Chris Koch
Analyst · Oppenheimer. Please go ahead. Your line is open
Thanks Jim. Good afternoon everyone. Please turn to Slide 3 of the presentation. I'm pleased to report Carlisle had record fourth quarter sales and operating income and we continue to make significant headway towards our Vision 2025 goals of $8 billion in revenue, 20% operating margin and 15% ROIC, all driving to $15 of earnings per share. As a reminder, the building blocks and drivers of achieving Vision 2025 include, growing 5% organically with operational leverage, driving a continuous improvement culture, utilizing the Carlisle operating system, building scale with synergistic acquisitions, investing in exceptional talent and deploying over $3 billion into capital expenditures, share repurchases and dividends. We are pleased with our progress towards delivering Vision 2025 while acknowledging our culture of continuous improvement drives us to seek out new opportunities for growth in sales and operating income. Highlights of our Vision 2025 journey so far include, driving organic revenue growth of 5% since launching Vision 2025, in line with our long-term target, increasing operating margin to 13.6% achieving gross savings and benefits from COS within our targeted range of 1% to 2% of revenues, deploying over $630 million of capital into 12 strategic and synergistic acquisitions and utilizing our strong cash flow and balance sheet to return over $1 billion of capital to our shareholders in the form of share repurchases and dividends. Turning to Slide 4, for the full year 2019 against the backdrop of challenging global conditions, Carlisle Companies performed very well, benefiting from significant exposure to strong North American construction markets, growing demand in re-roofing, increasing exposure in medtech, continued strong underlying demand in aerospace, a return to higher levels of profitability in our Brake & Friction business, continued operational improvements effort through COS and solid execution on our M&A integrations. Some specific 2019 highlights include total revenues grew over 7% or close to 3% organically for the year, despite enduring multiple quarters of global industrial production declines. Pricing increased in all segments contributing 1% of year-over-year sales growth. Operating income grew approximately 29% year-over-year exhibiting strong leverage on our top line growth with margins expanding 220 basis points year-over-year to 13.6%. Strong operational performance generated $8.21 of diluted earnings per share, up 40% year-over-year. We generated free cash flow of $614 million converting at a rate of 130%. Executing on our commitment to return capital to shareholders, we repurchased over $380 million of shares and paid over $100 million in dividends. We increased our dividend 25% to $2 per share annually, our 43rd consecutive year of increasing dividends. And finally we deployed over $615 million on eight strategic acquisitions during the year. We introduced Vision 2025 in 2018 and are excited about the progress thus far, particularly in our two largest segments, CCM and CIT. They account for over 85% of revenue and over 90% of our total segment operating income. CCM status is a best-in-class building product supplier continues to be evidenced through its price and market leadership, superior products and service, industry leading innovation, a strong and increasing re-roofing backdrop in a high-teens operating income profile. Over the past decade, Carlisle Construction Materials has spent over $500 million in investments in manufacturing, research and development, and customer service to build an industry leading platform known as the Carlisle Experience, which our contractors and distributors have come to rely on to drive efficiencies and productivity in their own businesses. And I remained very pleased with the progress the CCM team has made, expanding into new platforms, namely polyurethane and architectural metal businesses. Reflecting on CIT, there has been significant press surrounding Boeing 737 MAX 8 grounding that has clearly created uncertainty around return to service date and ultimately uncertainty for the supply chain. For Carlisle, we anticipate being impacted by these conditions through at least the first half of 2020 in line with Boeing's public comments. While we realize this as an interruption to CIT’s consistent growth in the aerospace markets, we are viewing the situation as a delay in sales, not lost revenue. We expect resumption of our normal deliveries when the 737 MAX 8 returns to service. We remain – we maintain a very optimistic outlook for the global aerospace business in the coming years, driven by rising demand for air travel globally, sustained aircraft build rates as well as increasing content per plane, given growing electrification and data needs. Our engineering expertise, brand and strong customer relationships position us well to leverage the attractive long-term growth in commercial aerospace markets and we will continue to pursue synergistic acquisitions in this space to drive our reputation and position as a leading supplier to global aerospace OEMs. Reinforcing this, we announced our commitment to acquire Fileca in October of 2019. Fileca augments and diversifies our position at major European commercial aerospace, space and defense customers and enhances our geographic presence. We expect to finalize the closure of the Fileca acquisition in the first quarter of 2020. We also continue to build out our medical technologies platform within CIT. This platform has strong growth and profitability characteristics and will transition CIT to a more balanced portfolio of interconnect solutions. We intend to accomplish this growth both organically and through acquisitions, capitalizing on aging populations that are demanding a higher level of medical equipment and technology globally. We continue to work towards building out a more comprehensive offering of manufacturing solutions to our medical OEMs. Our recent acquisition of Providien represents a significant step in the establishing a leverageable medical technologies platform. Providien with over $100 million of annual sales is a leading provider of comprehensive solutions for global medical device OEMs, including medical device contract manufacturing, precision machining and metals, thermoforming and medical injection molding. In the coming years, we will invest significant capital into expanding Providien product offerings and seek synergistic acquisitions to grow our medtech platform to $1 billion in sales. Turning to Fluid Technologies, 2019 was a year of focus on improving customer satisfaction, driving manufacturing efficiencies, entering new markets and introducing new products. The team at CFT made substantial progress in 2019 on all these fronts, introducing 10 new products, making four acquisitions, further expanding into the Sealants and Adhesives market and reducing our lead times by almost one-third. Despite this progress, as we predicted at about this time last year, impacts from Brexit and U.S. trade negotiations with China drove an increasingly negative global industrial production environment throughout 2019 and ultimately drove declines in volumes that have overshadowed CFT’s progress towards their Vision 2025 goals. On capital deployment, our free cash flow and strong balance sheet continues to offer us both strategic optionality and financial flexibility. When we introduced Vision 2025, we envisioned a balanced approach of organic growth investments, acquisitions and returning significant capital to shareholders. For the past three years, we have been opportunistic buyers of our stock, spending over $1 billion in share repurchases, notably exceeding the total level contemplated in our Vision 2025 plan. Going forward, we will remain balanced yet opportunistic in our approach with driving $15 of EPS by 2025 the key focus for our vision. In addition to our strong financial performance in 2019, we are pleased with the continued momentum our team has generated around environmental, social and governance issues. In 2019 we established an ESG steering committee, developed an ESG reporting process, elevated the position of Director of Sustainability to report directly to the CEO and established the plan to publish our first ESG report in 2020. We're at the beginning of our ESG reporting journey, but Carlisle has always been a responsible corporate steward through our 100-year lifetime. We're excited to share our progress with investors, customers, and the communities in which we operate. In addition to these actions, we have made progress in diversifying our Board of Directors and have made commitments to ensuring a $15 per hour minimum wage in our U.S. operations, gender pay equity, and a gender balanced management team. Now please turn to Slide 5, as we look at our fourth quarter results in greater detail. In the fourth quarter, revenue increased 6.2% to a record $1.14 billion, our 27th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth. We generated $141 million of operating income, a 23% increase over prior year, which led to record fourth quarter diluted EPS of $1.81 up 22% year-over-year, confirming that we are making the right investments in our factories, in our people and in the Carlisle operating system. Fourth quarter results were driven by continued price discipline in all segments, solid demand and excellent margin expansion at CCM. Benefits from lower raw – costs raw materials and efficiencies gained from COS throughout the company. CCM revenues grew over 11% year-over-year, including 5% organic growth, reflecting strong commercial construction and re-roofing demand, new product sales growing 50% year-over-year and the addition of Petersen in early 2019. We continue to see a solid backlog of work in North America, tight labor markets, strong re-roofing demand and tight capacity. CCM’s solid performance in 4Q and all of 2019 demonstrates its market leadership, especially in pricing result and in delivering the Carlisle Experience to roofing customers and distributors. With roofing labor markets remaining very tight, we believe our ability to deliver the right product at the right place, at the right time, coupled with innovation and training enhances the value we bring to the market. The Carlisle Experience continues to be recognized and appreciated by our customers. We instituted a price increase on all our CCM products in mid-January addressing the costs of providing industry-leading value to our customers and general inflation in operating costs. We believe the trends experienced in 2019 will continue into 2020 supporting our positive outlook. At CIT, revenues grew 3.3% in the fourth quarter reflecting continued solid performance in our traditional aerospace product lines and continued progress in building our medical technologies platform. Within the aerospace market the pressures from the Boeing 737 MAX 8, which I discussed earlier began impacting us in Q4 in a substantial way. In addition to the direct impacts, we are also being affected in our connectivity product lines specifically as the airlines are reluctant to remove existing planes from service for upgrades and retrofits. These pressures are significant, but will be resolved when the MAX 8 returns to service and will not impact our mid-single digit growth CAGR potential at CIT long-term Within the Medical Technologies platform the significant event in the fourth quarter was the acquisition of Providien. We were extremely pleased to have acquired the talent of Bill Gerard, President of Providien and his team. In addition to the world-class solutions they have developed for leading medical technology providers, Bill’s leadership and product vision will help us accelerate the growth of our portfolio and ensure we allocate capital to the most meaningful growth areas. CFT sales declined 3.5% year-over-year in the fourth quarter reflecting significant declines in global automotive production and a multi quarter decline in industrial production. Notably, acquisitions of Hosco, IDS, Shinhang and Ecco Finishing are tracking well, both from sales and integration standpoint. CFT’s operating margin was impacted by lower volumes primarily from China and global automotive and Tier 1 accounts. We remain hopeful that the U.S. trade developments inject a level of certainty that in turn promotes a return to normalize capital investment and spending. As mentioned earlier, CFT continues to make progress on their initiatives that will drive their vision 2025 plans including continuing to deliver price gains reflective of their value proposition, launching new products, entering new markets, and enhancing our product portfolio of market share through acquisitions. Turning to CBF; construction, mining and agriculture markets continued to exhibit an extraordinary amount of cyclical demand. After double-digit sales gains in both 2017 and 2018, 2019 was marked by accelerating decreases in global demand and CBF end markets and destocking activities at major OEMs. In the fourth quarter CBF revenue declined 17.4% year-over-year. Despite these declines, CBF continued to capture the benefits from its significant restructuring efforts around the closure of the Tulsa, Oklahoma manufacturing facility and its integration into Medina, Ohio and in their ongoing COS programs. Bob will now provide further detail about our fourth quarter financial performance and review our balance sheet and cash flow. Bob?