David Roberts
Analyst · KeyBanc
Thank you, Christa. Good morning, and welcome to Carlisle's First Quarter 2015 Conference Call. On the phone with me is our Chief Operating Officer, Chris Koch; our Chief Financial Officer, Steve Ford; our Chief Accounting Officer, Kevin Zdimal; and our VP and Treasurer, Julia Chandler. Before I begin reviewing our first quarter performance, I ask that you turn to slide two, titled Forward-Looking Statements and the Use of Non-GAAP Financial Measures. This slide details the risk associated with investing in Carlisle Company. I strongly urge anyone considering an investment in Carlisle to read these statements in detail, along with reviewing the financial reports we filed with the SEC before you decide to invest in our company. Before we turn to slide three, let me say that we will be changing the conference call protocol slightly today. During the call, I’ll review the company’s overall performance, Chris will be reviewing our overall individual segment performance and Steve as usual will be reviewing our balance sheet and cash flow statements. Before I get into the details of the first quarter, I have to tell you how happy we are with the completion of the acquisition of Graco’s Finishing Brands. We affectionately call this acquisition a thousand day crusade, primarily because that’s how long it took us to close the deal. We hung in there for 1000 days, because we understood the value of this business. This will be our next CIT. We will work to scale the business and improve the operating profit. There is tremendous upside in the acquisition of Finishing Brands. With that said, let’s now turn to slide three. As you begin to review the information on slide three, you will see that our net quarterly sales were up 9%. 7% of our growth was organic while 4% or 25 million came from the acquisition of LHi. FX reduced our sales by 2% in the quarter. We feel that 9% growth in the quarter is exceptional, considering that the commercial roofing season had not yet kicked in the high gear and the weather in January, February and much of March made it difficult for our contractors to get our roofs in the quarter. Many of our contractors finished the first quarter with very healthy backlog and that should carry us through the second and third quarters with strong results. While CCM grew nicely in the quarter, our largest dollar and percentage contributor to growth was CIT. Quarterly sales were up 29% or $44 million, exceeding our expectations and estimates. Our large aerospace customers continue to ramp up their build rates, we also had other customer segments within CIT growing and Chris will discuss this with you later in the call. At Brake and Friction, we saw sales down 6%, all related to FX. CBS volumes were actually flat in the quarter. We still haven't seen any signs of recovery in the braking business and do not expect to see any in 2015. At Food Service, our sales were down 5%, due to soft international sales and decline in the sale of capital equipment to the healthcare industry. Healthcare equipment sales are usually lumpy as big dollar items for healthcare facilities are not made with any consistent cadence. Considering that the first quarter is not one of our busier quarters, I think our performance during that period of time speaks well to the strength of our commercial roofing and aerospace markets. Overall Company earnings for the first quarter were up 5%. Our margins were down 30 basis points, as a result of pricing actions at one of our large aerospace customers. We did see earnings leverage at Construction Materials which is the result of lower cost material and pricing remaining relatively stable. As I said in my opening remarks, the FTC gave us the approval to complete the acquisition of Finishing Brands which we closed on April 1st. The business will be the foundation of a new pillar and will be reported as Fluid Technologies in future quarters. EPS for the quarter was $0.59, 5% growth over the first quarter of 2014. Turning to slide 4, you'll see our first quarter sales bridge. Price had a negative 0.8% impact on sales as Accelerated Opportunity Capture went into effect at CIT on January 1st. Volume was positive 8.2% and acquisition of LHi contributed 3.9% to our growth. FX was negative 2.2%. By segment, you'll see that organic growth at CCM was 9%, CIT 12%, Brake and Friction was flat, and Food Service was down 5%. Slide 5 details our EBIT bridge for the quarter. Price and raw material were slightly positive at 0.3%, volume contributed 0.8%, while COS savings contributed 0.9%. On the negative side of the ledger, other contributed 2.3% of the decline, including other\mix, higher inventory cost at Food Service, Akron plant closing costs and other smaller one-time items, including last year's Thermax settlement gain. This concludes my review of Carlisle's overall performance. I'll now turn the call over to Chris, who will provide you more detail on each one of our segments. Chris?