Douglas Pertz
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, Ed and good morning, everyone. Today, we reported solid growth in revenue, operating profit, adjusted EBITDA and EPS despite currency headwinds that were much stronger than expected. FX translation reduced operating profit by $17 million more than $6 million higher than we anticipated in our prior guidance. Thanks to stronger organic and acquisition related growth in North and South America segments operating profit or operating profit before corporate expenses increased 18% and was up 28% organic basis and 33% on a constant currency basis. Total operating profit which included higher quarterly corporate expenses was up 7% on a reported basis and 25% in constant currency. These higher third quarter corporate expenses included $5 million of expenses related to share based comp and higher insurance premiums together reducing profit growth by about 5%. These costs in addition to our plan spending of about $5 million Strategy 2.0 development and approximately $2 million of IT upgrades also in corporate expense. Corporate expenses can vary from quarter-to-quarter compared to last year and sequential and as demonstrated by this quarter. However, our full year corporate expenses are projected to be in-line with our forecast of supporting our guidance of earnings growth in the mid teens that we will talk about today. On the strategic front we continued or continuing to execute on our Strategy 1.0 organic growth initiatives taking in them wider and deeper throughout our global footprint. These initiatives have already driven substantial profit growth and with some new improvement initiatives will be critical drivers to the expanded margins we’re targeting over our next year three-year plan period. Reporting our Strategy 1.5 in the quarter we completed the acquisition of TDS, a small cash management business in Columbia. Our largest acquisition to-date Dunbar is making significant contributions to our U.S. results. The integration of this acquisition is progressing well and we expect to exceed our targeted cost synergies of $45 million by the end of 2020. Our new three-year plan will include a third Tier Strategy 2.0 which is aimed at expanding our presence in the global cash ecosystem. We developed 2.0 this year for initial rollout in early 2020. Finally, we’ve adjusted our full year 2019 guidance to reflect higher than expected impact of FX into third and fourth quarter of this year. The full year negative translational effects impact is now expected to be $80 million, an increase of $20 million over prior guidance. On an operational basis our guidance has not changed. Turning to the next slide, reported revenue for the quarter was up 8% and operating profit was 7%. As stated in the last slide translational effects rates reduced reported earnings by $17 million of which $6 million was greater than what we had originally assumed in our guidance. Previous guidance effects rates, operating profit would have been 14% over the prior year even with the higher corporate expenses we mentioned earlier. We also achieved solid growth in adjusted EBITDA and earnings per share both in constant currency and on reported basis. Ronald will provide more details on these and other financial metrics in a few minutes. Turning to slide 5, led by Mexico and the U.S., our North American operations achieved double digit growth in revenue and operating profits both on a reported and on a constant currency basis. U.S. reported revenue profit growth of 22% and 17% respectively due primarily to the Dunbar acquisition. It’s important to note that U.S. non-GAAP results include approximately $5 million related to the settlement of the class and action lawsuit and integration expenses that reduced its margin rate to 6.4% in the quarter excluding these items the U.S. margin rate was approximately 8%. Clearly the U.S. quarterly results were not as planned as I would have liked them to have been. However, we're confident that even with these added cost, our U.S. business will exit the fourth quarter and is targeted 10% margin rate and achieve a full-year margin rate of at least 8% and it's important to remember that we started our three-year plan in 2017 when we started our U.S. margin was less than 1%. As I just mentioned, we continue to expect the integration of the Dunbar into our U.S. operations to deliver synergies in excess of $45 million by the end of next year. We recently completed the rebranding of all Dunbar operations closed or consolidated 21 branches to-date and are in the process of migrating to a new common CIT operating system for both businesses. And as we've stated, we expect continued strong profit growth in the U.S. next year and we're targeting 13% margin in 2021. Mexico continued to deliver strong revenue and profit growth. In fact, I want to again congratulate the Mexico team for exceeding their three-year margin target. That's three years through 2018 which was 15% in just two years through last year and they're continuing their path to improve margins this year and will into the future. In South America, reported revenue was up 6% and margins grew 28% despite FX translation that reduced revenue by $39 million and profit by $15 million. Organic profit rose 54% on 18% organic revenue growth. In constant currency, revenue was up 24% and profit rose 60+ percent. Argentina and Brazil were the primary drivers of the improved results. Brazil's results included positive contribution of the successful integration of Rota bond acquisition. These results demonstrate that our underlining operations continue to perform very well despite our strong currency headwinds. Our inflation based price increases in Argentina combined with the recent volume growth are beginning to offset the pesos dramatic devaluations since mid 2018 including August of this year. For 2019, we’re now assuming an average of 50 pesos versus the U.S. dollars with an average for the fourth quarter of 67 pesos to the U.S. dollar. We will be keeping an eye on next week's elections in Argentina which could cause further volatility in the pesos value. Before turning over to Ron, I should mention that revenue in the rest of the world segment was relatively flat with a reported operating profit up 5% and 6% up on an organic basis. France is by far the largest country in this segment and it is a solid profit growth in the quarter. Thanks to improved efficiencies and positive impact of [TEMUS] integration. We look forward to continuing this improvement for now, this year, and excuse me and into the next year. And now, for review of financials by Ron.