Alan S. McKim
Analyst · Wedbush
Thanks, Michael, and good morning, everyone. Beginning on Slide [Audio Gap] the first quarter of 2015, down 13% year-over-year. While Oil and Gas Field Services and Lodging were responsible for the majority of the decline, currency translation, severe winter weather and base oil pricing also adversely affected our performance. First quarter adjusted EBITDA of $78.3 million came in below the guidance we provided to you on our Q4 call in late February, but those of you who have followed Clean Harbors for years know that March is what makes our first quarter. That's when our environmental business, which is seasonal, typically picks up. This year, the pace of that acceleration was slowed by the lingering effects of a cold and snowy winter in some areas of the country, which caused major project delays in parts of our business, including tech services. Meanwhile, Oil and Gas and Lodging continued to un-perform, which was only exasperated by the winter drilling season in Western Canada being significantly impacted by capital budget reductions and ongoing headwinds in the energy market. I'll now go through the segments in more detail, beginning on Slide 4 with tech services. Segment revenue and profits increased modestly from a year ago, but frankly, we expected more growth. One factor that affected this segment in Q1 was prices on some of the materials and other recyclable materials we sell. This included materials from our transformer services business, which recycles copper and other materials from our utility clients; and catalysts, which we recycle from our chemical and refinery clients from catalyst change-outs. The impact of lower commodity prices in this area was largely offset by an increase in overall drum volumes and more incremental gains from Safety-Kleen as well as another strong quarter in landfill volumes. Tech services achieved an incineration utilization of 91%, driven by another solid contribution from our Canadian facilities. Even though we recently added 12,000 tons of annual practical capacity to our Lambton incineration facility that location still managed to exceed 100% utilization for the quarter. Overall, utilization could have been slightly higher in Q1, but there was one unplanned week-long March shutdown at our El Dorado, Arkansas plant. We're careful about scheduling our planned shutdowns and preventive maintenance for these facilities, but unplanned outages do occur. We are excited about the construction of our new incinerator at El Dorado. The time table for completion remains on schedule, and a lot of the concrete's been poured, and we expect several key components for the facility, such as the rotary kiln, to be delivered this summer. Budgeted at more than $100 million, this will be the single largest investment made in our history, and we're excited to share the progress with all our stakeholders. In the quarter, our landfill business extended its recent momentum, with volumes up more than 20% from a year ago based on a steady stream of projects across a number of vertical markets. Turning to Slide 5. Industrial and Field Services revenue was down 7% year-over-year but overall was in line with our expectation. The weaker Canadian dollar and the significantly slower oil sands environment continues to be factors. The Oil Sands, as you will see from our Lodging results, was a real challenge for us in the quarter. That said, we did see some strength in several areas, including Canadian specialty services and U.S. industrial. Overall, turnaround activity was lower than expected as some companies scaled back projects and pushed work out to Q2 and Q3, due mainly to the refinery worker strike and the turmoil in the energy environment because of the crash in crude pricing. Field services had a relatively soft quarter, but that business had some weather disruptions, particularly on the project side. We do not see any major response opportunities this quarter. Profitability and margins in the segment were lower than expected largely due to project mix, pushouts and pricing pressure from some energy customers. Softness in the segment and the turnaround delays affected overall utilization for our billable personnel, which decreased to 77% from 80% in Q1 of last year. Moving to Slide 6. Our revenue in Oil Re-refining and Recycling was nearly flat with the prior year. Our team has executed well on the Zero-Pay and Charge-for-Oil initiative that we announced in December. There is no question this initiative was necessary. Posted base oil pricing for Group II remains at $2.45 a gallon, and this is down over $2 per gallon since our acquisition of Safety-Kleen. Base oil pricing may rise at some point, but we continue to operate this business under a difficult pricing environment. The loss in the first quarter for our SK oil business was caused by 2 factors: first, the rapid change in base oil pricing that occurred late last year; second, the impact of high-priced waste oil being processed in the quarter. As we discussed on our Q4 call, we have about a 2-month turn in our waste oil inventory from the moment it's picked up at our customer's site to the point it's transported, processed and ultimately sold. So higher-priced inventory gathered in late 2014 was still being processed in the first quarter. Our percentage of blended in the quarter was consistent with the quarter 1 year ago although down from Q4, and this will continue to be a focus for SK oil going forward. Turning to Slide 7. Direct revenue in Safety-Kleen Environmental Services was down 18%, but this is due -- this is really a decline almost entirely due to the lower intercompany costs resulting from lower pay-for-oil. Outside revenue in this segment, as shown here on the slide, was essentially flat as the key elements of this segment, including parts washers and containerized waste, performed well in Q1, which helped drive our margins. Profitability was up 19%, reflecting a good mix of business and the cost reductions we implemented in the past year. Parts washer services increased 17% from a year ago, an encouraging trend that extends the recent momentum we've seen in that business. We remain aggressive in this area, and we expect to regain market share in 2015. As expected, used motor oil collection volumes declined from a year ago as the market reacted to our efforts, to our sharply lower price-for-oil pricing initiative and also the impact from a severe winter weather. We collected about 41 million gallons versus 47 million gallons a year ago. The acquisition of Thermo Fluids, TFI, which I'll talk about shortly, will also increase our used motor oil supply needs going forward. We lowered our average PFO costs significantly in Q1. And while we don't share a specific number for competitive reasons, I can say that we're rapidly approaching 0. The entire Safety-Kleen team has done a good job in working through the spread compression that we have suffered in that business since acquiring Safety-Kleen. We are now moving forward in some markets with charging for oil and also charging stop fees to address the excess transport costs incurred to service many remote customers. We also continue to expand our footprint and grow this segment, opening 3 new branch locations in new markets in the quarter as well as adding 10 new used motor oil trucks for growth. Now the next 2 segments, Lodging and Oil and Gas Field Services, really took a hit this quarter from market forces. The significant crude oil price decline, coupled with the emergency reactions taken by many of our customers to reduce capital budgets, stop any spending they could or demand for significant price concession for services that we perform, proved a major challenge for us. As you can see on Slide 8, Lodging Services revenue was down 40%, while adjusted EBITDA fell 61%. This segment was hit on 2 sides. The winter drilling in Western Canada was almost nonexistent, as this affected our mobile camps business, while a combination of lower occupancy and pricing pressure hurt our fixed lodging locations, too. Our camp manufacturing business was largely on plan in the quarter. Q1 was the first quarter in which our fixed lodges were materially affected by lower Oil Sands activity. Historically, our occupancy rates were reasonably strong even despite a challenging market, even while some of our peers may have faltered. We have maintained great relationships with our customers, and our lodges are many customers' top choice. However, desperate competitors and across-the-board cuts by energy companies have affected both our pricing and our occupancy levels. Occupancy at our fixed lodges was just 50% in Q1 compared with the low-70% range for several previous quarters. The combination of reduced occupancy and competitive pressure to lower our room rates caused the EBITDA and margins to fall substantially from a year ago. Turning to Oil and Gas Field Services on Slide 9. The 47% drop in revenue from the prior year was higher than anticipated. Reduced exploration budgets impacted our seismic support business, while the rapid decline in rig counts both in Canada and the U.S. hurt our surface rentals. In Western Canada, the monthly average rig count in Q1 was 270, which was nearly half of what it was in the first quarter of last year. Our production service group also was affected by the lack of any significant fluid rental and pipeline testing projects as well as lower day-to-day work, with energy companies really holding back on any spending. Nevertheless, we did continue to believe we're gaining some market share as small competitors are struggling, customers are looking to consolidate vendors. We started working with a lot of new customers and really have expanded even into some of the new shale plays. Average utilization of our key equipment, like centrifuges for processing waste, was only down slightly to 51% in the quarter versus 54% a year ago. However, we're experiencing pricing pressures from our customers, which is reflected in our profitability and our margins. Moving to our corporate initiatives on Slide 10. As we announced in this morning's news release, we have elected to expand the planned carve-out to include our entire Lodging Service segment, a move we believe will help simplify our service offerings to our customers and maximize the value of this strategic decision that we made. We have been moving forward with our carve-out program, and during our detailed discussions on this business, we concluded that splitting up our Lodging assets would not be in the best interest of our customers or our shareholders. We envisioned situations in which we could be competing against ourselves for opportunities and assets would be needed across the business, creating confusion with some customers. This is particularly true around our dorms and our camp manufacturing. The overall profile of our Lodging segment has evolved since we completed our strategic review last year given the changes in the energy market and the Oil Sands. As a result, we intend to include the entire Lodging Services segment in the carve-out, which we expect to be prepared to go public early next year. The next initiative I want to touch on is our recently completed acquisition of Thermo Fluids, which we purchased in an all-cash deal for $85 million. The strategic benefits of this acquisition are numerous. One reason TFI was so attractive is that it supports both our environmental and our waste oil collection business growth plan. On the environmental side, there's a significant opportunity to cross-sell our services into 20,000 customers that are essentially under-penetrated with the many services our environmental team has to offer. In addition, Thermo Fluids geographically complements Safety-Kleen's branch network. Thermo Fluids has a presence in 21 states, primarily in Western U.S., and its network includes 36 permanent facilities, many of these large terminals and a number of which have rail access. Thermo Fluids also has a well-maintained transportation fluid, including many trucks and railcars. And on the waste collection side, adding Thermo Fluids to our existing used motor oil business will make available new supply to our re-refineries from the most cost-effective locations across the country. In addition to those first 2 initiatives, we also recently expanded our existing share buyback program, raising the total capacity to $300 million. Looking at Slide 11, share repurchases remains an important element in our capital allocation strategy. We also intend to continue, though, to invest in our business, particularly where we see attractive long-term growth opportunities such as the new incinerator. We continue to evaluate M&A opportunities as well, with a focus on businesses in our core environmental or industrial markets and those we can acquire at a reasonable valuation. Moving to our outlook, starting on Slide 12. We have a range of initiatives underway aimed at revitalizing our revenue growth. Within tech services, we have some large remediation projects kicking off in Q2 and Q3, and we will look to build on our momentum in both incineration and landfill. We remain on target for the planned startup of our new incinerator in late 2016, which we continue to believe will be well timed. Within Industrial and Field, our primary emphasis in the near term is maximizing our resources during the upcoming turnaround season, both in the U.S. and Canada. For Field Services, increased collaboration with Safety-Kleen and expansion through collocated offices is expected to pick up as we move further into the year. Within Oil Re-refinering, we're focused on reducing transportation costs, increasing our blended product sales and moving forward with our pilot program to build a direct sales channel, where we sell our blended products directly back to our Safety-Kleen customer base. We've been successful in Ontario and Québec, and we will be expanding this program in several other markets this year. Turning to Slide 13. On the Safety-Kleen branch side, we're continuing to drive down our total cost for used motor oil while maintaining sufficient volumes to run our plants. Our primary focus near-term will be integrating Thermo Fluids, particularly in the optimization of network as well as training the Thermo Fluids sales force for cross-selling. For Lodging, we're continuing to seek opportunities for additional occupancy at reasonable room rates at our fixed locations. For our mobile camp business, we're seeking opportunities in regions such as British Columbia to deploy our assets. We were recently awarded some significant work within our camps and manufacturing business, all scheduled to begin in the second half of the year. Within Oil and Gas, our strategy is to continue to take additional market share in a challenging environment and pursue emerging opportunities such as the gas drilling and the support work in Alaska that we're doing. At the same time, we are moving forward with additional cost-cutting to counter some of the margin pressures we are facing in this business. So before I turn it over to Jim, let me finish by saying that we are really disappointed with our financial performance that we're reporting this morning. But I would tell you that our employees continue to go above and beyond in these very challenging times. We're exceeding our safety targets, and I couldn't be more appreciative of their efforts, particularly during this past brutal winter that we just came through. So thanks to our employees. And with that, let me turn it over to Jim for his financial review. Jim?