Scott Robinson
Analyst · SunTrust Robinson. Your line is open
Thanks, Tod. Good morning, everyone. Third quarter sales grew 15% to $700 million, including 6% from currency translation and about 1% from Hy-Pro. EPS was $0.53 in the quarter, up 18% from last year. As projected, we delivered strong sequential improvement in sales, operating margin and EPS. Sales were up 5%, operating margins grew 210 basis points, and adjusted EPS was up 23% from second quarter. We have a favorable view of the sequential sales increase and associated profit metrics as it indicates typical seasonality in our business. Digging into profit, third quarter operating margin was 14.4% compared with 14.5% a year ago, reflecting a gross margin decline of 60 basis points that was mostly offset by expense leverage. Inflation is still the largest pressure on gross margin. Roughly two-thirds of the 60 basis decline was attributable to higher raw material and supply chain costs. In addition to the price increases we implemented in January, we raised prices another floor to 15% last quarter to offset some of the pressure. It’s too soon to quantify the total impact, but benefits from our recent actions will begin rolling through by the end of the fiscal year. Mix was also a headwind last quarter, but it was much more pronounced in engines given the relative strength of the OE businesses. Expense leverage offset a large portion of the gross margin decline. As a rate of sales, expenses dropped from 20.2% last year to 19.8% this year, which is one of our lowest quarterly rates since our prior sales peak in fiscal '12. The expense rate was helped in part by additional cost cutting measures, which targeted discretionary spending categories. Our employees are rallying around this initiative, and we are encouraged by the global commitment to improving our margins. At the same time, we are investing back into the Company. We are growing our sales team to support new products, especially in the industrial segment. Additionally, we increased R&D expense by 10% last quarter as we further strengthen our technical capabilities. I also want to quickly touch on the corporate and unallocated bucket, which includes a handful of items like interest expense, gain or loss on FX, and certain corporate overhead items. It's prone to variability, so I want to point out that our current year-to-date corporate results are essentially flat after showing favorability last quarter. Moving on, our tax rate increased 70 basis points to 29.4%. Benefits from the U.S. rate reduction and stock-option accounting were more than offset by the mix of earnings and reformulated charges. The timing of our fiscal year end makes 2018 a transition year, so there are a lot of puts and takes in our effective rate. Overall, we continue to view tax reform as positive for Donaldson. Our long-term effective rate will drop about 2% on average to somewhere between 24% and 28%. Another benefit is the increased flexibility in accessing our optimizing global cash, which will support our long-standing capital deployment priorities. Investing back into the business is our top priority. Last quarter, we made capital expenditures of $27 million well above last year, and largely focused on new capacity to support revenue growth. We also made discretionary contributions of $35 million to our U.S. pension plans last quarter, allowing us to take advantage of higher U.S. tax rate during our transition year. Returning cash to shareholders is our other priority. And last quarter, we returned $68 million through dividends and share repurchase. We have paid a cash dividend every quarter for the past 62 years, and we have been increasing it annually for more than 20. We are proud of this trend and last week's announcement that we are increasing our dividend by 6% keeps it going. Maintaining a strong balance sheet is critical to executing these priorities, and we remain in stable position. At the end of Q3, our debt to EBITDA ratio was 1.5 times, or 0.8 times on a net basis. We believe that we are appropriately leveraged, giving us confidence that we are well-positioned to support the current and future business needs. As we close out the quarter, we made some tweaks to our full year guidance. So I'll walk through a few of the highlights. We remain encouraged by market conditions, so the sales forecast was moved up to the top end of the prior guidance range, which is up 15% last year. Included in the estimates are benefits from currency translation and acquisitions of 3% and 1% respectively. We also push the engine forecast to the upper half of the range provided last quarter. Segment sales are projected to grow 18 to 19% with a forecasted change driven by continued first-fit strength. On-road is now expected to be up in the high 30% range, and off-road is projected in the low 30s. There was no change to aftermarket, which is forecast up in the mid-teens. And we now expect sales for aerospace and defense to be down in the low single-digits. The industrial segment is projected to grow 8% to 9% this year, up from prior guidance of 5% to 7%. We took forecast up across the segments, but our perspective on those markets is largely unchanged. IFS is expected to grow in a low double-digit range, and we project a mid single-digit increase for special applications. GTS decline is expected to moderate into mid single-digits. We still expect fiscal ’18 operating margin between 13.8% and 14.2%, including an incremental $10 million for strategic investments. The midpoint of the range imply the fourth quarter rate of around 15%, up 70 basis points from the prior year and up 60 basis points in the third quarter. We continue to project full year interest expense around $21 million and other income from $1 million to $5 million. Excluding the impact from tax reform charges, we project our full year tax rate will land between 26.7% and 28.7%. We increased our capital expenditure forecast by $10 million, the full year CapEx between $100 million and $110 million. The change is primarily due to capacity investments, including some acceleration to get new capacity online as quickly as possible. Cash conversion remains in the 60% to 75% range, excluding the impact from tax reform and our pension funding. All together, we now project fiscal ’18 adjusted EPS between $1.97 and $2.01, which is a couple of cents higher when comparing the midpoints of the current to prior ranges. Please also remember that year-to-date charges related to our provisional estimates of the impact from tax reform are negatively affecting GAAP by $0.83. I also want to share a few things we are contemplating in our fiscal 2019 plan. Please keep in mind that we will provide more details when we release fourth quarter earnings, so our discussion today will be very limited on this topic as we are early in the planning process. In terms of revenue projection, it seems very likely that market conditions remain supportive through at least the first half of our next fiscal year. We do, however, expect that the pace of growth may moderate in our key end markets so update still look to grow. We also expect that past program wins with innovative products, new product offerings and continued expansion into new and adjacent markets remain additive to overall market conditions. I realized that said, but again, it’s early in our process. We want to emphasize is that we are contemplating this area where revenues go down next year. Similarly, we are not contemplating a scenario where operating margins decline next year. Our commitment to increasing our level of profitability on increasing sales remains intact, and we are engaging the entire organization in this effort. There are, however, several puts and takes to consider. The first and likely the largest is inflation. While magnitude is uncertain, we expect higher cost to raw materials and transportation. Incremental pricing actions taken this year will help, and we will also generate benefits from our continuous improvement programs and improved analytics from our ERP to drive optimization. To further leverage the ERP, we formed a new financial shared services team with existing employees. This team will harvest benefits from the ERP as a globalized, standardized and optimize our process. I am excited about the contribution they will make to Donaldson in the years ahead. We will continue making strategic investments in fiscal 2019, including growth in R&D spend and capacity investments. Finally, incentive compensation should be a modest tailwind in ’19 with the annual reset of bonus plans. The net effect from these items is an expected year-over-year improvement in both total and incremental operating margin. As we move through planning process, we are focused on first supporting our customers and then balancing the priorities of meeting demand, investing in the future and managing our costs. I am confident that we are striking the appropriate balance, and believe we are positioning ourselves well for a strong finish to ’18 and positive momentum in ’19. Now, I’ll turn the call back to Tod. Tod?