Earnings Labs

CONMED Corporation (CNMD)

Q3 2015 Earnings Call· Wed, Oct 21, 2015

$36.69

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon, everyone. Before we begin, let me remind you that during this call, management will be making some comments and statements regarding its financial outlook which represents forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties as those terms are defined under the federal securities laws. The Company's actual results may differ materially from its current expectations. Please refer to the risk factors and other cautionary factors in today's press release as well as the Company's SEC filings for more details on factors that may cause actual results to differ materially. You will also hear management refer to certain non-GAAP adjustment measures during this discussion. While these figures are not a substitute for GAAP measurements, management will use these figures to aid in monitoring the Company's ongoing financial performance from quarter-to-quarter and year-to-year on a regular basis and for benchmarking against other medical technology companies. Adjusted net income and adjusted earnings per share measure the income of the Company excluding credits or charges that are considered by the Company to be special or outside of its normal ongoing operations. These adjusting items are specified in the reconciliation in the press release issued this afternoon. With these required announcements completed, I will turn the call over to Curt Hartman, CONMED's President and Chief Executive Officer, for opening remarks. Mr. Hartman? Curt R. Hartman - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thank you, Lauren. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for CONMED's third quarter 2015 earnings call. With me on today's call is Luke Pomilio, CONMED's Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. On today's call, I'll provide a brief overview of the financial and operating highlights for the third quarter then Luke will provide a more detailed analysis of our financial performance and an update on our 2015 financial…

Operator

Operator

Our first question comes from the line of Richard Newitter from Leerink Partners.

Richard S. Newitter - Leerink Partners LLC

Analyst

Hi. Thanks for taking the questions. Curt, maybe I could just start off with the guidance reduction and where you were kind of sitting when you last reported results. You sounded pretty confident in the third quarter and the trends that you were seeing, and you felt comfortable reiterating your full year. And I understand some of the factors that you went through on the call just now in your prepared remarks, but maybe just help us understand what really kind of changed the most relative to your thinking then to kind of lead to stepping aside from the full-year growth rate? Curt R. Hartman - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Rich, I think the biggest single change has been the export market deterioration which was pretty substantial. The export market is served by distributors. They tend to order in large quantities, and it's not a super predictable pattern. It tends to ebb and flow a little bit. We're served by a lot of distributors, and that was a reference to my comment about hiring people in some of these markets to get a better view on those distributors. So we had a big impact from our export market distributors, specifically Brazil, Middle East-Africa and then some other outliers that really slowed down as we got further into the third quarter. The capital equipment across the General Surgery businesses was really soft in the third quarter. Candidly, some of that is competitive response. We've gone into the market. We're showing up more than we historically have, and I did not ever expect our competitors just let us walk in. And they've started to do what big competitors do which is compete for the business aggressively. So we're going to have to learn how to operate in that environment a little better, a little sharper. And I think it's a combination of export and the General Surgery slowdown across the U.S. market that were the two biggest factors that gave me pause. Candidly, the last part is about one of my stated goals here which is to have CONMED be trusted by a couple different constituents. One of it is our employees. One of it is our customers, and the other part is the market. And clearly, the results we put up in the third quarter did nothing to endear trust with the markets, and we've got to set a new level of expectation that people can say I don't necessarily like it, but I think it's achievable. And hopefully, that's what our guidance accomplishes here today.

Richard S. Newitter - Leerink Partners LLC

Analyst

Okay. And then maybe just on that, where you stand today, the level of visibility you have and into some of those factors that you just mentioned that are a bit more challenging and you appreciated (22:48), maybe can you give us any sense as to rough timelines as to when the export part of the business can return? It sounds like visibility is a bit murky on that. And then the second part of my question is just on the new product cadence. You said there were some delays. I was curious if you could mention some areas around what those new product areas were and how long do you think it'll take to get those products to market. Thanks. Curt R. Hartman - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Sure. So I think I mentioned this in one of our previous calls. The Company really came into the year with a brand new forecasting process, one that is fundamentally driven by the commercial side of the organization versus anything out of the corporate office. And we rolled that process out and we've also put a lot of new leaders in place, so we have a lot of development and evolution of the process, and that evolution continues. It's a company that serves global markets. We've got to find the right data, the right inputs to ensure the vitality of the process, and we continue to refine that each and every day, each and every month, each and every quarter. Our forecasting process today is much better than it was at the beginning of the year, much better than it was a year ago, candidly, so my confidence level in our forecast grows each and every day. As it relates to what we have for our outlook right now,…

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Kristen Stewart from Deutsche Bank.

Kristen M. Stewart - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Hi. Thanks for taking the question. I was wondering if you could just talk mainly about just kind of thoughts around M&A and maybe some product tuck-ins, given the, I guess, softness that you're seeing within the business and I guess just maybe things not – turnaround maybe not coming, I guess, as you may have hoped, just how that changes, if at all, anything from an M&A perspective whether or not you may put some things on hold until the business is kind of starting to turn as you would have liked to have seen. Curt R. Hartman - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Great question, Kristen. We have a very active M&A pipeline. And if you look at our balance sheet, you'll see some dollars were allocated to that category. They were small single product tuck-ins and in this case, both of them hit our Orthopedic business. One of them is a patient positioning platform and another one is a special shoulder cannula. Both of those are now in the fold, and we're actively marketing those products. And they're small in terms of revenue contribution, but the enthusiasm they build in our sales force and with our customers is very important as we effect the transition. So, I'm actively pushing M&A. Each of my business leaders and their marketeers are out working the market, looking for new products to tuck in. As you all know, we hired a new head of M&A back in May. He has hit the ground running. He's very active. We're sourcing a lot of deals, and we're encouraging exactly that because we do believe our sales teams are revamped in the U.S. and ready to do more if we can get them more products.

Kristen M. Stewart - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

That interchange, it sounds like to your M&A, is still pushing ahead and... Curt R. Hartman - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, we're still pushing M&A. I don't think anything in the third quarter would have us slow that down. Our challenges in the third quarter are not about the sales force right now in terms of caliber. It's about executing in some tough markets like export. In General Surgery, we had some capital equipment sales that in some cases, pushed; in some cases, we lost. So we've got to sharpen our focus there and get a little bit better on following through and finding a way to compete in some big opportunities.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Mike Matson from Needham & Company. Mike S. Matson - Needham & Co. LLC: Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. I guess I just wanted to start with the domestic direct sales team. So I know there were a number of changes made there. It sounds like your growth was better in Orthopedics and maybe a little worse in General Surgery. But I was just wondering if you could provide an update on how the integration effort has gone on the General Surgery side. And then just the compensation changes and so forth, has that resulted in any turnover or disruption among the sales teams? Curt R. Hartman - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Sure. Great question, Mike. And just specifically, as I go through each of our businesses, in the U.S., our U.S. Orthopedic selling team recorded its first positive growth quarter in – first on our last seven (30:51), I think. So, very positive trends there in terms of what we're seeing with the revamped management and direct feet on the street, whether it's through distributor or direct reps. And the compensation changes there were really about simplification, giving them clear understanding of compensation versus what they sell. So I think the plan is working the way we had hoped. And I think the added attention through a better management structure, most recently with the addition of Nate to run that business, is really starting to move things forward. Clearly, we have more work to do but excited by the trajectory as we look at our first quarter results, second quarter results and where we finished in the third quarter. In the General Surgery category, we have three businesses in the U.S. We have Advanced Surgical, which is the…

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Matthew O'Brien from Piper Jaffray. Matt O'Brien - Piper Jaffray & Co (Broker): Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the questions. Just, Curt, if we could start with on the General Surgery side, your commentary that you made about some competitive responses that you're seeing within that market. I'm just curious how you're going to compete going forward with these companies, given some of the product delays that you have. Should we think about this as being a headwind probably until the back half of next year? Curt R. Hartman - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Hard for me, Matt, to put an exact timeline on it because it's not across the board. It's some markets, and part of this is training of our sales team which now have a bigger bag in the Advanced Surgical portfolio to sell. And we've got to learn how to leverage the capital and disposables and secondarily, we need to learn how to leverage the entire portfolio across CONMED. And to that extent, we just hired another person to come in and help develop our program offerings and manage those across our selling entities in conjunction with our business general managers. So some of this is putting the right people in place to do these programs, create them, manage them, train our reps on them. Some of it is in key markets we're contractually locked out. So we've got to do a better job on the IDN and GPO front and get in the door. And some of it is new products where we can broaden the portfolio in innovative ways that perhaps our competitors cannot do right now. I think if you go back in history, that was the attempt with Altrus, was to get…

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Jeffery Cohen from Ladenburg Thalmann. Jeffrey S. Cohen - Ladenburg Thalmann & Co., Inc. (Broker): Oh, hi, guys. Curt, can you talk a little more about the Advanced Surgical business and the new products that'll be introduced in the first half of 2016? And will they be introduced domestically as well as in all of the markets you serve? Curt R. Hartman - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Jeff, we have a couple new products that we were working on that we thought we're going to be able to drop into some – two of those were – or excuse me, one of those was really a continuation of an existing platform. The other two were relatively new as it relates to the Advanced Surgical offering on the Endomechanical side. We haven't really called those out in specific terms, but they fit the core of the market, if you will, for where the Advanced Surgical group fits. And right now, as we've gone through and redone the voice of customer work and defined what we believe the market is looking for, it has pushed our timeline on those to be more first half of 2016 than second half of 2015. So that's probably where I'll leave that comment. Jeffrey S. Cohen - Ladenburg Thalmann & Co., Inc. (Broker): Got it. Could you talk about the domestic growth for the Orthopedic business for the quarter? It looked like a bright spot. Can you talk more specifically about products or segments which sit out? Curt R. Hartman - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Sure. We had a couple areas that we liked what we saw in terms of improvement. Within sports medicine, the anchor line, the sports tissue line, we're starting to…

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Matthew Mishan from KeyBanc.

Matt Mishan - KeyBanc Capital Markets, Inc.

Analyst

Great. Thanks, Curt, Luke, for taking my questions. Curt R. Hartman - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: You bet.

Matt Mishan - KeyBanc Capital Markets, Inc.

Analyst

So if I look at the guidance, it looks like it's coming down more at least for – and I know you don't give quarterly guidance, but it's coming down versus my model more for the fourth quarter than it necessarily is for the third quarter. And I guess my question is, what gets worse as far as the drivers of the guide down (44:56)? What's worse in the fourth quarter than in the third quarter? Curt R. Hartman - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Matt, it's a good question and I go back to a statement I made earlier. Part of what I set out to do here was to build trust, and we wanted to put guidance out that people could be looking at and say fundamentally we believe this is very safe guidance. And so we've tried to factor in a range of possibilities into our models and factor in some of the surprises that we saw in the third quarter and say, okay, we think we know where they're going, but let's assume they don't correct or get to the levels that we believe they're going to in the fourth quarter; what would that look like? So we've tried to capture those considerations in our fourth quarter estimates which obviously flow into the full year.

Matt Mishan - KeyBanc Capital Markets, Inc.

Analyst

And, Luke, on the gross margins, it looks like they were very good in the quarter. But what I've – following you guys now for a little bit, it seems as if when you do have these unexpected declines in sales, the gross margin doesn't – it doesn't impact you in the current quarter but necessarily in the quarters afterwards. Is there going to be a hangover on the gross margins from this decline or this guide down (46:32) over the next couple quarters? Luke A. Pomilio - Executive Vice President, Finance & Chief Financial Officer: Matt, the good news is even though the growth for the quarter wasn't where we hoped it would be, we did have growth for the quarter, and we're anticipating growth going forward. So the variance issue that we ran into, sort of the hangover from 2014 into 2015, isn't something I anticipate going into 2016 with it. Actually, the production variances currently are neutral to favorable.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Mark Landy from Northland Capital Markets.

Mark Landy - Northland Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Good evening, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I guess just trying to reconcile the direct international business, the growth you've seen there with the kind of decline in the distributor business. And we've heard that in some geographies, the currency downturn has been pretty violent. And there's a lot of questioning on stocking going on, whether or not the local distributors actually have the cash or want to put cash into inventory. Is that something that impacted you guys in the distributor part of the business, or am I kind of reaching too far to try and reconcile the two? Curt R. Hartman - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: I think as the question relates why is direct better, the first part of the answer, Mark, is direct is better because we've made a lot of people changes, and I'll give you a real life example. We have a new country manager in Germany. Luke's been with the Company for a long time and can't remember the last time Germany grew. We have a new country manager. Six months into his tenure, he's got the ship righted and we're putting up double-digit growth in Germany. We're very excited by that, and that's just a direct market example where the right leader or the right people can make change happen pretty quickly. If you go to the export market, the historical approach in our export markets has been somewhat of a come one, come all, if you can distribute the product and you're interested, we're going to sign you up as a distributor. I am not a believer in that model. If everybody owns it, nobody owns it. So we've hired a few people to provide a little better oversight and more direct interaction in some of our key export markets. We've asked them to dive in to the distributor base, narrow the focus on our distributors. So that's the longer-term play. The shorter-term play really goes back to what I referenced in my script about places like Brazil. Brazil, the overall macroeconomic picture is just terrible. It's not a matter of declining sales because we're dropping our price to the distributor. It's a matter of the distributor simply not buying because there is no demand. And that trend was there in the first quarter and second quarter, but it took a substantial turn for the worse in the third quarter that caught us a little bit flat-footed. So that, to me, is the biggest issue in the difference between export and direct.

Mark Landy - Northland Securities, Inc.

Analyst

You called out Brazil, Curt (49:58). Are there any countries that you can kind of put into the same bucket just so that we can have some idea of know what to watch with respect to the local economy? Curt R. Hartman - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, I specifically called out Brazil because it's an important market – one of our larger markets. I also mentioned the Middle East and Africa area. Those would be the two principal ones that impacted our third quarter. There were other ones, but I would – in totality, they hurt. But individually, I think they were all within the manageable definition, Mark.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Kristen Stewart from Deutsche Bank.

Kristen M. Stewart - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Hi. Thanks for taking the follow-up. Luke, I just wanted to go back just to the currency impact and just kind of thinking ahead to 2016 and the past. I know you've always talked about the currency gains that you've had in 2015 as representing potential headwinds as we look forward to 2016. I think the amount that you've quantified is $10 million in aggregate. What's the total amount in 2015 we should think about? I know you talked about $2.8 million in 3Q and a similar amount in 4Q. But what's the total amount that we're looking at in 2015? Luke A. Pomilio - Executive Vice President, Finance & Chief Financial Officer: Hey, you're 100% right, Kristen. So as of today, we've locked in all of 2016. Unfortunately, as you know, with hedging, you end up at the same place just on a delayed basis. So, we've locked in 2016 rates that weren't as favorable as the rates that we had locked in for 2015. So the number we're talking about is between $10 million and $11 million of hedge gains that we've realized in 2015 which will be a headwind for us in 2016.

Kristen M. Stewart - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. So that's the way to think of that, I guess, in terms of the kind of step-down into 2016 just in terms of modeling and thinking ahead? Luke A. Pomilio - Executive Vice President, Finance & Chief Financial Officer: That's correct.

Kristen M. Stewart - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Okay, perfect. Thank you for the clarification.

Operator

Operator

I would now like to turn the call back over to Curt Hartman for closing remarks.