Earnings Labs

CDW Corporation (CDW)

Q4 2014 Earnings Call· Tue, Feb 10, 2015

$132.96

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning. My name is Amanda, and I'll be your conference operator for today's call. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the CDW 2014 Full Year and Fourth Quarter Earnings Call. All lines have been placed in a listen-only mode to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks there will be a question-and-answer session. I'd like to remind you that today's conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, please disconnect now. It is my pleasure to turn the call over to CDW's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Tom Richards. Mr. Richards, you may begin your conference.

Tom Richards

Management

Thanks, Amanda. Good morning, everyone. And thank you for joining us today to discuss CDW's fourth quarter and full year 2014 results. With me in the room are Ann Ziegler, our Chief Financial Officer; Chris Leahy, our General Counsel; and Sari Macrie, our VP, Investor Relations. I'll begin our call with an overview of our fourth quarter and full year performance and share some thoughts on our strategic progress and expectations for 2015. Then I will hand it over to Ann, who will take you through a more detailed review of the financials. After that we will open it up for some questions. But, before we begin, Sari will present the Company's Safe Harbor disclosure statement.

Sari Macrie

Management

Thank you, Tom. Good morning, everyone. Our fourth quarter and year end 2014 earnings and first quarter dividend release were distributed this morning and are available on our Web site along with supplemental slides that you can use to follow along with us during the call. I'd like to remind you that certain comments made in this presentation are considered forward-looking statements under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Those statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Additional information concerning these risks and uncertainties is contained in the Form 8-K we furnished to the SEC today and in the Company's other filings with the SEC. CDW assumes no obligation to update the information presented during this webcast. Our presentation also includes certain non-GAAP financial measures including non-GAAP earnings per share. All non-GAAP measures have been reconciled to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in accordance with SEC rules. You'll find reconciliation charts in the slides for today's webcast as well as in our press release and the Form 8-K we furnished to the SEC. Please note that all references to growth rates or dollar amount increases in our remarks today are versus the comparable period in 2013. The number of selling days for the fourth quarter and full year are the same in both 2014 and 2013. So there is no difference in growth rates for average daily sales and reported sales. A replay of this webcast will be posted to our Investor Relations Web site investor.cdw.com by this time tomorrow. I also want to remind you, this conference call is a property of CDW and may not be recorded or rebroadcast without specific written permission from the Company. So with that, let me turn the call back to Tom.

Tom Richards

Management

Thanks, Sari. We had a strong finish to a great year of both financial and strategic performance. For the year, we significantly outpaced our medium term annual target of growing 200 basis points to 300 basis points above the U.S. IT market delivering a 2014 net sales increase of 12.1% well above estimated market growth rates with excellent profitability. Adjusted EBITDA increased 12.2% and earnings per share increased 29.7%. Our performance in 2014 demonstrates the strength of our business model and highlights the power of our balanced channel portfolio, diverse product suite and variable cost structure. Let me walk through each of these and how they contributed to performance. First our balanced portfolio of five channels each with nearly $1 billion or more of annual sales. This balance has served us well on the path when we have been confronted with challenges outside our control like the closing of the federal government in 2013. In 2014, instead of working together to offset macro economic or exogenous factors, our balanced portfolio worked together to fuel top-line growth. With each channel growing high single digits or better. Second, our diverse product suite of more than 100,000 products from over 1000 leading and emerging brands, which ensures we are well-positioned to meet our customers' needs whether transactional or highly complex. In 2014, this enabled us to meet strong client device demand for both PC refresh and meeting common core curriculum digital testing requirements. Client device demand drove significant growth throughout the year. While initially dominating customer mind share as we move through the year and refresh projects are underway, our solutions business bounced back of growing high-single digits in the second half of the year. Even with this strong performance transactional products grew faster than solutions throughout the year and represented 53% of…

Ann Ziegler

Management

Thanks Tom. Good morning everyone. As Tom indicated, our fourth quarter and full year financial results demonstrated the strength of our business model, as we captured market share and delivered excellent profitability and cash flows, while continuing to invest in our future. As I review our financial results, I highlight some other ways the results demonstrate one of the key strength of our business model, our variable cost structure. Turning to our P&L, if you have accessed to the slide posted online, it would be helpful to follow along. I am on Slide 8. Top-line growth was excellent this quarter, with net sales of $3.05 billion, 12.4% higher than last year on both the reported and average daily sales basis as we had the same number of selling days in both the fourth quarter of 2014 and 2013. Average daily sales were $48.4 million as expected on a sequential average daily sales basis sales were down 5.1% versus Q3 2014, below recent Q4 seasonality due to exceptionally strong Q3 performance. Gross profit for the quarter increased 9.7% to $491.1 million. Gross margin in the fourth quarter was 16.1%, 40 basis points below last year primarily reflecting the ongoing mix impact from growth in lower margin to more transactional products. Given our strong sales growth margin was also negatively impacted by vendor funding, which while increasing in absolute dollars represented a lower percentage of net sales. And as expected the higher mix of federal sales also negatively impacted gross margin. Partially offsetting these decreases were an increase in net service contract revenue, which includes software assurance, warranties and netted down software-as-a-service revenues all booked at a 100% gross margin as well as positive inventory reserve adjustment. Reported SG&A including advertising expense was $327.6 million, 7% higher than last year attributable to…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Benjamin Reitzes with Barclays. Your line is open.

Ben Reitzes

Analyst

Good morning team.

Tom Richards

Management

Hi, Ben.

BenReitzes

Analyst

Hey couple of things, just in terms of how we think about demand and revenue throughout the year, Tom you mentioned client slow and solutions pickup, can you just give us a little more detail there, how much you expect in clients to slow and a little more detail on what's going to pickup the slack and potentially maybe some verticals that pickup the slack as well?

Tom Richards

Management

Yes. I think Ben, my expectation for 2015 is we'll return to what I would describe as a more normal rhythm that we have had in previous years, we had a pretty strong tailwind as you know with the Windows XP and what that caused on the refresh cycle. I think I'm getting out of the business of predicting when cycles end, because I might go for the month. Look, it lasted longer than I thought and obviously at end of the fourth quarter, but what we did see, which I think is important is beginning in the third quarter, the solutions business begin to really come back and really hit a nice rhythm during the second half of the year and we would expect that to continue. Look K-12, I think on this call, you guys have asked me so many times when are they going to run out of the common core digital testing, client device business, I've missed that one a bunch of times, they keep defying logics. So I would tell you, I think they are going to continue to find ways, we have some new things happening in K-12, some e-rate opportunities, which kind of go hand and glove with putting in the networks that are going to help take advantage of digital testing then you have the one-to-one initiative. So we think there is a number of things there to – that will keep that momentum. We think federal was back on our normal rhythm again. Hopefully, we don’t have any exogenous factors like the shutdown. So we think that continues to be strong. You saw a nice year and a really nice end to last year by our corporate gang both med-lar and small business. And we expect that group to continue to grow going forward. So we feel pretty good about heading into 2015, and it's just a little bit of a shift in where the business comes from.

Ben Reitzes

Analyst

All right. And then just sneaking in a follow-up, healthcare it looks in my model, you really be public, but healthcare looks like it was slow and I was wondering if that's going to pick up and I also wondered what your repurchase plans were for 2015? And that's it from me.

Tom Richards

Management

Well, it sounds like three.

Ben Reitzes

Analyst

Yes, yes.

Tom Richards

Management

But, let me sneak in the second one and then I'll flip to Ann. Yes, healthcare this year for us, if you look at the whole year grew about, higher-single digits 9.5. We would expect healthcare to continue to be a mid-to-high single digit growth. I think it is going to have some lumpiness just because of the Affordable Care Act and what its doing to drive out cost causing consolidations. Now I think that would tend to plan our favor because of the breadth of our footprint. But anytime you have consolidations going on, it causes people to pause; try to take cost out and I think you saw then and some of the lumpiness there for sure. But I think on the whole on the average we still expect healthcare to be a good growth segment for us. So I'll let Ann answer the third one.

Ann Ziegler

Management

Yes. On the repurchases Ben, what we've committed to is that, we'll buyback enough shares to offset dilution from our equity plans and that would be roughly 2 million shares in the year. I would say that's a minimum commitment, the repurchase is structured to permit us to buy along any secondary that our sponsors may do. But that will depend on market conditions and timing.

Ben Reitzes

Analyst

Thanks a lot. Good execution.

Tom Richards

Management

Thanks Ben.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Matt Sheerin with Stifel. Your line is open.

Matt Sheerin

Analyst · Stifel. Your line is open.

Yes. Thanks and good morning everyone. Just question regarding your commentary on growth this year, perhaps more momentum on the solutions side versus the transactional side. Would that in theory booster your gross margin through the year and it might be, you finally see a reversal in gross margin throughout the 2015 versus last year?

Tom Richards

Management

Well, if you think about our model, it will impact a couple of different things, I would argue that part of the reason we saw a little bit of improvement in gross margins in the fourth quarter versus the third quarter was the continued improvement of our solutions business, which you are accurate Matt and that is got a higher margin profile. But there is a double-edged sword to everything in life, the downside of that is – is that we, they tend to be more complex, require technical resources as I said in my formal comments and therefore tend to maybe drive up your sales compensation. So we're – that - work this year and the reverse so to speak, because transaction business doesn't require that. Then in next year, while we'll benefit from hopefully maybe having some pressure to grow, I can use that analogy gross margin you'll have the offsetting fact of having to pay more people.

Matt Sheerin

Analyst · Stifel. Your line is open.

Got you. So the EBIT margin is very won't be impacted that much there.

Tom Richards

Management

That is exactly why we focus on the EBIT margin because it's really the things that we can control most and you will hear us talk about the EBIT margin most frequently because of that very reason.

Matt Sheerin

Analyst · Stifel. Your line is open.

Okay. And just my second question, regarding the potential server upgrade cycle that a lot of suppliers and distributors are talking about, are you having conversations with customers there and it seems like it may not be one for one replacement where customers opt for alternatives either a cloud solution or another platform. And how does CDW play in that scenario?

Tom Richards

Management

Matt that is very accurate. Fortunately we're having more than just conversations. We're actually having success. We started in the middle of last year a pretty aggressive and thoughtful Windows 2003 server initiative. We are finding as you might expect, some different kind of feedback from customers. There are many customers that we've been able to already help. And I would suggest that was a small part of why you saw some of the positive growth in servers. But the other thing that, we're hearing is the many customers either through virtualization have created capacity and so there are not necessarily automatically adding new servers, but maybe expanding the capacity of existing servers, in addition to looking at cloud-based solutions, which, as turned out great for us, it's one of the reasons our cloud business as had such exceptional growth. So I think it will be – look it's, I hesitate to use the word tailwind, because of what a big tailwind XP was, but I think it will be a mild tailwind from – for 2015.

Matt Sheerin

Analyst · Stifel. Your line is open.

Okay. Thanks very much and best of luck this year.

Tom Richards

Management

All right. Thanks Matt.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Tien-tsin Huang with JPMorgan. Your line is open.

Tien-tsin Huang

Analyst

Great. Thanks good morning, good results here. Just first on the transactional mix versus solutions being higher, is that a function of budget flaws or something else and what's going to drive the mix higher or towards solutions in 2015?

Tom Richards

Management

Thanks Tien-tsin. I would say it was more a function of the Windows XP exploration as the kick starter. But I think once people got into the mode of doing that, they were, they took advantage of it and started to just expand it beyond just Windows XP and did a refresh cycle.

Tien-tsin Huang

Analyst

Make sense, it make sense. And this is for Ann, just a clarification on the 2015 guidance, through 2015 so easing that as a compounded annual growth rate meaning the average through period for 2015 or is that an annual growth expectation for 2015, do you follow on that?

Ann Ziegler

Management

Yes. That's an annual growth expectation for 2015.

Tien-tsin Huang

Analyst

Terrific 2015 over 2014. Thanks again.

Tom Richards

Management

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Brian Alexander with Raymond James. Your line is open.

Brian Alexander

Analyst · Raymond James. Your line is open.

Okay. Thanks. Ann, you mentioned vendor funding in the minus column if you will this quarter as it relates to gross margin, but you also said that you added higher funding dollar. So I'm just curious if the margin rate decline was that more mix driven or are there more holistic changes that your vendors are making in terms of how they approach vendor funding?

Ann Ziegler

Management

No. Brian, it was mix. That was what I was alluding to, because the revenues grew so much and vendor funding is a little bit more of a fixed dollar, so while the dollars were higher, just as the mix impact it had a negative margin effect.

Brian Alexander

Analyst · Raymond James. Your line is open.

Okay. And then just the follow-up is on software. Tom, I understand it was influenced, down 1%, influenced by a higher mix of net sales and SaaS sales and that depresses revenue, but it increases gross margin, I think you said gross profit dollars up high single-digits. So I'm curious, in the situations where your software vendors are converting from a license model to a SaaS model. Do you think CDW is at least holding its own in terms of market share? And when you look at the economics to CDW, over the life of a SaaS agreement are you generally making similar, more or less profit dollars than you were under the old model?

Tom Richards

Management

So Brian, I think your description is accurate, although I would probably change it. I'd like, we're actually not holding our own, based on the success of our cloud business, and the SaaS growth rate, it feels, although it's a pretty complicated comparison, truthfully trying to compare the two. But I would think as far as just pure market share and helping customers, I think holding own would be the minimum. As far as the financial model, it's a little bit premature I think, and here's why. As you make the conversion to, in some cases subscription, that becomes a monthly payment process and extends, can extend over multiple years. But then you also have lots of opportunities to upgrade even once that's in place and we really haven't seen that play out yet. I can tell you that the complexity and just the thought of going through which workloads do I want to put in the cloud, how do I want to think about my on-prem solutions versus what I have off-prem, has caused many of our customers to actually come to us and say help us think through this. And that's why we've added those cloud client executives this year. We're now up to 15. Those people can sit down with customers and actually have that detailed planning discussion. So up to this point it's been, as I said at the IPO, it's been a positive thing for CDW and our cloud growth has been exceptional.

Brian Alexander

Analyst · Raymond James. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks a lot.

Tom Richards

Management

Yes. Thanks, Brian.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Bill Shope with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Bill Shope

Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Okay. Thanks. I wanted to dig in a bit more on the solutions and enterprise momentum you guys are looking for this year outside of servers. How are you thinking about other categories like storage? Are you seeing any signs of a refresh here as we head into 2015? And then I guess related to that you have commented on storage growth. If you could break that down as you have done in the past in the terms of incremental color and legacy versus emerging growth within storage?

Tom Richards

Management

Well, let me answer the second one first, Bill. The second one is it was more balanced this quarter. We saw strong growth from what you might think of is the more traditional solutions from a storage perspective. But we continue to see strong growth from the emerging brands and a lot of the flash technology so I just think it was a quarter where you had balanced growth, probably why we had a pretty good quarter overall relative to the growth rate. When we think of solutions, it's a much broader context than for us just servers and storage. It's our NetComm business, which has been a really stable and strong growing business. If you look at our performance over the last multiple quarters, NetComm is usually in the top two or three growth categories every quarter, which I think is a manifestation of what's going on in the data center as well as the growth in cloud computing. The second thing is our services practice, which is another meaningful part of our solutions business and again that's been a really strong growth for us, tied to our deployment of those customer-facing coworkers I talked about that are close to customers that can help do managed solutions and services. And the other one, converged infrastructure, which is something we don't talk about a lot, it includes network, but it also includes our security practice which is growing very aggressively in our collaboration practice, which is growing aggressively. So that is kind of more of a holistic picture, I didn't even get into the mobility part that I mentioned in the script so that's really how we think about solutions, not just the server and storage.

Bill Shope

Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Okay. That's helpful. And then quickly if I could, on the buyback. I wanted to understand why you wouldn't get more aggressive than just countering dilution this year? And I guess related to that, could you remind us of any legacy restrictions you still have on the buy back with some of your prior debt deals?

Ann Ziegler

Management

So let me address the last question first. Under the remaining 8.5% notes we have outstanding, there's a restricted payment basket, which would be obviously hit if we did a share buyback. That dollar amount is roughly $225 million as of the end of Q4. Obviously, that restriction would go away once we refinance the 8.5% and then the relevant RP basket becomes the one under the term loan, which at this point is in excess of $700 million so much less of a restriction. In terms of how aggressive we're going to be on the buy back this year it's not – I guess I don't mean to say we're not going to be more aggressive. What I'm saying is the minimum commitment that we've made is to offset dilution. Whether we become more aggressive depends on market conditions, opportunities, obviously if we exercise our call option on Kelway that will be a use of cash as well. So at this point in the year, it's just hard to be more specific than that. We'll obviously do the minimum commitment.

Bill Shope

Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Okay. Thank you.

Tom Richards

Management

Thanks, Bill.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Sherri Scribner with Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.

Sherri Scribner

Analyst · Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.

Hi. Thanks. Just thinking about your long-term goals about growing the U.S. IT market by 200 basis points to 300 basis points. I just wanted to understand in terms of your perspective, is that additional opportunity for share gain? How much more share opportunity is there for you, or is it largely driven by your mix of business and being better positioned in growing segments?

Tom Richards

Management

I would say yes, Sherri. First of all, if you think about CDW being a $12 billion business, our addressable market is over $200 billion so, there – and that's just in the U.S. Lots of upside for us relative to market share and market share opportunity both with existing customers and with those customers that unfortunately aren't customers of CDW at this point, yet. The second thing would be your point about the solutions business, obviously gives us opportunities to further penetrate into the data center and become more trusted advisors with our customers. So it really is a combination of both.

Sherri Scribner

Analyst · Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.

Okay, great. Thank you. And then, Ann, just quickly on the interest expense; I know you said that now your interest rate is about 5% on a blended basis and I think you said – just wanted more clarifications, I think you said the interest rate dropped in 2Q. Just trying to figure out how to model it for the full year based on $160 million to $170 million for the full year? Thanks.

Ann Ziegler

Management

Yes. I was alluding to the interest rate dropping because we've indicated that we'll refinance the 8.5% no later than when they've first become callable, which is in April of 2015. So it's too soon to say the amount of that drop because I don't know what the markets are going to be and what we'll be able to refinance that. The two most recent refinancings we did at 5.5% and 6%, but it depends on market conditions when we do that refinancing.

Sherri Scribner

Analyst · Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.

Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Katie Huberty with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Jerry Liu

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Hi. Hey. It's Jerry for Katie. Just a question on the solutions versus transactional. Understand that solutions momentum is increasing going into this year and finally it's slowing down. But with the common core debt line into spring – in the spring of this year could we see transactional stronger in the first half? Or would CIOs not be rushing to do upgrades?

Tom Richards

Management

Jerry, that's a good question. Look, we still – there's a significant number of school districts that have not deployed yet and there is some discussion about whether they would extend the date relative to reimbursement funding. So I wouldn't be surprised if you saw some of the school districts extend their acquisition, especially when you think about the kind of linkage to the one-to-one initiative from a digital curriculum standpoint. So I don't think we should depend on the fury that we've kind of seen, to get ready, but I wouldn't be surprised if we saw school districts in the first half of the year trying to get ready for spring 2015.

Jerry Liu

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Got it. And the follow-up is on a strong NetComm growth that you commented on. I assume a lot of that is related to the client refresh. Is any of that related to customers going to a hybrid model or using the cloud, I mean just trying to figure out if that momentum is going to continue as well.

Tom Richards

Management

I think the thing about the NetComm growth is it has been really consistent both before the big client refresh and through the client refresh. I think it's a function of kind of the popularity and growth in mobility inside of businesses. It's a function of the increased use of cloud computing. So there's a number of things that are driving it that are in addition to the client refresh. So that is why we would expect it to continue to be a good growth category for us.

Jerry Liu

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Got it. Thank you.

Tom Richards

Management

Yes.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Amit Daryanani with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Amit Daryanani

Analyst · RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Thanks a lot. Good morning, guys. Two questions for me. One, maybe you could just talk a little bit more in Kelway maybe you've had some more time to spend with them, I'm sure. Do you think there's some structurally that at Kelway that prevents the operating margin over time getting closer to what CDW has which is currently, I believe, at 2.5%, 3%?

Tom Richards

Management

Well look, we have spent, obviously additional time with Kelway. We've had three or four months of working closer with the team. And as I said I think on the last call, we think there are learning opportunities for both sides both operationally, go-to-market. So our focus has been on the pilot that we've been operating for 18 months. We're going to continue to operate in that role even though we're a 35% investor in Kelway. But I don't think you should be sitting here going, okay, CDW is going to increase its ownership automatically Kelway's margins are going to dramatically increase. I think that's an unfair assumption. We do think there are lots of opportunities though for us to improve the efficiencies on both sides of the pond.

Amit Daryanani

Analyst · RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Fair enough. Then if I could just look at the 2015 outlook that you guys have provided a mid-teens EPS growth. I'm curious is that the way to think about, what do you think operating income dollar growth would because I assume there's some sort of deleverage and potentially in buybacks that that's built into the mid-teen EPS growth, so just trying to get a sense how much of that is operating income driven versus leveraged below the operating income line?

Ann Ziegler

Management

Yes. I mean I think the way you need to think about it is we focus on EBITDA, EBITDA margins and we're looking at maintaining those margins. So we would expect the EBITDA margins to be relatively consistent with the rest of the growth coming from further interest reductions as well as stock buy backs.

Amit Daryanani

Analyst · RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Perfect. Thanks a lot, guys.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Jayson Noland with Robert Baird. Your line is open.

Jayson Noland

Analyst · Robert Baird. Your line is open.

Great. Thank you.

Tom Richards

Management

Hey, Jason.

Jayson Noland

Analyst · Robert Baird. Your line is open.

Hello. Ann, a question on seasonality. You mentioned on your slide on modeling on the revenue side, would that look normal in comparison to past years for cal 2015 about 48, 52 first half, second half?

Ann Ziegler

Management

At this point we are expecting relatively normal seasonality as we move through the year. Now that can obviously change as exogenous factors happen during near but right now we are looking for roughly normal seasonality.

Jayson Noland

Analyst · Robert Baird. Your line is open.

Okay. And then a follow up question, I think in the script your business in Canada, FX is mentioned as a headwind. I assume that's true with Kelway to a certain extent. How do you manage a strong dollar with your business outside the U.S.?

Ann Ziegler

Management

At this point, it's all translation adjustment. I mean Canada buys in dollars and pays in dollars and so it's a translation adjustment. We did take about a 40 basis point hit to top line growth in 2014 because of that translation adjustment. When you look at Kelway at this point it's a relatively de minimis part of the business, you saw the small amount that we reported in other income net. And again, its translation adjustment so at this point we are not doing any hedges.

Jayson Noland

Analyst · Robert Baird. Your line is open.

Okay. Congrats on the success. Thanks.

Tom Richards

Management

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Anil Doradla with William Blair. Your line is open.

Anil Doradla

Analyst · William Blair. Your line is open.

Hey, guys. Congrats on the quarter. A couple of questions. Tom, you talked about K-12, some of the education trends, but when I look at 2015, do you think this is going to be a growth business?

Tom Richards

Management

Oh yes. I do. Yes, absolutely. It'd be pretty hard for them to repeat the incredible growth they had in 2013 and 2014, but we do believe K-12 remains a growth business for CDW.

Anil Doradla

Analyst · William Blair. Your line is open.

Great. And one of the kind of secret sauces that you've always talked about is the culture, work culture. Can you share some attrition numbers? I mean whether it's 2014 or during the quarter, employee attrition numbers and compare that against your competitors?

Tom Richards

Management

We don’t share those kind of attrition and quite honestly I don't know the competitors. I can't tell you this that it continues to be a place where people start and in many cases finish their career, and I think that speaks volumes about the work environment. And I've often said this, I think the reason CDW takes such good care of its customers is because the co-workers take such good care of each other first.

Anil Doradla

Analyst · William Blair. Your line is open.

Great. All right. Thanks about that.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. I am showing no further questions. I'd like to turn the call back to Tom Richards for closing remarks.

Tom Richards

Management

Okay. Thank you again to everybody for taking time out of your morning to talk about CDW. We appreciate your interest. We are very proud of 2014, and equally as excited about 2015 and the things we're going to be able to do to help customers. So if your company isn't taking advantage of CDW you know where to find us. And as always it's Valentine's Day. Go hug somebody. Thanks everybody, see you.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today's conference. This does conclude today's program. You may all disconnect. Everyone have a great day.