William M. Cook
Analyst · BMO Capital Market
Thanks Tom and good morning everyone. Our first quarter results proved again the power of our diversified portfolio of filter businesses around the world. So, although we saw some weaker end markets in NAFTA including on-road heavy truck and residential construction, these were balanced by a strong growth in Europe and Asia in both our Engine and Industrial business segments. And in addition, with our strong international presence we benefited from the weaker dollar. Now, I'd like to briefly cover some highlights by segments and I will start with our Engine business in Europe. In Europe, our off-road and on-road businesses, both grew over 20% and our Engine aftermarket grew by more than 30% in the quarter. European business conditions for us continued to be good due to the combination of general economic growth together with new business we won at both existing and new customers. And with our aftermarket growth in the European emerging markets, which we include Eastern Europe, Middle East and North Africa, this has been a priority for us as we've had more distributors throughout these developing regions. In Asia, our Engine off-road and aftermarket businesses also had a strong quarter. The strength was seen across the region. Japan, we saw continued strong construction market. In China, we added new off-road customers and increased our aftermarket distribution and in Australia, we saw good growth as a result of the mining boom. Now, switching to NAFTA, as expected our NAFTA engine businesses were mixture of different stories this quarter. In off-road, the small construction market and our sales to it remained weak due to the much publicized residential housing crisis. However, this was offset by the Ag equipment sector which was strong by... which was fueled by strong farm and crop conditions. Our aerospace and defense sales were up on strong military demand, particularly for filters for the new MRAP vehicles and replacement parts for existing military equipment that needs overhauling. In addition, our acquisition last year of AFS also added about $4.4 million to quarter one sales. In our replacement parts, our aftermarket business truck ton miles in NAFTA moderated as the economy has slowed and general equipment utilization rates are mixed, better for large equipment in ag but slower or less for small construction equipment, resulting in a good quarter for aftermarket, which ended up 9%. And, finally the heavy truck downturn was about what we expected. Our NAFTA on-road sales were down 56% following last year's Big 3 buy in front of the January 2007 new emission regulations. Now, I'm going to switch to our Industrial businesses and I'll start with our industrial filtration solution business, which had a great quarter internationally, up 20% in both Asia and Europe. In Asia, our sales in China were very strong, reflecting the continued strong manufacturing investment climate there. In Europe, we also benefited from the continued capital investment across the continent as Western Europe continued adding capacity and Eastern and Central Europe continue to make new investments. And in NAFTA our sales were up 6% as we continued to see good demand for both our systems and replacement filters. In our gas turbine business, we started the year very strong, but I should remind everyone that these are typically large systems, in fact the largest we make and the result, our shipments to our customers by quarter are volatile and tend to bounce around a bit. But overall the gas turbine market we serve continues to enjoy a strong up cycle in both the power generation and oil and gas markets. And then finally, our special application sales were good in quarter one as we saw solid growth in both our disk drive filter and PTFE membranes businesses. Now switching to our outlook for the balance of the fiscal year, it's good for fiscal '08 as noted in our press release; we have just increased our full year sales expectations for both business segments. Earnings and business sales are now expected to be up between 7% to 9%, up from our previous forecast of 5% to 7%. And our Industrial business segment should be up between 11% and 13% and we previously forecast that to be up between 8% and 10%. So we picked up both of our forecast for both the Engine and Industrial sides of our company. Now many of you may be thinking, after an 18% revenue increase in quarter one why our full year numbers aren't higher, so let me briefly explain. During quarter one, we did receive a benefit on the revenue line of about 4.6% due to foreign exchange as Tom mentioned. And we don't expect to see a similar size benefit during the second half of this year. Second reason is as I mentioned our GTS shipments by nature bounce around by quarter. We had an outstanding quarter one, but we don't forecast the next several quarters to be quite as large. And then third, remember we had a strong second half last year with our first $500 million quarter in the fourth. So our comps would be getting tougher. But having said that, we are looking at another good revenue year, with total sales up approximately 11% and our first $2 billion sales year ever. Now looking at the outlook conditions by segment, starting first with our Engine business. Despite some current weakness in NAFTA, both the construction and mining equipment sales continue to grow internationally. In the Ag equipment sector, we see strong growth there globally. The latest reports forecast both good crop prices and farmer incomes to be up, which is positive for the Ag equipment market. We expect demand to continue growing in out Aerospace and Defense business and in addition last March's acquisition of AFS will continue to benefit our sales line. We expect our aftermarket sales to continue to grow strong internationally as we focus on continuing to develop new markets and adding distribution. And finally, as Tom mentioned we continue to see the NAFTA Truck business being down about $30 million to $40 million this year through our third quarter before starting to pick up in the fourth quarter of fiscal '08. In our Industrial businesses, we see all of the major business groups up in fiscal '08. In IFS which includes our industrial dust collectors and compressed air filters, incoming orders remain good for both equipment and replacement filters. So we have increased our sales growth guidance up 10% to 15% for fiscal '08. In our GTS business, we have significant orders in hand already for fiscal '08 and we're expecting a 10... 15% to 20% sales growth for the full year as we continue to see good conditions in the Middle East, Asia and parts of Africa. And finally we're expecting 5% to 10% revenue growth in our special application business this year. As Tom mentioned, we expect our fiscal 2008 operating margin to be a minimum of 11%. We have now increased our full year EPS to that range and expect EPS to be between $1.97 and $2.07 per share and which would be our 19th consecutive year of record earnings. Now as our habit, I want to give you an update on two of the new platforms that we have talked about; one is PowerCore and the other one is the diesel emissions. And I'll start first with PowerCore. We have now won 93 equipment platforms with our OEM customers, 73 of these are already in production and another dozen are expected to go into production during the fiscal '08. Our sales... our PowerCore sales in the first quarter were up 20% to $12.5 million and we still have another 80 plus platforms in the proposal stage with our OEM customers. So with our current win rate of over 90%, we are confident of the continued growth of PowerCore technology. Then finally, we will be releasing our next generation PowerCore technology in 2008, which utilizes the latest advances in Donaldson technology which will allow us to further reduce the footprint of the filtration systems by about one-third. Switching to emissions; while we continue to be positive regarding our long-term participation in the diesel emissions market, we have now reduced our estimate for our on-road business to $80 million by the end of 2012. So why make this adjustment? Well, based on our current expectations of platform wins for 2010, coupled with current volume projections for those wins, we feel that $80 million is our best estimate today. In addition, we believe that it will take approximately 2 years from the implementation of the 2010 EPA regulations, the industry market volumes to recover to normal production levels. We will continue to support our existing on-road emission customers, while we increase our focus to the retrofit off-road market, which we now believe are better fit for our product development skills. So, the bottom line around this emissions opportunity is that we continue to see the on-road and off-road diesel emissions as a good growth opportunity for Donaldson, although not quite as large as we had first hoped. Now I want to offer some wrap up comments on the quarter. We are off to a very good start in fiscal '08 with strong sales, a new record and a 12% operating margin. Our overall sales outlook for fiscal '08 is good for both the Engine segment and the Industrial segment. The strength of our business model, which is a portfolio of diversified filtration businesses around the globe, continues to work as the weakness in those end markets in the midst of cyclical downturns like heavy truck, has been and will be offset this year by the strength in our Industrial businesses globally and our international Engine business. In addition, in this period of continuous improvement, we have been remained focused on improving the long-term profitability of our business. As Tom reported, we made good progress this quarter, specifically one of the areas of immediate focus for us is that we will be continuing to improve our distribution efficiencies by investing in people, processes and systems to yield a long-term sustainable improvement. The bottom line with all this is that we expect to deliver another record year of sales and earnings, making fiscal 2008 our 19th consecutive EPS record. Tina that concludes our prepared remarks. Now, we'd like to open it up to questions. Question And Answer