Alan S. McKim
Analyst · Sidoti & Company
Thanks, David, and good morning, everyone. Q1 was our first quarter as a combined organization with Safety-Kleen. It's also our first quarter where we are reporting our 5 new reportable segments. Going forward, we'll be reporting our performance through these 5 reportable segments, which we have included at the back of today's news release. This segments are Technical Services, Oil Re-refining and Recycling, Safety-Kleen Environmental Services, Industrial and Field Services and finally, Oil and Gas Field Services. These segments map to our internal operating structure under our 4 presidents that I outlined on our last call with Oil Re-refining and Recycling being further broken out of Safety-Kleen as a fifth segment for SEC reporting purposes. Before going through how each segment performed this quarter, I'd like to provide an update on the integration of Safety-Kleen, which we've now owned for 4 months. Since our Q4 call in February, we have made significant progress in advancing the multiple integration initiatives we have underway. The folks at Safety-Kleen have experienced a tremendous amount of change since the beginning of the year, including new leadership. In April, we announced that Jerry Correll had been promoted to President of Safety-Kleen. Jerry is a seasoned industry executive who has spent more than a decade here at Clean Harbors, following 16 years at Safety-Kleen and Laidlaw. He has a strong sales and operational background and is familiar with both organizations, and that's really made him my ideal fit to succeed Bob Craycraft. Today, we are more confident than ever that the combination of our 2 organizations will be an advantage from both a competitive and financial standpoint. While an integration of this scale is always complex and challenging, we're convinced that the cultural and strategic fit between our 2 companies is a strong one. We've gained a far greater understanding of Safety-Kleen's business processes in the past 4 months, which have reinforced our belief that this was an excellent deal for Clean Harbors and our shareholders. We continue to be excited about the valuable assets and customers we've gained. On the last call, I outlined how we have identified more than 500 projects or tasks that our integration teams are executing against to generate the cost synergies this year. At this point, we feel confident enough in the synergies available to us that we're raising our expected total for 2013 to a range of $70 million to $75 million. By streamlining a number of functions and gaining efficiencies, we're unlocking the full value of our combined organization. But I would like to share 2 key reference points at the high level that we're tracking. One is the ratio of billable to nonbillable headcount, and the other is corporate SG&A. With our billable ratio, prior to the Safety-Kleen acquisition, we had approximately 2.5 billable heads to every billable -- every nonbillable head, while Safety-Kleen had a ratio of 1:1 at the time of the acquisition. At the same time, Clean Harbors corporate SG&A was $102 million in 2012 and Safety-Kleen carries a similar amount on a much lower revenue base, which has essentially doubled our corporate SG&A on an annual basis. Many of the synergies we expect to deliver this year will come from a reduction in both of these metrics. On the cost side, our initiatives include: First, eliminating redundant personnel and processes. So of the $70 million to $75 million total, approximately 1/2 will come from headcount reductions, many of these have been completed in the past 6 weeks. Second, internalization of disposal of Safety-Kleen's waste volumes into our network. We expect this will generate approximately $8 million of annualized savings and we essentially began capturing that during the quarter. Third, internalizing certain outside transportation costs that Safety-Kleen is incurring, which should result in $4 million to $6 million in annualized savings. Fourth, internalizing maintenance for vehicles for the Safety-Kleen fleet that had a number of outsourced maintenance programs that we believe that we can internalize with a resulting savings of up to $4 million annually. Fifth, we have targeted a reduction in our combined professional fees of approximately $4 million. Sixth, we expect to save $3 million to $4 million annually from the internalization of our total project management business, a $50 million business of Safety-Kleen's. We can utilize Clean Harbors' resources to perform field services and CleanPack work that would have been outsourced by Safety-Kleen in the past as part of this business. Seventh, we see opportunities for economies of scale in areas such as procurement. We have national programs in place with suppliers for certain items, as does Safety-Kleen for others. So we're adopting the most cost-effective programs for each side based on our combined volumes, such as office supplies, tires for vehicles and so forth. Lastly, we are nearing completion of the process of moving all of the Safety-Kleen systems to our single platform that uses our proprietary wind system as its backbone and PeopleSoft layered in. Safety-Kleen was running SAP and purchased a number of expensive packages to support its systems. We believe we'll not only generate considerable savings from transitioning Safety-Kleen to our flexible system, our wind systems, but will gain efficiencies, increase asset utilization and enhance our tracking capabilities. The $70 million to $75 million synergies this year is strictly on the cost side. In addition, we see multiple cross-selling opportunities across both organizations. We're in the process of training our combined sales force about our broad service offerings. Whether its selling Clean Harbors' Industrial and Field Services or disposal capabilities into an existing Safety-Kleen customer or promoting Safety-Kleen parts washing business into the plants of our existing customers, we see a number of opportunities that are right for cross-selling. However, we do not expect cross-selling to move the needle too much this year as we complete the integration and the sales training process. We expect that our cross-selling efforts will be a source of meaningful growth for us in late 2013 and into 2014 and beyond. Turning now to Q1 results. On balance, Q1 was a soft quarter for us. As we move forward with the integration of Safety-Kleen, we also experienced a less than robust winter drilling season in Western Canada and the pricing environment in the refining business remained under pressure throughout the quarter. At the same time, our environmental-related businesses were in their seasonally slow period, so any pockets of strength that we saw were not sizable enough to offset the weakness we experienced in Re-refining and Oil and Gas Field Services. So looking at our quarter from the segment level, Technical Services continued to be a steady performer for us this quarter as we generated organic growth of nearly 10% from Q1 a year ago. Utilization at our incinerators was 88.9%, down slightly from 89.7% in Q1 last year, but still at high level of throughput. Geographically, our Canadian operations had an excellent quarter with 95% utilization, while our U.S. locations come in at 87.3% in part due to an unplanned outage we had during the quarter at the El Dorado facility in Arkansas. Following 2 record-setting quarters, volume in our landfill business were down 12% from Q1 of '12, primarily because of the timing of some large-scale projects and slower Bakken-related work due to weather. We view this as a typical quarterly lumpiness within that business and we continue to have a positive outlook for our landfills in 2013. Activity levels were high within our network of transfer, storage and disposal facilities and wastewater treatment plants as we said -- as we saw steady waste streams in the quarter and an increase overall with customer drum volumes. Within our Oil Re-refining and Recycling segment, we faced a challenging pricing environment throughout Q1. Fortunately, pricing trended upward as the quarter progressed. After a $0.38 drop in Group II base oil pricing in January, we saw about a $0.15 price jump in March, although Group II pricing is stable, it is still down over $0.90 per gallon from June of last year. While we're affected by the downward spike in Group II lube pricing, we are taking several important steps to mitigate the volatility going forward. First, we are blending more product. And as margins in the blended market are higher and less subjected to these severe price movements versus Group II, we're targeting getting our blended output to cross that 50% threshold this year. This has been ongoing for several years at Safety-Kleen, but it is a process at Safety-Kleen that continues to produce what the market is demanding. Just 3 years ago, only 38% of Safety-Kleen's output was blended, and last year was closer to 44%. Our blending activities range from mixing in certain additives to generating our own branded line of recycled products sold as EcoPower. As I mentioned on our Q4 call, Safety-Kleen added a $15 million blending facilities to its Indiana site late last year and that is helping with our expansion in this area. The second element in lowering our exposure to the base oil spread is on the input side. Safety-Kleen uses no bridging crude, so we have more control over our feedstock than traditional refineries. We're gathering waste oil from thousands of accounts. We're looking at more rapidly adjusting our pay for oil program to combat pricing pressures and abnormalities in the market. Together, we believe these 2 steps will lower volatility and effects of the near-term pricing swings in the Group 2 marketplace. Within our Safety-Kleen Environmental Service segment, we achieved solid results. This segment is made up of the Safety-Kleen branches, and work primarily consists of its small quantity generator business, parts washers and waste oil collection. We continue to feel strongly that Safety-Kleen's Environmental business can leverage our waste treatment and disposal network. Within the small quantity generator market, we were able to see firsthand, this quarter, how diverse and deep of a customer base Safety-Kleen has built during the past several decades. The parts washer business achieved good results this quarter and we continue to see cross-selling opportunities for us, particularly as we introduce these product offerings to our Canadian customer base. And lastly, on the Safety-Kleen environmental side is the waste oil collection business, where we pick up more than 200 million gallons of used oil annually from customers to supply our re-refining operation, as well as resell the excess in the markets as a recycled fuel oil. This business delivered another steady performance this quarter and we see opportunities for expansion, greater efficiencies as we leverage the Clean Harbors rail infrastructure and collection network with Safety-Kleen. Turning to our Industrial and Field Services. This segment was a solid contributor this quarter. Within the segment, we saw typical results within our turnaround service business for the first quarter and better-than-expected activities in the Oil Sands, where we continue to be well positioned as a go-to provider for Industrial Services at the mines, upgraders and refineries. Bookings at our Lodging business remained at a high level this quarter and continue to generate good margins for us. Field Services, which used to be its own segment is now combined with our Industrial business. Field Services grew in the quarter as we saw a healthy mix of large projects and routine maintenance work this quarter. And finally, within our Oil and Gas Field Service segment, we saw a continuation of the trends we experienced in Q4, with the winter drilling season less robust than we had experienced in 2011. In Western Canada, rig counts remain down about 15%, which continue to affect our rental business in the quarter. In the U.S. market, activity in the quarter was better than it had been for the past several quarters. We have improved our position in the marketplace now that we have successfully repositioned some of our solids control assets and rental equipment in response to the shift in the marketplace toward liquid-rich gas and oil plays. And as we discussed on our Q4 call, we have diversified our client concentration in this market, growing our roster from mid-single digits to approximately 2 dozen key customers. While we experienced a challenging 2012, we believe this business has now stabilized. And during the first quarter, we announced industry veteran, Laura Schwinn, will be heading up this segment and we are optimistic about its opportunities under her leadership. With that, let me turn to our outlook. The Safety-Kleen integration is proceeding at a rapid pace, and we're encouraged by what we've seen so far. The combination of our 2 organizations will create numerous opportunities for margin enhancement and ultimately, profitable growth. During Q2, we are entering the stronger period for our Environmental business and many of our key verticals. However, we continue to expect our revenue and EBITDA growth to be weighed towards the second half of 2013 as we are able to better leverage the Clean Harbors/Safety-Kleen combination as we move through the year. We also will begin to pursue more and more cross-selling opportunities with each of our segments with the continuation of our ongoing sales force training, as I mentioned earlier. However, given the revenue shortfall here in Q1 and our expectations about pricing in the Oil Re-refining segment, we decided to be conservative and lower our revenue guidance for 2013 by $100 million. On the cost side, however, we remain committed to our ongoing expense reduction and margin improvement initiatives. We are confident that we can capture the $70 million to $75 million in planned cost synergies for Safety-Kleen in 2013. Overall, we believe that we can generate enough cost savings in our business to achieve our adjusted EBITDA guidance, despite the lower revenue. So with that, let me turn it over to Jim for the financial review. Jim?