competition that's coming in new without that experience? Naren K. Gursahaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Well, again, this is another area where there's a lot of initiatives in place and I think the success of those initiatives is reflected in the attrition performance we've got. We've demonstrated over – particularly over the past five quarters. Again, when I look at us compared to what we see in the industry, we have more than caught the pack and in some cases are leading the pack, but we are still not happy with where we are. Again I will give you couple examples; we are doing a lot more with data analytics than we've ever done before to identify potential at-risk customers, proactively reaching out to those customers where it's appropriate or at least routing those calls to more experienced representatives in our customer care organization that are capable of dealing potentially with more complex issues. As Mike and I both mentioned in our comments, we've continued to make investments in our service infrastructure to reduce the meantime to repair as well as meantime to install and through our customer survey activity, we have seen steady improvements in that initial install customer satisfaction as well as the anniversary survey. So again, there is no one silver bullet in this one. This is lots of work on the ground and Mike just commented, a big part of that is changing the culture of the organization. We've had a historically a sales gross add driven culture and over the last three years, we have really been working to change that culture and get everybody focused on customer retention in addition to gross adds not in lieu of.

Jeffrey T. Kessler - Imperial Capital LLC

Analyst

Final quick question. Canada, there wasn't that much talked about in Canada on Investor Day. I realize that Canada is a big deal because both Protectron and ADT Canada did not have high levels of Pulse take rates up there, what you have got to do it right to get Canada integrated. Can you give us some update on how things are going up in Canada as far as integrating that business into the rest of your ecosystem? Naren K. Gursahaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, again I think we've made great progress there. I think I talked a little bit of this Investor Day. Where we've got a new leadership team there brought in a President of the business from outside, got a great new strong CFO there, we put in a strong marketing leader. We took one of our top talent from the U.S. to be the sales leader up there leading the direct and indirect channel. We've got the IT leader came out of the Protectron business as well as some of the key customer care people who are both from the Protectron and ADT side. So I think we've got a very, very strong leadership team up there that's making a lot of progress now on the integration of the two businesses there. Now operating as a single management team leading the combined business and candidly, we don't talk much about Protectron versus ADT. We talk about the one ADT Canada business. I think we're starting to see the synergies come through and I think in FY2016 you'll see more of that. Mike you want to add? Michael S. Geltzeiler - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah, I mean the synergy targets are certainly on track. As we've indicated we are a little delayed because we want to get the master team in place. The IT integration strategy is being laid out, is being executed now which would drive a lot of synergies. Some of the offices are being consolidated. So, we're very excited now. I think we have the right team, the right vision. And to your earlier point about take rates, Protectron's take rates we have on one of the slides is 49% interactive. Okay, albeit it's (50:22) .com services but there're selling interactive services and it's at a higher level than they were selling before. ADT continues to move-up the take rate as well in Canada. So, you absolutely right, selling more Pulse, selling more interactive systems in Canada is another opportunity. I think with the unified sales approach we will see that.

Jeffrey T. Kessler - Imperial Capital LLC

Analyst

Okay. Thank you very much. Naren K. Gursahaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Great, Jeff. Thanks. And Candice, thanks we are at the bottom of the hour. We are going to end the call. Thanks to everyone for joining the call and we'll speak to you soon. Thank you.