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CrossAmerica Partners LP (CAPL)

Q2 2013 Earnings Call· Fri, Aug 9, 2013

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Second Quarter 2013 Earnings Conference Call for Lehigh Gas Partners. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Later in the call, we will conduct a question and answer session. Instructions will be given to you at that time on how you may participate. This conference call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as amended relating to the Partnership's, future business expectations and predictions, and financial conditions and results of operations. These forward-looking statements involve certain risks and uncertainties. The Partnership has listed some of the important factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed in such forward-looking statements which are referred to as cautionary statement in its second quarter 2013 earnings news release. The news release may be viewed on the Lehigh Gas Partners website at www.lehighgaspartners.com. All subsequent, written and oral forward-looking statements attributable to the Partnership or persons acting on its behalf are expressly qualified in their entirety by such cautionary statements. In addition, certain non-GAAP financial measures will be discussed on this call. The Partnership has provided a description of these measures as well as a discussion of why they believe this information is useful to management in its Form 8-K furnished to the SEC yesterday. The Form 8-K may be accessed through a link on the Partnership's website at www.lehighgaspartners.com. In addition to accessing the Form 8-K on the Partnership's website, you can also sign-up for lgpe/communication to keep you up-to-date on the activity on the Partnership and be notified on the latest Partnership news. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I will now turn the conference call over to the host, Joe Topper, Chairman and CEO. Please proceed.

Joe Topper

Management

Thank you and good morning. Welcome to Lehigh Gas Partners' second quarter 2013 earnings call. Joining me on the call today are Mark Miller, CFO and Dave Hrinak, President. The purpose of today's call is to review our second quarter 2013 results. Once we have concluded our prepared remarks, we will open the session to questions. I will first walk through a brief overview of our second quarter results, comment on the two transactions that we recently announced and review our announced distribution increase. Mark will then provide more detailed review of the second quarter. Net income for the second quarter of 2013 totaled $5.5 million, or $0.36 per common unit. For the quarter, EBITDA totaled $14.1 million, Adjusted EBITDA totaled $14.9 million and Distributable cash flow amounted to $11.2 million, or $0.75 per common unit. The Partnership declared a second quarter distribution of $0.4775 per unit, a 5.5% increase over the current quarterly distribution. Based upon our distributable cash flow of $0.75 per common unit, the coverage ratio on the declared second quarter distribution is approximately 1.6 times. As Mark will touch on in his comments, we had a strong quarter from a fuel margin perspective, which helped drive our solid financial performance. As we have stated on previous calls, our ability to grow our distributable cash flow and distributions will be driven by acquisitions. We are pleased to announce the two recent transactions. They are great transactions for us allowing us to acquire quality assets in scale and a new market in Tennessee that we are excited about. The larger transaction that we announced last week for the Rocky Top portfolio, which for an aggregate consideration of $36.9 million. In the transaction, we acquired 30 key sites, four leasehold properties along with seven third-party supply contracts and other…

Mark Miller

Management

Thank you, Joe. The second quarter of 2013 represented the Partnership's second full quarter as a public partnership. In addition to the actual financial results for the quarter, the Partnership is providing 7 pro forma results for the period ending June 30, 2012, in our earnings press release. The Partnership completed its initial public offering on October 30, 2012. And, as such, management believes the pro forma results for June 30, 2012, provide investors with a more relevant comparison than the actual results of our predecessor for the periods ending June 30, 2012. For the second 2012, on a pro forma basis, the Partnership distributed 154 million gallons at an average selling price of $3.09 per gallon and an $0.069 average margin per gallon. Gross profit from motor fuel sales for the second quarter of 2012 on a pro forma basis totaled $10.7 million. Relative to the pro forma results for the second quarter of 2012, our fuel margin increased 4.4% and our gross profit from motor fuel sales increased 12% in the second quarter 2013. The increase in gross profit from motor fuel sales including by both the higher volumes and margin for the quarter relative to the previous year. Net rental income, less than expense for the quarter totaled $6.4 million. On pro forma basis, the Partnership recorded $3 million in net rental income in the second quarter 2012. The increase in net rental income for the second quarter 2013 relative to 2012 is primarily due to the increased rent associated with the Express Land and Dunmore acquisitions completed at the end of last year and to the lesser extent the Getty leases signed during the second quarter at the end of last year. On the expense side, operating expenses for the second quarter 2013 totaled $1.1. And,…

Joe Topper

Management

I want to thank everyone for joining the call today and we appreciate your interest in the Partnership. With that, I would like to open up the line for questions.

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) First question comes from the line of Ben Brownlow from Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Ben Brownlow - Raymond James

Analyst

Good morning. Congratulations on the acquisitions in the quarter.

Joe Topper

Management

Thank you.

Ben Brownlow - Raymond James

Analyst

Just trying to get a sense of the EBITDA contribution from, I guess the EBITDA from last year or going forward on that two acquisitions. Can you give a little detail on how the fuel margin is comparable to your existing fuel margins and the rental income that you expect?

Joe Topper

Management

Ben, we didn't disclose it in the press release. At this point, that's competitive information right now and it's a very active market out there and we are not going to disclose that because we end up either bidding against ourselves from prior releases or with other competitors now that have that information and have our metrics. I would tell you that they are within the guidelines of what we have acquired in the past and we hold through to those guidelines going forward.

Ben Brownlow - Raymond James

Analyst

Are there any upfront CapEx requirements, or are you pretty happy with the asset quality?

Joe Topper

Management

These assets are very good, outstanding assets. Most of them have rebuilt within the last five, seven years. They are in very good shape.

Ben Brownlow - Raymond James

Analyst

I guess from another perspective, on the acquisition environment, what sort of range in multiples are you seeing out there for wholesale supply contracts in both fee based acquisitions? Has that changed materially from the last year or so.

Joe Topper

Management

How do I answer that? There's just still an attractive group of acquisitions that are available in the multiples that we would like to buy. There are some transactions that are going higher than we think and there are some transactions that are going lower for different reason. I guess at this point, we are probably looking at somewhere between five and eight different transactions that are in the multiple that are attractive to us. There are some things that are going at a higher multiple, but they are not as attractive to us.

Ben Brownlow - Raymond James

Analyst

Okay. And, just one last one for me. On the fuel margin, were there any RIN credits embedded in that?

Joe Topper

Management

There's two things going on with the RIN credits. Some of the markets that we are in, the RIN credits are actually showing up in the rack pricing and some of the markets that were in the RIN credits are showing up as rebates of off the rack. So, yes, there are RIN credits built direct and indirect in those numbers.

Operator

Operator

Thank you for that question. The next question we have comes from the line of Ethan Bellamy from Robert W. Baird. Please go ahead.

Ethan Bellamy - Robert W. Baird

Analyst

Good morning, everybody. Congrats on a solid quarter. What kind of annual acquisitions are you targeting now, Joe? Then kind of a follow-up to that is, do you have the human capital in place to fully integrate these acquisitions and/or do you need to build out sort of the team to manage this success you having in the rollout?

Joe Topper

Management

Thanks, Ethan for the complement on the quarter and I'll try to get the other two as good as answers. I don't have a goal to acquire a dollar amount of assets in a year. I would tell you that I am very comfortable saying that, I think when we publicly talked about a range of $50 million to $75 million a year in acquisitions, I think the market of attractive assets would probably push that target up to a higher range of $150 million of potential acquisitions for the next couple of years, somewhere in the $50 million to $150 million, depending on whether they meet our criteria. On the other side, the evidence by this quarter was that we integrated the last two acquisitions seamlessly and they were accretive to the partnership. We are scaling up and have plans that have put us in place to double the size of the company within the next two to three years, so yes we need additional human capital, but that's part of our plan and we are in the process of acquiring it.

Ethan Bellamy - Robert W. Baird

Analyst

Thank you. That's helpful. Then just one more. Who are you out there competing with in the acquisition market right now? It seems like you still have a fairly first mover advantage in terms of being public and being out there hunting with a public currency.

Joe Topper

Management

I break it into three categories. 7-Eleven, Quester, obviously the lead in the marketplace for what they want to buy. Then of the large jobber market, we would obviously have the leading edge based upon our capital structure to do it, but there are other competitors out there that are trying to grow knowing that they need to grow in this environment and level of things they want to follow where we went and they think that this was an attractive outcome for us and other competitors want to get there, but I think we have still a year, year and a half advantage on any next competitors.

Ethan Bellamy - Robert W. Baird

Analyst

All right. How the volumes look so far this quarter? I am sorry if I missed it. I joined late.

Joe Topper

Management

The second quarter? The second quarter volumes store-over-store were down slightly for a couple of reasons. One was, we were repositioning some of the Getty assets. When we acquired the Getty leases last year, we had the right to give back assets. And as we have gone through and done a better analysis there, we were giving some of those assets back. Some of it is, because we converted some of the stations from commission to dealer and there are some pricing issues that occur from when a dealer starts having to price his own product, which we envision to work through that. There were some difficulty with volumes in the Northeast, some of in the Utica Shale area where they were, the Marcellus Shale, where they have cut back on the drilling a bit that affected the volume, so we are a little bit lower volume, but we made it up in margin which is we made more money.

Ethan Bellamy - Robert W. Baird

Analyst

Got it. In Calendar 3Q so far?

Joe Topper

Management

Calendar Q3 volumes are, I don't see anything wrong in those numbers. I don't see anything wrong in the margin numbers.

Ethan Bellamy - Robert W. Baird

Analyst

Excellent. Thank you very much.

Joe Topper

Management

I will give you heads up. The fourth quarter when Sandy hit and the price of fuel dropped by a lot of money last fourth quarter, I think we did like $9.8 a gallon. I am not sure we are going to be meeting that this year, but I am confident of the full year number.

Ethan Bellamy - Robert W. Baird

Analyst

Excellent. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. The next question we have comes from the line of Suzanne Hannigan from Janney. Please go ahead.

Suzanne Hannigan - Janney

Analyst

My question has actually been asked and answered, but congratulations, guys.

Joe Topper

Management

Thank you very much. I am glad you liked the answer, Suzanne.

Operator

Operator

And so, we have no questions at this time, so now I would like to hand the call back over to Joe Topper for closing remark.

Joe Topper

Management

Thank you very much. Thank you for the good questions. Appreciate your interest and we will continue to work hard to represent the unit holders and increasing the dividend going forward. Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes your call. You may now disconnect. Have a good day.