Earnings Labs

CDW Corporation (CDW)

Q4 2015 Earnings Call· Tue, Feb 9, 2016

$132.96

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the CDW Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2015 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, there will be a question-and-answer session and instructions will follow at that time. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Tom Richards, Chairman and CEO. Sir, you may begin.

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

Thank you, Shannon. Good morning, everyone and thank you for joining us today to discuss CDW's fourth quarter and full year 2015 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 full year and fourth quarter performance and share some thoughts on our strategic progress and expectations for 2016. 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 L. Macrie - CDW Corp.

Management

Thank you, Tom. Good morning, everyone. Our fourth quarter and full year 2015 earnings release was distributed this morning and is available on our website, www.investor.cdw.com, 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 our Form 8-K which 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 will find reconciliation chart in the slides for today's webcast, as well as in our press release and the Form 8-K we furnished to the SEC today. Please note that all references to growth rates or dollar amount increases in our remarks today are versus the comparable period in 2014 unless otherwise indicated. In addition, all references to growth rates for hardware product, software and services, today represent organic net sales only and do not include the results from Kelway. The number of selling days for the fourth quarter and full-year are the same in both 2015 and 2014, so there is no difference in growth rates for average daily sales and reported sales for either period. A replay of this webcast will be posted to our website by this time tomorrow. I would also like to remind you that this conference call is the property of CDW and may not be recorded or rebroadcast without specific written permission from the company. And with that, let me turn the call back to Tom.

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

Thanks, Sari. 2015 was a year of both strong financial performance and strategic progress. For the year, we delivered a net sales increase of 7.6% with excellent profitability. Adjusted EBITDA increased 12.3% and non-GAAP earnings per share increased 23.6%. On a constant currency organic basis, which excludes results from our August 2015 acquisition of Kelway, net sales increased 5.3%. Our performance in 2015 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 briefly walk through each of these and how they contributed to performance. First, the power of our balanced portfolio of five U.S. channels each with over $1 billion in annual net sales. In 2015, we had balanced performance across our two segments with both Corporate and Public increasing 5%. MedLar and Small Business each delivered mid single-digit growth. On our Public side, strong results from our Government business both from federal and state and local, offset flat sales in Education and lumpiness in Healthcare. On a constant currency basis, Canada grew mid single-digits. Second, our diverse product suite, of more than 100,000 products from over 1,000 leading and emerging brands, which ensures we are well positioned to meet our customers' needs, whether transactional or highly complex. As you will recall in 2014, we had strong client device demand from both XP exploration driven PC refresh and Common Core curriculum digital testing requirements. That led to client device sales of nearly 6 million notebooks and desktops, which drove strong transaction growth. This year, solutions grew more rapidly than transactions, continuing the acceleration we saw in the second half of 2014. With nearly double-digit increase for the year, solutions represented a more typical 50-50 split, up from the 47% they represented in 2014. This…

Ann Elizabeth Ziegler - CDW Corp.

Management

Thanks, Tom. Good morning, everyone. As Tom indicated, our fourth quarter and full-year financial results reflect the combined power of our balanced portfolio of channels, our breadth of product offerings, particularly our ability to bring innovative emerging technologies to our customers and our focus on profitable growth. They also reflect the progress we are making against our long-term financial strategy to drive strong cash flow, deliver double-digit earnings growth and return cash to our shareholders. Turning to the P&L, if you have access to the slides posted online, it will be helpful to follow along. I am on slide eight. Consolidated top-line growth was excellent this quarter with net sales of $3.42 billion, 12.1% higher than last year, while sales in Canadian dollars remain a relatively small portion of our total net sales, less than 4%. The strengthening U.S. dollar continued to depress organic net sales. Currency shaved approximately 70 basis points off of organic growth in the quarter, 30 basis points more than last year and 10 basis points more than last quarter. On a constant currency basis, organic net sales were 5.8% higher than last year. On an organic average daily sales basis, sequential sales were down 3.1% versus Q3 2015, which is in line with our usual Q4 seasonality. Gross profit for the quarter increased 13.4% to $557.6 million. Gross margin in the fourth quarter was 16.3%, up 20 basis points above last year. Kelway continues to favorably impact margin given its higher mix of solution and services and we continued to mix into revenue recorded at a 100% gross margin such as our net service contract revenue. As you know, net service contract revenue favorably impacts gross margin, but does temper revenue growth. Consolidated reported SG&A, including advertising expense, was $377.7 million, 15.3% higher than last…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our first question is from Matt Sheerin with Stifel. You may begin. Matthew Sheerin - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.: Yes. Thanks and good morning. Tom, in regard to your commentary regarding cloud adoption and the acceleration of SaaS application sales, we've seen similar commentary from several of your vendors and distributors, and concern about legacy hardware demand. Do you have similar concerns? Or are you capturing that revenue in different ways such as from emerging products or selling a SaaS application, cloud services, et cetera, and do you see that accelerating further this year?

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

Okay. Good morning, Matt. Thanks for your question. Yes, first of all, let's start with kind of the premise that despite our success, we still only have 6% of the addressable market. So I think that's a great starting point. Yes, we do expect our cloud success to continue. It's of interest to customers, but I think I've said this at least for the last three years or four years, I do believe that customers will settle in on a hybrid model for their IT infrastructure, and as such that will include parts of the platform being on-prem. If you think about our results this quarter, Matt, I think it's an interesting example. Servers grew very nicely in the quarter, which indicates that you can have both and you will have both as customers kind of look at workloads and make the decision where the workload is best positioned. I think if you look at our storage results this quarter, mid-single digits, a lot of that driven by emerging technology. If you think about converged infrastructure, which I would argue is kind of an on-prem response in some ways to a pure cloud model, I think you've got lots of opportunities. And then the last one is think about the netcomm. We've had this drumbeat going, if you will, on successful netcomm growth – meaningful successful netcomm growth. So I think all of those can co-exist and it's especially exciting for us, because we still have a relatively small percent of the overall addressable market. Matthew Sheerin - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.: Okay, great. That's helpful. And on the Education market, you talked about the puts and takes there with the hardware slowing but eRate picking up. Do you see more of the same this year or will there be an equal offset and you won't get much growth from that market?

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

Well, I think, it's best, Matt, to actually break it into the two subcomponents, because each of them have a little different dynamics going on. If you think about K-12, a lot of what was a real challenge from a growth perspective to that group this year was the bizarre success they had in 2014 and most of it driven by Common Core curriculum. So as many of you pointed out to us when we were on the road last year, how are you going to grow on top of that, that now is kind of behind that group. I think another interesting thing, and you saw it in the results in the quarter, is as the eRate funds begin to flow that you see an increase in solutions business. And so K-12 had a nice quarter in some of the, what we would call, data center products, be they netcomm, be they servers and storage. And so we would expect that balance to be more representative going forward and as you also know. And I don't want to become an expert on eRate here, but the eRate of 2015 is still being deployed and we're yet beginning the eRate process for 2016. So you will look at that as a great opportunity for the people in K-12. If you go to higher-ed, it's a function of a lot of those institutions depend on state funds. And I think some of what you saw in the last half of last year was just directly tied to state funding. I know I serve on the board of a higher education institution. That certainly was a challenge for that institution, and we're anticipating that that's going to get resolved sometime during the year and things will return to normal in higher-ed. Matthew Sheerin - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.: Okay. Thanks very much.

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

Okay.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Rich Kugele with Needham. You may begin.

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

Good morning, Rich. Rich J. Kugele - Needham & Co. LLC: Thank you. Good morning. Good to see the leverage in the quarter. I wanted to just ask specifically then about the broader IT spending market in the U.S. You said that you thought that it would be closer to 2% and then I suppose ramping as the year goes on to the 3% range. Can you just talk about where you might be seeing the weakness to back that up or do you think it's more of a high-end enterprise problem? Any comments on that?

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

No, I think, look, if you just think about the mixed economic signals here in the last probably 30 days or 60 days, on the strong side, you've got the labor market, you've got unemployment, you've got gas prices, you've got all of those things that would typically drive the consumer spending. But at the same time, as you guys know you've got weakness in manufacturing and the oil industry and you've got kind of general macro worldwide economic concern, and I think you just sense. Now, I don't have a statistic, Rich, but you just sense a little bit of angst and we think while that's angst driven by the financial markets, we do think it causes people to be a little more thoughtful and cautious. But you also, I think, have confidence that as we move through the year, we kind of get some stability that we'll get back to that 3% range. So it's more of what do we sense. If you're asking like are customers coming to us saying, we're delaying our decisions, I would say it's not that stark. I think there are people just being more cautious right now as we kind of see how this plays out. Rich J. Kugele - Needham & Co. LLC: Okay. And then just as a follow-up to that, is any of that causing you to change your inventory buying or are you trying to play things little closer to give yourself a little bit more flexibility or do you think your own plan is sufficient?

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

No, look, we're pretty thoughtful about that on an ongoing basis, Rich, and so we are going to be opportunistic where it makes the sense to do that from an inventory standpoint. And so much of the business today doesn't necessarily just come into the warehouse, whether it's because it's customized or it's driven by software, that isn't quite kind of the big challenge it probably was five years ago. Rich J. Kugele - Needham & Co. LLC: Excellent. Well done. Thank you.

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

Okay. Thanks, Rich.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Amit Daryanani with RBC Capital Markets. You may begin.

Amit Daryanani - RBC Capital Markets LLC

Analyst · RBC Capital Markets. You may begin.

Thanks a lot. Good morning, guys. Couple of questions for me. First off, just to start off with the Dell relationship. I'm wondering, as you go beyond 2016 and the $200 million contribution, do you think it kind of stabilizes at these revenue run rates or is there a bigger ramp up beyond the $200 million you're going to see this year with them?

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

Good morning, Amit. Look, I think it obviously continues to grow. I think Michael put the number out there, a $1 billion, which I told him thanks a lot. But we do see the relationship expanding and again not necessarily at the cost of our other partners, because at 5% or 6% market share, there's lots of opportunity for us. I think we're trying to be thoughtful about it, because of the customers' expectation of what we deliver and wanting to do it right. And so we think that kind of 2016, if you will, will be kind of the first full year of the ramp.

Amit Daryanani - RBC Capital Markets LLC

Analyst · RBC Capital Markets. You may begin.

Got it. And I guess, Ann, you talked about fiscal 2016 EBITDA margins to be at the higher end of the target range, I assume kind of high-7%s, close to 8%. This would be the second year in a row you're well above the target range which you guys have talked about. I'm curious I mean do you think do we start to think about your EBITDA margins as high-7%s to 8% longer term? Or you don't want to go that far quite yet?

Ann Elizabeth Ziegler - CDW Corp.

Management

No, we actually think we'll be within our target range in 2016 of the mid-7% range, which we defined as 7.4% to 7.6%. So we do actually expect – because of investments in SG&A, we do expect the adjusted EBITDA margin to be lower in 2016 than it was in 2015 and at the high-end of our medium-term target range.

Amit Daryanani - RBC Capital Markets LLC

Analyst · RBC Capital Markets. You may begin.

Fair enough. Thank you.

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

Thanks, Amit.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Mark Moskowitz with Barclays. You may begin.

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

Hi, Mark.

Mark Moskowitz - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst

Yes. Good morning. Thank you. A couple of questions if I could. Just kind of curious if you could talk about how we should think about the contributions to revenue growth in 2016 versus 2015 from your emerging vendors' bucket versus your more traditional vendors' bucket? And I have a follow-up.

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

Yes. Gee, it's tough to quantify that for you, Mark, truthfully. I think if you think about it by product family, obviously in the storage business, you continue to see this incredible growth, that is offsetting some of the legacy products and it produced in the quarter, what, mid-single-digit. So, I think that's probably representative of where most of the emerging players are coming from with the exception of security where we, as I think mentioned in the script, continue to add new security partners and the growth rates are triple-digits. It's not necessarily that way in every one of the product suites where you have an influx, it really is in specific product areas and right now, we're seeing most of the emerging vendors in converged infrastructure, storage, if you keep that as a separate category, and software, I think, are where the biggest new players are.

Mark Moskowitz - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. Thank you. And then as a follow-up on the commentary today around services and just the increased SG&A related to the services thrust going forward, how should investors think about kind of the multi-year tail there in terms of – is there really a nice deeper penetration in terms of the current revenue opportunities as you think about the services, engagements kind of taking full strides one to two years out?

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

Yeah, look...

Mark Moskowitz - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst

And with deeper penetration of the wallet?

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

Yeah. Well, from a penetration of wallet, Mark, you're kind of dead-on to the strategy so to speak is that if you think about our historic legacy, which was predominantly kind of a hardware driven and you think about the evolution of technology, the more dominating position software is playing, even in hardware like network is a great example or netcomm. And then you expand it to kind of the issue for our customers, this is IT resource issue and the need to have a partner that can take on some of those implementation and service activities, we would expect that to become an increasingly large part of our business and you add on top of that, cloud computing, which you could argue is more of a services play. I think you should look to and we expect the services business and therefore the good margins, which is implied that go with that business to be an increasing part of our profile going forward.

Mark Moskowitz - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst

Thank you.

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

Okay. Thanks, Mark.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Matt Cabral with Goldman Sachs. You may begin. Matthew N. Cabral - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Thank you. So I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into where you stand with the integration of Kelway relative to your plan, both in terms of increasing share with your existing customers as well as the opportunity to add in new customers? And then related to that, I just wanted to know what the experience so far has really taught you about the potential to – potentially further expand internationally in the future?

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

Okay. Well, Matt, first as I think I alluded to in the script, the integration itself is on plan and going well. And more specifically, you heard me mention that the cross business is building, so to speak, cross-border business. Just to give you a perspective, since we started this process, I can tell you we've got 10 or 11 pretty significant deals that have come as a result of this integration and it's generated north of $50 million in business. So as we would have expected, you're beginning to see the momentum build. Having said that, I think we're still at the tip of the iceberg, only because we are being pretty careful about the customers and what they're looking for and how we respond to those customers, just because the subject of international can be – if you just say, are you in the international business that can be a pretty large part of the world, so to speak, and so we're being thoughtful. If you remember, Kelway is a UK-dominant company at this point with, I think I'd shared last time about 90% of their revenue is coming from the UK. But they have built a hub-and-spoke strategy, where they have locations in other parts of the world and that will be the way we will continue to expand our capabilities is by following that kind of hub-and-spoke expansion. And typically, it's done by following a customer to a particular area and then using that to expand in the area. Matthew N. Cabral - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Great. And then as a follow-up. Can you talk about what you're seeing in the PC market right now and what you're expecting out of that going into 2016? And also just what level of client interest you're seeing right now around Windows 10?

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

All right, let me take the second one first. And keep me honest here, if I don't answer the first one second. So, on Windows 10, I think there's a decent amount of interest. I think though, Matt, what they're doing is following their normal refresh cycle. And when the opportunity presents itself then they would implement Windows 10. I don't believe it's a kind of full course spread, let's go get it done now, it's more of we're on this normal cycle, it appears to be from many different vantage points, it provides power and different efficiencies, but it's not a – if you're thinking about is it a massive tailwind, the way Windows XP expiration was, I would say no, the word I've used is, it's going to be a gentle breeze at our back. The second thing is, this year was an interesting year for us in the client devices, especially notebooks, and to a equal degree, tablets, because we had that incredible 2014. If you think about it, even from a notebook and mobile device perspective, on top of – I think in 2014, that category grew something like 36% or some ridiculous number, this year we were in the mid-single digits. So I think pretty impressive considering that we would expect it to continue to be kind of a normal part of the growth trajectory. In fact, I tell people all the time, even before 2014, if you look at our performance in client devices in 2011 and 2012, even when all people reporting death of the PC, et cetera, et cetera, that continued to be a growth business for us, a steady growth business. We have no reason to believe that's not going to be the case continuing going forward. Matthew N. Cabral - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Got it. Thank you.

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

Yep.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Brian Alexander with Raymond James. You may begin. Brian G. Alexander - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Okay. Thanks, good morning. Tom, just focusing on the first half of the year and looking at the guidance you gave. It looks like you are expecting revenue to be up around 12%, if I take all the components that you messaged market up to share gain, Dell, Kelway and add it all up. I just want to make sure we're on the same page that you're looking for low double-digit growth, because consensus is closer to about 14%.

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

Are you talking about at a consolidated level, that's what you're talking about? Brian G. Alexander - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Yeah. Consolidated sales in the first half year.

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

And, I think you have to start with, Brian. I think even as you noted in some of your published material is that we originally built the original targets on a 3% and we're saying we think it's going to start at 2%. That has a corresponding impact all the way through the business, nothing has changed about how we feel about Kelway, nothing has changed about how we feel about Canada. I think you also though have to then consider the currency impact which is obviously a little different than it was and if you kind of take those two things out of the equation, I think it looks pretty much exactly the way we stated so that hopefully gets you squared with the number. Brian G. Alexander - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Yep. That's helpful. And then Ann, just to follow-up on DSOs up six days I think year-over-year. How much of that was driven by the impact of net revenue accounting as you go more to services, et cetera and the mix that affects DSOs, how much of it was that versus an actual underlying increase in DSOs, I know you talked about extending payment terms to large customers, should we expect that to continue?

Ann Elizabeth Ziegler - CDW Corp.

Management

Yeah, a couple of things. It was really on the Public side of the business. Public had significant strength in Q4 and in general our Public customers have longer DSOs than the Corporate side of the business. So that was the impact I was referring to; in particular, we had some large deals where payment extended into 2016. You get eRate business for example, which just takes longer to collect because of all the administrative burden associated with it. In your first question, if you're looking at the impact of netted down revenue so to speak, a very high level way to look at that is to look at the corresponding increase in DPO because remember it causes DSO to go up and it also causes DPO to go up in a way that generally offsets it. So at a very high level if you look at the change there, that will be the part that will be attributed to netting down and then the rest would be the mix into Public. Brian G. Alexander - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Great. Thank you very much.

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

Thanks, Brian.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Sherri Scribner with Deutsche Bank. You may begin.

Sherri A. Scribner - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Hi, thank you. I wanted to get a little more detail on the strength you're seeing in the storage segment. It sounded obviously like the emerging segments are seeing growth and I know you mentioned converged, but are you seeing an increased adoption of flash-based storage at your customers, is that transition accelerating?

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

Yes, Sherri, I think in the script I actually remember the numbers, triple-digit growth, in our flash business.

Sherri A. Scribner - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Yeah.

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

So, your instincts are right on, it is becoming like any other new technology, the more it gets deployed, the more costs come down, the greater customers deploy the technology. And so, it is driving a big part of the emerging growth in our business, which has at this point more than offset the, what I will call the legacy business.

Sherri A. Scribner - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. Thanks. And then, I just wanted to circle back on the services business and the recurring aspect of that. I guess when I think about your services, I think of it more as helping customers adopt new technologies, but not necessarily as a recurring service like a traditional service. Can you maybe help us think about that and maybe gauge how to think about how it recurs? Thanks.

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

I can help, I think that's a great question, because it does sometimes get lost in the shuffle so to speak. If you looked at it today, the lion's share of our services business is kind of project management driven, right, that's implementing a netcomm solution for somebody, but if you think about areas like infrastructure-as-a-service, remote network management and monitoring, some of the SaaS products, those are all more in the what I'll call recurring revenue stream even though that today still isn't pure Sherri, because I think people are still adopting to how do I deliver a recurring revenue capability. But I would tell you my instincts are that over time, that will increase, now I don't know what the pace is going to be, but I do see if you just think about us building our command center, it was to address an ongoing opportunity in remote network management and monitoring and that is more of a recurring revenue service capability.

Sherri A. Scribner - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Thank you.

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

All right, thanks Sherri.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I'm going to turn the call back over to Mr. Richards for closing remarks.

Thomas E. Richards - CDW Corp.

Management

Okay. Thanks again everybody for taking the time this morning. I appreciate your questions and your interest in CDW. And I'm going to close with, it's Valentine's Day and Sari holds her breath when we get to this part of the call. So for all you guys out there, don't blow it, you'll pay for it for a long time. And if I can appeal to your emotional quotient, I read yesterday that $13 billion are spent on Valentine's Day. So from an economic perspective, please contribute to the economy. Thanks everybody. See you.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference. Thanks for your participation and have a wonderful day.