Mark E. Goldstein
Analyst · Jeff Hammond with Keybanc Capital Markets
Thanks, Andy. Now turning to Slide 12, I want to first cover what I think are the strategic highlights for the fiscal '14 and their impact on our business going forward. There are really 5 key themes here. The first is portfolio management. Between the divestiture of the Electrical segment, RV business and the Viking People business product line, we generated nearly $300 million of proceeds from portfolio streamlining. While these actions resulted in the loss of over $300 million in revenue, Actuant's remaining businesses are more tightly linked to our segment strategies, our 4 macro growth themes and high-growth market opportunities. The next major accomplishment is our continued progress on growth and innovation. We talked about this in greater detail on last quarter's call, and I'm pleased with the traction that we are getting on this significant cultural change to the organization. Major successes include: agricultural seeder system, mining maintenance tools, joint integrity consultancy offers, among others. Our high-growth markets sales, mainly China, Brazil and India, increased 19% in fiscal 2014, and we estimate about 1% of our fiscal '14 core growth came from growth and innovation. And I expect that to increase in the years ahead. The third highlight is leadership changes. In addition to the CEO transition in January, we have 2 new segment leaders. I purposely made the decision to flatten the organization and not backfill the COO role by asking the segment leaders to expand their roles from a pan-Actuant perspective, as well as to take on high-growth market responsibilities. This helps to further align the organization around the operating company philosophy, that you've heard me talk about accelerating in Actuant. Speaking of operating company, we made solid progress on the various standardization and simplification aspects of that transition during the year. In total, 12 facility or product line moves were involved to reduce our cost structure, providing funds to reinvest in growth. While I, unfortunately, can't say that I'm pleased with the execution on each of these significant projects, I do believe that we're on the right track and want to thank the hundreds of employees at Actuant that have been involved in their completion. Finally, capital allocation. If you combine dividend and buybacks in fiscal '14, we returned over 10% of our market cap back to shareholders. Given the high M&A valuations we encounter in the year, we believe those buybacks represented a better use of our capital. We did complete the Hayes acquisition in June, and its integration and financial performance to date have exceeded expectations. Although Viking did not have the start that we had expected, the trends improved sequentially and we're encouraged by recent results. While the year's financial results can be described as choppy at best, I can't help but be pleased about our positioning for the future. Now let's turn to guidance on Slide 14, and we'll start with sales. Our consolidated 3% to 5% core growth forecast for fiscal '15 leads to sales guidance of $1.425 billion to $1.475 billion. This, along with many other factors we'll cover shortly, should drive earnings per share to $2.05 to $2.15 per share. On a macro level, we're not expecting big economic improvement but continued choppy and painfully slow expansion. The addition of Hayes and divestiture of RV should offset one another on the top line, while the stronger U.S. dollar will be a headwind. Now a few core sales comments by segment. We expect Industrial core sales to improve due to the lack of an Integrated Solutions headwind from very tough prior year comps. New product introductions, price, a slight improvement in Industrial output and other growth and innovation successes will drive the balance of the growth. Energy is expected to have the highest fiscal '15 core sales growth at 4% to 6%, with Viking now being factored into the calculation. This segment growth reflects the momentum we've been seeing for the past 6 months in Asia Pacific and the Americas, with the North Sea and Europe lagging behind. We expect a difficult start for Engineered Solutions in fiscal '15 due to a huge comp from a year ago, primarily driven by the European truck pre-buy, ahead of the 2014 emission standard changes. We expect truck to grow in fiscal '15 but at a low-single digit rate and are seeing slowing in growth in ag orders, which collectively reduce Engineered Solutions' segment core sales from the 7% in fiscal '14 to 2% to 4% in fiscal '15. We prepared the graph, on Page 15, to illustrate both the sales and earning per share sensitivity of foreign exchange in our guidance. Until a month ago, we weren't expecting exchange rates to be a factor in the fiscal '15 guidance. But the currency markets changed dramatically in September. The euro was at an average of just under $1.35 for our fourth quarter and is now at $1.26. And as you can see on Page 15, our fiscal '15 guidance is based on a $1.28 euro and $1.62 pound. Each 1 point move from here impacts annual sales by $3 million to $4 million. This assumption causes a $20 million sales and $0.05 earning per share headwind from fiscal '14 actuals to fiscal '15 guidance. Now let's turn to Page 16, and I'll start to bridge from fiscal '14's reported EPS of $1.95 to the $2.10 midpoint of our fiscal '15 earning per share guidance range. The first step is to pull the onetime items out of fiscal '14's actuals, including the $0.04 per share RV gain that Andy covered earlier and the $0.07 per share tax benefit that we had in the third quarter. We then remove $0.05 for the foreign currency headwind and arrive at an adjusted fiscal '14 EPS baseline of $1.79 on a constant dollar continuing operation basis. Now let's move to Page 17, where we bridge from $1.79 to the midpoint of our fiscal '15 earning per share guidance. The biggest nonoperational increase in fiscal '15 EPS is the $0.18 per share carryover benefit of the buybacks completed during fiscal '14 and during the first month of fiscal '15. Next, we will have a $0.06 per share benefit from lower Viking retention expenses year-over-year. We've reminded investors all year that this was a headwind to Viking margins in fiscal '14. Going the other way is an $0.08 per share headwind for income taxes, as a result of a higher effective tax rate. We're anticipating an approximate 21% effective tax rate in fiscal '15 compared to an approximate 17% rate in fiscal '14, due to some expiring benefits. At 21%, our effective tax rate is still below the majority of our peers. Net M&A activity is another $0.03 per share headwind. This effectively represents the loss of RV profit in excess of the carryover profits from the Hayes acquisition. Simply put, RV was more profitable when we sold it than Hayes is today, largely due to most RV assets being fully depreciated or amortized, in contrast to Hayes assets, which were marked up. The last headwind, and one so many have missed, involves incentive compensation. We have built in bonus expense at target in fiscal '15 guidance, which is $13 million more than in fiscal '14, given the low target results for the year. That leaves us with the biggest driver of increased year-over-year earnings per share, it's base business improvement. This includes incremental profit on an assumed 4% core sales growth, which is at the midpoint of our guidance as well as the savings from, and the lack of inefficiencies related to prior year restructuring actions. This equates to a 45% combined incremental operating profit at about $60 million of core sales growth or about $0.33 per share. With all the pluses and minuses, this bridges to 17% earning per share growth, at the midpoint of our guidance. Other assumptions and guidance for fiscal '15. We expect free cash flow to be $160 million to $170 million, and assumes $66 million to $67 million shares outstanding for the earning per share calculation. You can see a summary of the remaining assumptions here on Page 18. The most important one is that, as always, our guidance does not assume any acquisitions or buybacks from today forward. Finally, we have summarized our first quarter guidance here on Slide 19. We're anticipating sales to be between $335 million and $345 million, and earning per share between $0.40 and $0.45 compared to $0.44 a year ago. The first quarter will have the most difficult prior year comp of the year. And it's important to consider 3 major items, including: a 2% top line headwind from currency changes year-over-year; last year's European truck pre-buy, impacting Engineered Solutions; and an approximate $0.07 per share -- earning per share of headwind, from a low 8% effective tax rate last year versus an expected 21% rate this year. There are a lot of moving pieces to account for, with our fiscal '15 guidance: currency, restructuring savings, core sales, tax and divestiture gains and others. We felt that a detailed walk through the bridge would help you better understand our expectations for the new year. At the guidance midpoint, we are anticipating a strong year for Actuant. 4% core growth, 9% operating profit growth and 17% earning per share growth. Not to be lost in the details, future capital deployment and acquisitions and share repurchases should be additive to this double-digit EPS growth. That wraps up our prepared remarks. So let's open up the phone lines for Q&A.