Joe Dziedzic
Analyst · today only. Brink's assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. The call is copyrighted and may not be used without written permission from Brink's. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Ed Cunningham, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications. Mr. Cunningham, you may begin
Thanks, Tom. Good morning, everyone. I will start with summary of our quarterly results using the same format we have used in prior quarters and then I will review segment results and finish with some comments on our outlook for the rest of the year. Our reported revenue for the quarter declined 8% as a negative currency impact of $96 million was partially offset by organic growth of 31 million. Operating profit almost doubled to $41 million reflecting a margin rate that improved from 2.5% to5.4%. Operating profit grew by $20 million after overcoming $11 million of unfavorable currency. The U.S., Mexico and Latin America region were the primary drivers of the improvement along with a $9 million reduction in corporate expenses. Our recent reorganization restructuring contributed to this improvement and we’re on track to deliver the $45 million to $50 million of savings we previous communicated EPS up sharply at $0.41 versus $0.15 in last year's first quarter. The EPS bridge highlights the strong improvement from operations. The year-over-year earnings growth of $0.26 per share includes $0.13 of unfavorable currency that was more than offset by $0.39 of improvement from operations. Currency was worse than we expected as the U.S. dollar compared to the January 1, 2015 exchange rates. We have updated our guidance to reflect threats as of the end of the first quarter which are reasonably close to today's rates. First quarter cash flows usually the weakest of the year due to the normal first quarter payments such as annual bonuses and various insurance premium payments. This year's first quarter included $10 million of severance payments related to our recent organization and restructuring activity and an increase in working capital. Last year's cash flow was unusually strong duet 60% inflation in Venezuela at the very favorable exchange rate of VEF6 to the dollar. But as we have consistently stated cash flow from Venezuela is not accessible and it's now negligible after the most recent devaluation. First quarter capital expenditures and capital leases were down $10 million versus last year due to lower spend in the U.S., Brazil, and Latin America. We spent less on [indiscernible] we acquired some saves through an operating lease structure and we also reduced our IT spend versus last year. Net debt increased by $50 million from the end of 2014 due to the previous explained negative cash flow, the CapEx spend in the quarter, and the impact of the strengthened U.S. dollar. The next few slides provide an overview of the five largest countries and global markets. The U.S. business ended 2014 on a positive note. With strong revenue growth and a full year margin rate of 3.1% which was up a 130 basis points. We're expecting similar improvement in 2015 and as Tom noted, we're off to a good start. First quarter revenue in the U.S. rose 4% with solid growth across the business including the higher margin, ATM and money processing services. This volume growth, combined with our cost reduction and productivity initiatives drove the U.S. margin rate up to 4.5% which is in-line without full year outlook. I need to once again caution everyone that the revenue growth rates of 5% to 7% are not sustainable for the remainder of the year as we will begin to see in the second quarter a greater impact of the transition of a large money processing to a competitor. There's no doubt that we're encouraged by two successive quarters of year-over-year revenue and margin growth. And we’re also well aware of the need to demonstrate sustainable profit growth. To that end our U.S. team is focused on several productivity initiatives that are in the implementation phase. Key projects include field force automation with hand held devices, route logistics and centralized billing. In February we disclosed some metrics to help investors track our progress on these projects. We provided our milestone targets for 2015 and we will a provide midyear progress update when we report second quarter earnings. We believe the implementation and ultimate optimization of these projects will put the U.S. business on a path of continuous improvement that will drive profit growth over the next few years and enable us to deliver margin rates that are more in line with our U.S. competitors. Profits in Mexico also improved despite a revenue decline due to unfavorable currency which more than offset some encouraging growth from retail customers. This business is recovering after difficult 2015 that included revenue declines based related to bank customer bank losses and a onetime insurance premium payment. After the customer losses, we took aggressive cost actions that have begun to show benefits. Like the U.S., Mexico has shown improvement for two successive quarters. The first quarter is 9.2% margin rate reflects solid operating performance but also includes income from change in employee benefits as well as a reversal of a prior period expense that helped the quarter. Still a solid quarter, but we do not expect the repeat performance of 9% this year. Including the first quarter, Mexico was on track to achieve it's full year margin target range of 6% to 8%. Mexico has several key projects that are expected to drive profit growth and enable it to achieve a 10% operating margin target next year. The implementation of the standard branch structure is nearly complete. So we should see almost a full year benefits from this project in 2015. And we expect the CIT and ATM initiatives being implemented this year to generate significant savings in 2016. In addition, our team in Mexico is very focused on driving top line growth, particularly in the retail sector, where we believe there is potential. France, Brazil, and Canada, round out our five largest markets and represent additional opportunities for improvements. These countries had little or no revenue growth in the first quarter, and had a combined margin rate of 5%. France is operating in as slow growth macro environment with strong currency headwinds. To improve results we’re repositioning the business to pursue higher margin opportunities within the cash supply chains of our customers. We expect to see the benefits of this focusing in 2016. But for 2015, it'll be challenging year on the top line with continued solid margins from cost controls. Brazil's revenue increased 4% on an organic basis reflecting the impact of their slowing economy. The margin rate of 8.3% trailed a strong performance in last year's first quarter but it's still solid. We expect a challenging economic environment in Brazil but believe our cost actions and focus on retail solutions will deliver improvement as the year progresses. Canada had a tough quarter on a slight revenue decline and higher pension cost from a lower discount rate. We expect recent volume gains and cost actions deliver improvement in the remainder of the year. Despite the impact of the strong dollar, the steady performance of our global markets unit continued into the first quarter. The combined operating margin of the 35 countries that comprise this unit with almost 13% up more than 300 basis points over the year ago quarter. Most of the improvement was driven by strong results in Argentina, Chile, and in our global services business. The EMEA region maintains solid margin of 7% on no growth in a difficult macroeconomic environment. The Latin America region delivered strong top line growth and margins primarily from Argentina and Chile a as the restructuring actions in Chile are beginning to paying off. Asia continues to perform extremely well on all fronts. We have not changed our 2015 EPS outlook of $1.55 to a $1.75 but we have changed how we get there. There are several things to note on this slide. The 2014 EPS of $1.01 has been adjusted to exclude Venezuela. The expected operations improvement of $1.04 to $1.24 is more than the full year 2014 EPS. The currency impact of $0.50 is higher than the prior guidance of $0.35 due to the continued strengthening of the U.S. dollar. So we're maintaining our 2015 EPS guidance despite the currency headwinds and removal of Venezuela. On the left hand side of the page is a line item by line item comparison of 2014 results to our 2015 guidance, I will highlight that we're currently estimating a $400 million unfavorable impact on revenue from the strengthened U.S. dollar. The right hand side of the page highlights that our revenue guide has been reduced by $300 million, $150 million from removing Venezuela, and $150 million from unfavorable currency changes. Also we have increased our margin rate guidance to a range between 5.3% to 5.8% and most importantly we’re maintaining our EPS guidance of a $1.55 to $1.75. There are several slides in the appendix that I will not go through in detail but I want to highlight a few of them. On slide 18, we provide the 2014 operating profit and EPS for each quarter, the message is that we had a very strong fourth quarter in 2014 that will be challenging to exceed. Slide 21 provides high-level bridge of our 2014 results to our 2016 target EPS of $2 to $2.40. We have made a few changes to the components of our 2016 outlook which include the increased currency pressure in 2015 but also an assumption that some of that currency comes back to help in '16. Also we increased the operating margin rate from 6.7% to 7%. So we're maintaining the same EPS target of $2 to $2.40 on lower revenue of $3.4 billion at higher 7% margin. I'll close by saying that we ended 2014 with some positive momentum that continued into the first quarter of 2015. Today we're a leaner, more customer-focused company that is well-positioned to deliver significant growth in earnings and cash flow. Denise, let's open it up for questions.