Frank H. Laukien
Analyst · Ross Muken
Thanks, Joshua. I hope you can hear me. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us on the call today. I will begin the presentation on Slide 4. The first quarter 2013 was a challenging quarter for Bruker, one in which we saw a combination of macro and company-specific factors negatively impact our financial performance. We conveyed on our last earnings call that we foresaw some softness in Q1, but we clearly did not anticipate the variety of issues that put pressure on our business in the first quarter. The incrementally negative macro or market developments included a significant weakening of the Japanese yen and weakness in the semiconductor and data storage industries, which is greater and longer than we expected. Bruker derived approximately 10% of its revenue from Japan in 2012. And while we have some local distribution and service expenses, we do not have significant costs in Japan to offset the yen's rapid depreciation. As a result, the yen's rapid decline significantly lowered our operating profitability for the first quarter. From a market perspective, we believe that the semiconductor and data storage industries are approaching a trough as part of their typical cyclical pattern. Our BMAT Group, which derives typically up to 20% of its revenues from these industries, saw a sluggish demand in the quarter and could not meet our bookings revenue or margin expectation as a result. Separate from these micro factors, we also faced some Bruker-specific operational issues that are temporary in nature. I will speak in more detail about these issues during my discussion of our 3 group's performance in the quarter. The net result of these factors was that we reported revenues in the first quarter of 2013 of approximately $393 million, a 3% decline compared to Q1 2012. The reported revenue decline in Q1 2013 includes a 1.1% decline in our organic revenues from Q1 2012. The lower revenue performance also resulted in significantly lower Q1 2013 profitability compared to Q1 2012. Our non-GAAP margin was 6% -- of 6% was down year-over-year, with much of this decline related to lower gross margin in the quarter. One contributor to this performance was the negative currency impact on our Japanese revenues was only -- was that the negative currency impact on our Japanese revenues was only partially offset by our modest yen-denominated sales, service and local materials' procurement costs. As a result, the decline in the yen disproportionately lowered our profitability in the first quarter. While we are disappointed with this performance, our overall Q1 2013 bookings continue to grow year-over-year, our new products are gaining traction, and we also saw a solid performance in several key markets. So despite the fact that we did not start the year as well as we would have liked, we believe that, except for currency changes, we can improved our performance over the remaining quarters of the year to make up for our slow start. One of the key reasons we are confident in our second half recovery is the fact that our bookings grew in the mid-single digits year-over-year in the first quarter. We think we have a credible plan to deliver our revised guidance, and we feel that we can resolve our first quarter operational issues over the next few quarters. As we have indicated in the past, our business can be lumpy and our quarterly revenues can see fluctuations. In the previous 2 quarters in 2012, we exceeded revenue expectations. But in Q1 2013, the factors I just outlined all added up to a miss. Despite the weak start, we believe that we can deliver on many objectives for the full year. For 2013, we continue to expect that we will generate organic revenue growth of approximately 3%, which is in line with our original organic growth guidance for the year. Looking now at the operational and financial details, I would like to turn to Slide #5 and make a few comments on the 3 BSI segment groups and our BEST segments. Our BMAT Group had a difficult quarter primarily due to market dynamics. Excluding the impact of the 2012 divestiture of our Japanese Thermal Analysis business, which was in the BMAT Group, BMAT's Q1 revenue declined in the low single digits year-over-year. The BMAT Group was facing a difficult Q1 year-over-year comparison and softening orders entering 2013. And we are experiencing longer than expected weakness in the semiconductor and data storage industry. These developments are having a pronounced effect on our Bruker Nano Surfaces or BNS division and its automated -- atomic force microscopy or AFM and SOM products for these markets. The weakness in semiconductors and data storage was particularly evident in Asia. This contributed to a year-over-year decline in revenues in the high single digits for our BNS division, which was greater than we anticipated. We are seeing longer capital approval cycles from BNS customers, so our near-term outlook for BNS remains cautious. Moving on, while the XRD and XRF business of our Bruker AXS division performed reasonably well. Overall, the AXS division revenue declined slightly in Q1 2013. This was primarily due to weakness in the X-ray crystallography business as a result of cyclicality and reduced U.S. academic funding. The BMAT Group revenues were also negatively affected by the divestiture of our Japanese Thermal Analysis business in 2012. That business generated unusually high revenues of approximately $6 million of revenue in the first quarter of 2012. Finally, although a smaller part of our BMAT Group, the bright spot in the quarter for BMAT, was the Bruker Nano Analytics or BNA division, which generated growth in the quarter and significantly improved its year-over-year profitability due to better pricing and product mix. Turning now to the Bruker BioSpin Group. This group generated high single digit year-over-year revenue growth in the quarter, including the positive impact of the acquisition of Carestream in-vivo product lines. Excluding the impact of acquisitions, Bruker BioSpin revenue still grew in the mid-single digit in Q1 2013 year-over-year, but we also saw a number of customer installations slipped out of Q1. One of the reasons for this slippage was that we had to rework several high-field NMR magnets before we can complete final customer installations in Q2 or Q2 -- Q3 of this year. Another factor that affected our Q1 2013 revenues for BioSpin was that some customer installations were pushed out due to the delayed availability of liquid helium for magnet installations. This is an issue that has affected us for the last few quarters and may continue just like the timing of some NMR and MRI installations going forward from time to time. Although not directly related to the current helium supply constraints, I'd like to highlight that very recently, just in April of 2013, Bruker introduced a trendsetting new Ascend Aeon NMR magnet types, which replaces liquid nitrogen and liquid helium boil-off during normal operation by a proprietary new active magnet refrigeration technology that does not compromise the NMR data quality. While this new product introduction will not help us in our installation delays, it is an example of how innovation can improve convenience and ease of use of our products for our customers in a significant way. We were encouraged by continued strength of Bruker BioSpin's new order bookings in both Europe and the United States. The healthy NMR new order bookings in North America were a bit of a positive surprise given the issues around sequestration. While BioSpin bookings will often take some time to impact revenue and margins, we are looking for ways to use the strong start in Bruker BioSpin bookings to contribute to our 2013 performance late in the year. I would like now to turn to Slide #6 to discuss Bruker CALID, which is home to the Daltonics, CAM, Optics and Detection division. The Bruker CALID Group is undergoing a significant amount of management, systems and business process changes. Some of these changes impacted our performance in Q1 as CALID reported a year-over-year decline in revenues. Our Bruker Daltonics Life Science division and our Bruker Optics division both faced order execution challenges in the first quarter. In our Bruker Optics division, we faced production constraints resulting from an unexpected product mix and we did not perform as many customer installations in China as we expected. Both factors contributed to lower-than-expected revenues in the first quarter. In contrast, Bruker Optics was a source of revenue over performance in Q4 of 2012 These quarterly revenue fluctuations and recent order execution issues highlight the need for better business finding in the line and in optics, and we have brought in new experienced Bruker Optics divisional operational finance leadership very recently to address the situation and believe that improvement can be made within the current year. Moving on, our Bruker Daltonics Life Science business also faced operational issues, primarily resulting from the impact of new systems and business processes and organizational changes. This division moved a -- most of its manufacturing operations onto SAP in the middle of the first quarter. Furthermore, Daltonics is experiencing a number of organizational changes, especially in Asia, that contributed to revenues slipping in the first quarter. We are working diligently to fix these problems, and we should start to see improvement in the remaining quarters of 2013. Finally, the Bruker CAM division met our modest expectations for the first quarter. We have made a number of improvements to the CAM management team, and we are confident that we have better and better products, and now, also a very experienced senior management team to compete effectively in the chemical and applied markets. Our outlook for CAM continues to depend on our ability to improve performance in the second half of the year and assumes that the CAM division delivers on its targets for new products and successfully executes its productivity initiatives on time. Finally, turning to the BEST segment. This division generated year-over-year organic revenue growth of 3.4% in Q1 2013 and reported an operating margin of approximately 3%. We're making progress on our initiatives to improve profitability, and BEST exited the money-losing iSFCL business during the first quarter. BEST management is doing a good job with making the business profitable while still driving growth. Now I would like to move to Slide 7 for some closing remarks. While the first quarter was disappointing, we believe that we will partially recover from that slow start and demonstrate improving growth and profitability for the remainder of the year. Our operational issues are mostly temporary in nature, and we are confident in our ability to turn pending or delayed customer installations into revenue over the next 3 quarters. In addition, we are controlling our discretionary spending and we are working to improve the profitability of our plants and field organizations. However, we cannot entirely offset the impact from the strong currency headwinds on our EPS in 2013. That said, we continue to make good progress on the operational initiatives we shared with you last quarter. In March 2013, we implemented and closed 2 of the operational improvement projects we had targeted for this year. In France, the Bruker BioSpin Group divested its small power electronics business to a strategic partner. This business generated approximately $5 million in revenues during 2012. In addition, in Switzerland, we outsourced our electronics production and testing to a contract manufacturing partner. As a result of these 2 programs, approximately 65 employees left the company in the first quarter to join our partners. While these programs provide little P&L benefit in 2013, we expect to see some cost savings in 2014. Additionally, we expect a meaningful inventory and working capital benefits later in the year. With that, I'd now like to turn the call over to our CFO, Charlie Wagner.