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Belden Inc. (BDC)

Q3 2015 Earnings Call· Wed, Oct 28, 2015

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. And welcome to this morning's Belden Incorporated Third Quarter 2015 Earnings Release Conference Call. Just a reminder, this call is being recorded. At this time you are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the call over to Matt Tractenberg. Please go ahead, sir.

Matthew Tractenberg - Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Thank you, Tina. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for Belden's third quarter 2015 earnings conference call. My name is Matt Tractenberg. I'm Belden's VP of Investor Relations. With me here this morning are John Stroup, President and CEO; and Henk Derksen, Belden's CFO. John will provide a strategic overview of our business, and then Henk will provide a detailed review of our financial and operating results, followed by Q&A. Before we begin, I'd like to let our audience know that Belden's 2015 Financial Analyst and Investor Event will be held on December 7th and will be once again, virtual. This live webcast will provide a review of the year, a discussion of the strategy and business drivers, and present 2016 guidance, followed by Q&A. You can find more details on our IR website in the coming weeks. We issued our earnings release earlier this morning and we have prepared a slide presentation that we will reference on this call. The press release, presentation, and transcript of these prepared remarks are currently available online at investor.belden.com. Turning to slide two in the presentation, during this call, management will make certain forward-looking statements. I'd like to remind you that any forward-looking information we provide is given in reliance upon the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The comments we will make today are management's best judgment based on information currently available. Actual results could differ materially from any forward-looking statements that we make, and the company disclaims any obligation to update this information to reflect future developments after this call. For a more complete discussion of factors that could have an impact on the company's actual results please review today's press release and our annual report on Form 10-K. Additionally, during…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Matt Tractenberg, your first question comes from William Stein with SunTrust.

Elliott Smith - SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, Inc.

Analyst

Hi. This is Elliott Smith on for Will. First, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the bookings linearity you saw during the quarter and how this related to what you normally see for the third quarter and how they've looked moving in October? John S. Stroup - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Well, the orders in the quarter were fairly typical. There wasn't anything unusual. It wasn't backend loaded. In fact, in some of our businesses, there was a little more strength in the early part of the quarter than we typically see. But then I'd say in other businesses we saw very typical patterns or even a little bit more backend loaded. So nothing that was unusual from a linearity point of view.

Elliott Smith - SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. Thanks. That's helpful. And one more, if you could just give us some directional views by segment for the fourth quarter, that would be helpful? Thanks. John S. Stroup - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Sure. So as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, our expectation in the fourth quarter and next year is that we're going to continue to see nice growth in our Enterprise, Broadband, and Network Security segments. Those businesses are benefiting from favorable secular trends and we don't see those being disrupted any time soon. And in our Industrial segments, we would expect that there will continue to be weakness as a result of low oil prices and a strong U.S. dollar. So in this most recent quarter organic growth on the combined basis for the industrial platforms was approximately negative 5%. It's my expectation that we would see something similar to that in the fourth quarter. And for the broadcast business -- in addition to the Broadband business doing quite well in the third quarter, our more traditional cable business had a strong quarter as well. And although, our revenue on a year-over-year basis with Grass Valley was down, bookings improved. So book-to-bill was above 1 again and product backlog within Grass Valley entering Q4 is $10 million higher than what we entered Q3. So we have a nice head start entering Q4 compared to where we were in the third quarter.

Elliott Smith - SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, Inc.

Analyst

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

We'll go next to Shawn Harrison with Longbow Research.

Frank Carson - Longbow Research LLC

Analyst

Hi, this is Frankie on behalf of Shawn. Thanks for taking my question. I just had a couple questions on Grass Valley. John S. Stroup - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Pardon me. I'm sorry. We're not able to hear you. Can you speak up a little bit?

Frank Carson - Longbow Research LLC

Analyst

Hi, can you hear me? John S. Stroup - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, I can hear you now, thank you.

Frank Carson - Longbow Research LLC

Analyst

Okay. Thank you. Yeah, hi, this is Frankie on behalf of Shawn. I only just had a couple questions on Grass Valley. One, are you guys seeing any changes, it looked like you have kind of bottomed? (21:55) And in terms of 2016, what are kind of drivers pushing it forward? Is it the Olympics, elections, or – and the second question to that is, just curious to where we're at with the restructuring program with Grass Valley and if you're considering it with any other units like industrial? John S. Stroup - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, so, let me respond to it in reverse order. So as it relates to the restructuring, as Henk mentioned, we are on schedule with the productivity improvement programs within Grass Valley. We saw that in the third quarter results. We'll see improvement again in the fourth quarter and we'll see further improvement next year. Within our industrial businesses we're looking very closely at opportunities to drive productivity improvements despite organic headwinds in 2016. We do think what we're experiencing with our industrial platforms in this quarter will be with us for a little while. We don't see any imminent change to oil prices or to the dollar situation, and therefore we think that U.S. manufacturing sector is going to be weak at least in 2016. So we're evaluating those opportunities. I think we'll be in a position to be more detailed with everybody in December when we talk about guidance for 2016. And then as it relates to Grass Valley, I would say the themes we discussed in the second quarter are still true in the third, and what I mean by that is, weakness outside of the U.S. is the primary issue, again related to the strong dollar and low oil prices. Some of you may have noticed, for example, that there was an announcement by Al Jazeera to reduce head count. That was at least partially due to low oil prices. We saw actually nice recovery in bookings in the U.S. compared to other parts of the world in the third quarter. And of course, in 2016, we've got the benefit of the U.S. Presidential election and we have the benefit of the Summer Olympics, and therefore, I would expect revenue to improve sequentially in Grass Valley from 2015 to 2016. Again we'll be more specific about 2016 when we're together in early December.

Frank Carson - Longbow Research LLC

Analyst

Thanks. That was really helpful. And then changing gears, looking at your guidance, it looks like the biggest delta to EPS was lower tax rates. Is that kind of what – what changed with it or is there something else? John S. Stroup - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Well, I would say that clearly the tax rate is part of it, but I would say the other part of it is that the guidance has been updated to include the backlog position entering the fourth quarter. So I would say, in general, the fourth quarter, as we see it today, is very similar to what we saw three months ago. And you're right, we do have a slightly better tax rate than what we incorporated into our guidance last quarter.

Frank Carson - Longbow Research LLC

Analyst

Okay. Thanks, guys. I appreciate it. John S. Stroup - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thank you.

Operator

Operator

We'll go next to Steven Fox with Cross Research.

Steven Fox - Cross Research LLC

Analyst

Thanks. Good morning. A couple of questions for me. John, can you just dig into your latest thoughts on some of the cord cutting issues that I think were also hampering Grass Valley sales? Have you gotten any kind of better feel for how this is going to affect your business maybe into next year, if you ex out some of these onetime events or every multiple year events like the Olympics and things like that? John S. Stroup - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah so, Steven, I think cord cutting might be one of the greatest misunderstandings that exist in our business, and what I mean by that is that if you look at the data, the data shows that the biggest headwind for Grass Valley is outside of the United States. And of course cord cutting is at least today relatively contained to the United States. And so it's true, of course, that there are alternatives for people to view content, and they're taking advantage of that, but the penetration rate is obviously quite low. You may have noticed that Netflix struggled a little bit in the quarter, and there's a lot of aggressive actions being taken by what we'd call traditional customers to make certain that they maintain their viewership. Now the other thing I would mention is that, to the extent that churn exists within the industry, it absolutely shows up within our broadband business. And our broadband business was up 8.8% in the quarter. So I feel like our broadcast platform is really well positioned for whatever ends up happening in the media industry. Live content of course is two-thirds of what Grass Valley does. We continue to see that as an opportunity and an area of strength. Our broadband position is outstanding. So to the extent that people are in need of increased bandwidth for things like streaming, we're in good position. So I just feel like it continues to be a misunderstanding and quite frankly a bit of a distraction away from the real data. And I always hate it when the data gets in the way, but the data really does point to the fact that most of the headwinds for Grass Valley are outside the U.S. and they relate to the currency and they relate to oil prices.

Steven Fox - Cross Research LLC

Analyst

That's helpful. And then just in terms of your comments around the industrial market into next year, you're kind of throwing in the towel and maybe some other companies in that space are still holding out hope that things are going to bottom in the next couple of quarters. Can you just sort of go into some of your thinking there, maybe parse it a little bit by which markets maybe can recover, if you see any, and which are dragging you down the most? John S. Stroup - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Sure, so without question, the biggest issue for us and most companies in the industrial space is the impact from oil and gas. So our business within the oil and gas sector is down approximately 30% in the third quarter from a year ago. Our MRO business is flat and our revenues to machine builders is close to flat. And our machine builder revenues, you can imagine, is more diversified, food and beverage, semiconductor capital equipment, a lot of different other industries. Our view is the following; first, we don't see any recovery, meaningful recovery in oil prices next year and that's because we think supply and demand has not reached equilibrium and we don't see any sort of snapback out of China. Secondly, we don't see any possibility that the U.S. dollar is going to weaken next year. In fact, we just saw in the last couple weeks, Europe reiterate their commitment to stimulus spending. I suspect there will be lots of other countries that'll follow. I think China might devalue further. I think the U.S. dollar is going to remain strong. And thirdly, we're in year seven of the economic recovery. And I know it wasn't a particularly satisfying recovery to people, but it was a recovery. So I think it's far more likely than not that the United States is going to experience a manufacturing recession in 2016, and we're prepared for it.

Steven Fox - Cross Research LLC

Analyst

Great, and just to clarify one other comment, within all that, you're considering cost actions that have not yet been rolled out for the Industrial segments. That's something that's to come in the next quarter or so? John S. Stroup - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: So we're evaluating, as we do every year this time of year, in our budgeting process, how we will achieve our productivity goals. So we have a productivity goal in each of our businesses every year, independent of revenue growth. Obviously productivity is a lot easier to achieve when revenue is growing and markets are growing, but that doesn't mean we don't have the same commitment to productivity improvement in a situation where revenues are declining. So, we're working on that now. And we'll be presenting that to our Board in November, as we do every year, our budget. And I believe in early December, when we talk to you all about our 2016 guidance, we'll be able to shed a little more light on what we're thinking around productivity programs in all of our businesses and probably more specifically the industrial platform.

Steven Fox - Cross Research LLC

Analyst

Great. That's very helpful. Thank you. John S. Stroup - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yes.

Operator

Operator

We'll go next to John Quealy with Canaccord.

John Quealy - Canaccord Genuity, Inc.

Analyst

Hi, good morning, folks. A couple questions here. First, if we can go back to Grass Valley, it's good to see that, you know, the broadcast business in Grass Valley is getting better, at least U.S., international and so that's partly oil and gas-related. The bookings, John, can you talk about, how does the margin profile look in the price. Obviously you're taking costs out of OpEx across the Broadcast segment but talk to margins, if you could, on the forward book? John S. Stroup - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yes, so margins are fine. So we haven't really seen any meaningful change in margins. I mean, there's maybe a couple of projects I can point to where there's been heavy levels of competition. But I don't think that's unusual. So I haven't seen any change in the margin profile as a result of this demand decrease and presumably lower utilization. I think that's, by the way, because obviously in this business there's not a lot of manufacturing cost to absorb compared to the other cost structures. So you know, margins haven't been an issue.

John Quealy - Canaccord Genuity, Inc.

Analyst

And then also, on the broader broadcast platform, obviously there's been some consolidation in terms of, you know, TE Connectivity and CommScope, any channel issues you've seen as you take a step back away from the Grass Valley brand across the enterprise there? John S. Stroup - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: No, our business that competes with Tyco and with CommScope is PPC, that's our broadband business. And they have such a strong position, both in terms of market share as well as intellectual property that, I think it's difficult quite frankly for TE or CommScope to do an awful lot. I mean we don't want to obviously take that for granted. We work everyday to make sure that our customers are having a good experience with us. But the PPC business is just very, very strong. And then on the Grass Valley side we continue to leverage that brand in that market and customer position to pull through cable products, that's gone very, very well. I think that the good news for Grass valley is that, even though the dollar is strong, even though oil prices are weak, all that does is postpone investment. It's not a matter of us losing business to local competition because they don't exist. So this business is going to have to make investments. And I think the fact that volume began to improve here in the third quarter, particularly in the U.S., I think is probably a pretty good testament to the fact that this business is going to recover.

John Quealy - Canaccord Genuity, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. And then two final ones for me, on network security, you talked about perhaps some new products or adjacencies in the industrial and broadcast market in 2016. I imagine this is going to be a piece of the analyst webcast coming up in a few weeks. But are we finally at a point where we can start to put Tripwire and bundle or integrate some of that functionality into the underlying hardware business that you've had over the years or what should we expect there? John S. Stroup - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: So we're already seeing it in the income statement this quarter, with the utility sector. So the work that's been done between our industrial IT team and the Tripwire team is making a real difference. And it's already showing up in our growth rates in the third quarter. So I want to start there. But there's activity in other areas, also. Some of the areas of activity are a little bit difficult for us to talk about because they are with customers where the discussions are still fairly preliminary, but we have a number of very interesting projects that we're working on with some key large partners around how we help them secure their automation solutions as well as the broadcast solutions. So we're obviously going to try to do the very best we can to share with you where we're going without disturbing or violating those conversations with our customers. And we'll continue to highlight things that are in the income statement, like in the third quarter with the utility sector.

John Quealy - Canaccord Genuity, Inc.

Analyst

Great. Thanks, John. Lastly, Henk, on cash flow and debt-to-EBITDA metrics, you've said and we've talked about trying to get below four here for year end. Can you give us an updated look, and again, I'm sure this is going to be dived into in the call in a couple weeks? Hendrikus Derksen - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President-Finance: Sure. So we end the quarter at 4.0, and based upon our guidance, implied EBITDA, we think at the end of Q4, we'll be around 3.6.

John Quealy - Canaccord Genuity, Inc.

Analyst

Great. Thanks. Nice job, guys. John S. Stroup - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Matt Tractenberg, there are no further questions at this time. Please continue.

Matthew Tractenberg - Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Thank you, Tina, that's going to do it for us today. Thank you, everyone for joining today's call. If you have any questions, please reach out to the IR team here at Belden. Our email address is investor.relations@belden.com. Have a great day, everyone.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude our call for today. You may now disconnect from the call. And thank you for participating.