Operator
Operator
Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Armstrong World Industries Incorporated Q3 2015 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will host a question-and-answer session and instructions will follow at that time. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Tom Waters, Vice President, Treasury and Investor Relations. Sir, you may begin. Thomas J. Waters - Vice President-Treasury & Investor Relations: Thanks, Trisha. Good morning and welcome. Please note that members of the media have been invited to listen to this call and the call is being broadcast live on our website at armstrong.com. With me today are Matt Espe, our President and CEO; Dave Schulz, our CFO; Don Maier, CEO of our Worldwide Floor Businesses; and Vic Grizzle, CEO of our Worldwide Ceilings Business. Hopefully, you have seen our press release this morning and both the release and the presentation Dave Schulz will reference during this call are posted on our website in the Investor Relations section. I advise you that during this call we will be making forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual outcomes may differ materially from those expected or implied. For a more detailed discussion of the risks and uncertainties that may affect Armstrong, please review our SEC filings, including the 10-Q filed this morning. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made, and we undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statement beyond what is required by applicable securities law. In addition, our discussion of operating performance will include non-GAAP financial measures within the meaning of SEC Regulation G. A reconciliation of these measures with the most directly comparable GAAP measures is included in the press release and in the appendix of the presentation. Both are available on our website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Matt. Matthew J. Espe - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thanks, Tom. Good morning, everyone. On our call today, I'll provide an overview of our quarterly and year-to-date results and update our guidance. I'll also discuss our initial Form-10 filing for the flooring business, and then Dave will give you a detailed discussion of our results and help bridge the financial information in the Form-10 through our historical segment results. For the third quarter, reported sales of $659 million are down $20 million or 3% from the prior year. The decline is entirely due to foreign exchange movements. On a comparable dollar basis, sales are actually up just over 1%. On this basis, all geographies grew sales, adjusted EBITDA of $128 million is up $6 million from the prior year. And note in the quarter, our North American ceilings business delivered record bottom line results with EBITDA of over $100 million for the first time ever. Price over inflation, productivity and mix improvements continue to drive the bottom line in the Americas. This is the second consecutive record third quarter earnings results for the Americas ceilings team to continue to raise the bar. Year-to-date reported sales of $1.843 billion are down $85 million or 4% from the first nine months of 2014. Again, foreign exchange had a significant impact. On a comparable foreign exchange basis, sales are down less than 1% year-to-date. The sales decline is attributable to the wood segment and ceilings in Europe. All other segments and geographies have higher year-to-date sales on a comparable exchange basis. Adjusted EBITDA for the first nine months of 2015 of $315 million is up $6 million versus last year, driven by the improved profitability of the third quarter. Sales for the quarter were slightly below our expectations due to engineered wood product availability here in North America, and softness in the China office sector impacting our ceilings business. We anticipate these trends will continue into the fourth quarter. Overall, North American ceilings sales were more or less where we expected. Volume was up in the U.S. but Canadian volume was down leading to a less than 1% decline versus last year. This represents a sequential improvement from the first half. Elsewhere sales of ceilings in India, VCT in the Americas and Architectural Specialties globally continued to be bright spots. EBITDA performance in the quarter was better than we expected due to realized and anticipated lumber cost declines. Dave will get into this in more detail, as he discusses the wood results. Based on third quarter results and our outlook for the fourth quarter, we are trimming the top end of our sales guidance range by $50 million, but we're raising the midpoint of our earnings guidance by $10 million. Now, with regards to the separation process, we passed a significant milestone in the quarter when we filed our initial draft of the Armstrong Flooring, Inc. Form 10 on October 8. This filing intentionally contain several sections that are incomplete at this time, things like the effect of data separation, capital structure, dividend policy, full listing of management and boards of directors and others. Now, this is typical for an initial submission, as we continue to make decisions regarding these topics, they'll be reflected in subsequent amended filings. This filing also summarizes several key agreements that will define how the separation transaction will be concluded. AWI and AFI will enter into and finalize these agreements prior to separation. The Form 10 also presents the flooring business's historical financial results on a carve-out basis. And Dave will explain how this was done and what it means. So with that, let me turn the call over to Dave. David S. Schulz - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Thanks, Matt, and good morning to everyone on the call. In reviewing our third quarter results, I'll be referring to the slides available on our website, starting with slide 4, key metrics. As Tom Waters already covered slide 2 and slide 3 is an explanation of our standard basis of presentation. Sales in the quarter of $679 million are up 1% versus 2014 on a comparable foreign exchange basis. Operating income and EBITDA are both up 5%. EPS is lower due to a $14 million non-cash charge related to the revaluation of the intercompany loans we have in place to fund our Russian and Chinese investments, which negatively impacted EPS versus the prior year by $0.12. As the ruble and to a lesser extent the RMB devalued, we had to write down the U.S. dollar carrying value of these loans. In the quarter, our free cash flow was up slightly from 2014. Net debt was down $138 million, driven by our cash generation over the past year. Return on invested capital was down due to a lower as reported profitability in the trailing 12 months, including the higher non-cash pension expense and separation costs. Slide 5 details the adjustments we made to EBITDA and provides a reconciliation to our reported net income of $30 million in the quarter. As with prior quarters, we exclude the impact of our non-cash U.S. pension expense of $6 million and costs associated with the flooring separation process of $7 million from our adjusted numbers. The $6 million cost reduction charge in 2014 was largely related to expenses associated with exiting our Kunshan, China engineered wood facility, and Thomastown, Australia vinyl tile plant. The interest/other line is the result of the non-cash intercompany foreign exchange loss that I just mentioned. The third quarter tax expense was similar to 2014. Moving to slide 6, this illustrates our sales and adjusted EBITDA by segment for the quarter. I'll talk through the businesses on the next few slides, but want to note here that corporate segment expenses were up in the quarter, driven by the timing of IT spend, but are down on a year-to-date basis. Slide 7 provides additional color on the Building Products segment results. Ceiling sales were up 2% on an equivalent foreign exchange basis, with price and mix gains in all geographies offsetting volume declines. Sales in emerging markets were down year-over-year, led by declines in China and Russia. Sales to India continue to very strong versus the prior year. As Matt mentioned, North American commercial sales improved sequentially from the first half of the year, despite continuing weakness in the healthcare vertical as well as constrained repair and remodel activity across most end markets. Regionally, the Northeast and Northwest were down, as the Northwest is facing a tough comparison. The South Central and West Central regions showed strong growth versus the prior year quarter. Building Products EBITDA was up $6 million in the quarter. Price gains offset volume declines and transactional foreign exchange headwinds. The record performance in the Americas that Matt mentioned drove the improvement as profitability in Europe and the Pacific Rim was essentially flat with 2014. Americas EBITDA margins in the quarter expanded more than 100 basis points versus the prior year as the impact of lower volume was more than offset by the benefits of price, mix, productivity and slightly lower energy costs. Slide 8 illustrates our Resilient segment results. Excluding the impact of foreign exchange, Resilient Flooring sales are up 3% as gains in North American VCT and the Pacific Rim offset continued weakness in residential products. Price and mix are down as we reduced prices to stem the residential share losses in 2014. Additionally, mix was negatively impacted as VCT volumes were up disproportionately versus higher price products. Resilient profitability was down $1 million. Increased spending on displays and other selling tools, as well as costs associated with the start-up of the LVT plant offset VCT sales increases and lower raw material costs in the quarter. Page 9 lays out our wood segment results. Wood sales are down $5 million as price and volume declines more than offset continued mix gains. Volume gains in solid wood were more than offset by declines in engineered wood due to continued capacity issues we are working through at our Somerset engineered wood facility. Progress is being made, but it will be 2016 before we restore engineered wood to our desired service levels. Wood adjusted EBITDA was up $5 million as a result of lower input costs. Note that the benefit of lower lumber costs far exceeds the year-over-year impact of pricing. Recall, we initiated several pricing actions in the second half of 2014 to be competitive with other industry leaders across multiple channels. With lumber prices declining in 2015, we continue to monitor our position relative to competition and evaluate it within the context of our strategy to drive profitable volume and improved mix across our portfolio. Additionally, given the high inventory levels required in the solid wood business, LIFO tends to accelerate the impact of both rising and falling lumber prices and this year, we are benefiting from significantly lower lumber costs. We anticipate this will continue in the fourth quarter, but not likely in 2016. Slide 10 shows the building blocks of adjusted EBITDA for the consolidated company from the third quarter of 2014 to our current results. As mentioned, we benefited from lower input costs, primarily in the flooring segments. Price and mix were down with lower selling prices in our residential flooring businesses, offsetting mix gains in the wood segment, and price improvements in the ceilings business. Manufacturing costs were slightly higher as a result of our challenges at Somerset, the LVT plant startup, and the expansion of operations at our Vicksburg, Mississippi engineered wood facility. The SG&A increases are primarily the continuation of our investments in the flooring business. Turning now to slide 11, you can see our free cash flow for the quarter versus last year. Working capital improvements and reduced capital spending offset lower cash earnings and other timing items. As we have mentioned in the past, quarterly cash flow can be volatile, but unusual items tend to even out over time, and as you will see in a few slides, our year-to-date other cash items are minor. Slides 12 and 13 depict our key metrics and our sales and adjusted EBITDA by segment for the first nine months of 2015. These slides are self explanatory, so I'll move on to our year-to-date bridge on slide 14. As you can see for the year, adjusted EBITDA is up $6 million. Input costs continue to provide significant tailwinds, and selling prices have only dropped modestly. We continue to see lower volumes year-on-year, primarily in wood and ceilings in Europe and the Americas. Lower volumes year-to-date in the America ceilings business are reflective of our results for the first six months of the year. The $21 million increase in SG&A is largely driven by our residential flooring investments. Slide 15 shows year-to-date cash flow versus the prior year. Working capital improvements and the significant decline in capital spending more than offset the drop in earnings. Slide 16 shows our guidance for 2015. As Matt mentioned, we have reduced the top end of our sales outlook for the year by $50 million, due to foreign exchange and engineered wood volumes. The ranges for operating income, EBITDA, and EPS have all been raised and tightened from previous guidance, largely due to lumber costs. Slide 17 provides more details on our outlook for the year and you can see that we have reduced sales in both businesses at the top end. The earnings range for ceilings was reduced slightly at the top end, while the flooring earnings range was raised. Corporate expenses and cash taxes are unchanged from prior guidance, while the capital spending and transaction cost ranges have been narrowed. Lastly, I want to spend a minute on the financial results for Armstrong Flooring Incorporated represented in the Form 10 that was filed earlier this month. We utilized certain allocation methods to assign a portion of the expenses, historically reported in the corporate unallocated segment to the Resilient and Wood Flooring businesses. These allocations were largely derived by head count, sales, or other relevant operational metrics by function. Slide 18 bridges 2014 adjusted EBITDA that we reported last year to the Form 10 as reported operating income for 2014. You can see the impact of the corporate allocations and other items. While these assumptions are appropriate for the Form 10 financials. They are not necessarily good indicators of the future cost of the businesses. We will provide an outlook for 2016 expectations for AWI and AFI prior to the separation. The other adjustments reflect differences, largely driven by lower materiality threshold being applied to the $1.2 billion floor company, versus the $2.5 billion consolidated Armstrong. Other assumptions made in creating this view of historical results involve allocating a portion of the Armstrong U.S. pension plan expense to AFI. As noted in the Form 10, we anticipate allocating a smaller pension liability to AFI upon separation and historically represented in the Form 10 financials. The flooring company has also assumed to hold no cash, rendering the cash flow statement something of an intellectual exercise and not necessarily an indication of historical cash generation or usage. With that, I'll turn it back over to Matt. Matthew J. Espe - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thanks, Dave. Finally, I want to talk about a couple of items of note on our flooring investments and product development. Last quarter, I mentioned that we placed 2,500 of a planned 5,000 displays with our retail partners. Through September, we placed more than 4,000 displays and the remaining units will be deployed before year end. More importantly, feedback from our channel partners on the effectiveness of these sales tools has been favorable and we've seen it in our results. For example, FasTak LVT, which is a differentiated and innovative product and is prominently featured in the new displays has experienced the 3x growth in monthly sales compared to the period prior to the display placement. These displays are a foundational element of our strategy to reinvest in and grow our business with independent retailers. As we move into 2016, this will also involve consumer demand generation, training, additional merchandising, market development and promotional programs all geared to increase the number of aligned retail partners that Armstrong has as a preferred choice for hard-surface flooring products and solutions. Last quarter, I also mentioned that we would begin shipping the residential LVT products to our customers in the fourth quarter. We remain on target and we'll begin taking orders in November. There is still more to do with the LVT plant and we look forward to launching our commercial product line early next year. We're making meaningful progress in the LVT segment, and our strategic investments are beginning to show encouraging results. Finally, on the ceiling side, you may have seen our launch earlier this month of the Total Acoustics platform, which is aimed at addressing the challenges of noise in office, hospitality, healthcare and education facilities. Noise can impede concentration, healing and learning. Total Acoustics ceiling panels feature both sound absorption and sound blocking, thus providing complete noise control and design flexibility for our architectural and honored customers. Armstrong's Total Acoustics product offering allows our customers to choose the ceiling that's right for their space. There is a lot more information on this launch in our North American commercial ceilings website. And so with that, we'd be happy to take questions.