Jamie Miller
Analyst · America Merrill Lynch, we have Andrew Obin. Please go ahead
Thanks. Larry. I'll start with the fourth quarter summary. Orders were $34.1 billion down 1% reported and up 4% organically with particular strength in equipment orders up 7% organically driven by aviation commercial engines and renewables. The services orders were up 1% organically. Revenues were up 5%, industrial segment revenues were up 2% reported and 8% organically driven by renewables Aviation Oil & Gas Healthcare and Transportation. Equipment revenues grew 10% and services were up 6% organically. Industrial profit margins were 7.5% in the quarter down 150 basis points year-over-year on a reported and organic basis driven by significant declines in Power and Renewables. For the year, margins were down 80 basis points organically. Industrial profit was down 16% in the quarter with Aviation, Healthcare and Baker Hughes GE all delivering strong profit growth offset mostly by Power. Specifically Aviation had another outstanding quarter and year expanding total year margins while shipping over 1,100 LEAP engines. Net earnings per share was $0.07, which includes losses from discontinued operations related to GE Capital. GAAP continuing EPS was $0.08 and adjusted EPS was $0.17. I'll walk the GAAP continuing EPS to adjusted EPS on the right side of the page. Starting from GAAP. Continuing EPS was $0.08 and we had $0.06 of gains principally from the sale of Distributed Power. As you will recall in the third quarter, we booked the $22 billion impairment charge related to Power goodwill based on our best estimate at that time. And during the fourth quarter, we finalized our analysis and booked an incremental $69 million charge for Power following the third quarter charge. We also recorded a goodwill impairment charge of $94 million in renewables at our Hydro business. Combined these charges were $0.02 impact. On restructuring and other items, we incurred $0.07 of charges principally at Corporate and Power as we continue to resize those segments in line with our stated plan including $0.02 of charges related to business development transaction expenses and $0.01 for our share of Baker Hughes GE's restructuring. Lastly, we realized a $0.01 negative impact from US tax reform as we updated our estimate of the transition tax and other aspects of the enactment of the new law. Our current accrual reflects the effects of tax reform enactment based on guidance issued through year-end. Excluding these items adjusted EPS was $0.17 in the quarter. Moving to cash, adjusted industrial free cash flow was $4.9 billion for the quarter, $1.9 billion lower than the prior year driven primarily by a lower progress collections. Income depreciation and amortization totaled $2.3 billion. Working capital was positive $2.3 billion for the quarter as we reduced over $1 billion of inventory on a higher fourth quarter volume and grew progress collections by $500 million primarily in renewables from strong PTC-driven orders. Contract assets were a source of cash of $900 million as we saw higher services billings in aviation driven by higher fleet utilization and spare parts consumption from strong air traffic and we spent about $1 billion in gross CapEx or $600 million ex-Baker Hughes GE. For the year, we generated $4.5 billion of adjusted industrial free cash flow and we ended the year with higher volume in the fourth quarter as is typical for our businesses. And to provide you with more detail, Power used $2.7 billion in free cash flow for the year due to a combination of restructuring costs, nonoperational headwinds as well as execution and market issues. Next, I'll cover liquidity. On the left side of the page, you can see the walk of the GE cash balance. We ended the fourth quarter with $16.8 billion of industrial cash in the bank excluding Baker Hughes GE. And for the total year, we had industrial free cash flow of $4.5 billion. We paid dividends of $4.2 billion and as of the first quarter of 2019, you'll recall that the dividend is decreasing to $0.01 per share per quarter, which will preserve about $4 billion of cash in 2019. We generated cash proceeds of $5.9 billion net of taxes related to our industrial disposition principally Industrial Solutions, Value-Based Care and Dis Power. And together with Wabtec that gets to the more than $10 billion we had talked about previously. Earlier in the year, we assumed $6 billion of debt from GE Capital to fund the principal pension plan, which was completed in the third quarter. Alstom and GE exercised their JV redemption rights and call options, which we settled for $3.1 billion in the fourth quarter. These entities operate at a loss. So the consolidation of 100% of the financials negatively impacted fourth quarter and will be an income headwind for us of about $300 million in 2019. We also completed a secondary offering for approximately 100 million Baker Hughes GE shares as well as a direct stock buyback with Baker Hughes GE for 65 million shares bringing our ownership stake to 50.4% in the fourth quarter. These actions combined with other Baker Hughes GE buybacks during the year totaled $4.4 billion in cash proceeds. The $2.5 billion of other cash includes a number of items including about $900 million of investments in our Aviation business primarily from the first half of the year; $900 million of short data derivative hedge settlements that we used to mitigate risks across the portfolio; and $400 million of FX translation on our non-US dollar-denominated cash. Running with a higher cash balance will help us address inter-quarter funding needs. In line with our goal to reduce reliance on short-term funding, peak short-term funding needs declined from $19.7 billion in the fourth quarter of '17 to $14.8 billion in the fourth quarter of '18. These were funded with commercial paper and some utilization of our credit facilities. As we execute dispositions in 2019, we expect our intra-quarter funding needs to continue to decline and would expect to use a mix of commercial paper, credit facilities and excess cash at GE Capital to efficiently fund these needs. At the end of the year, commercial paper outstanding was $3 billion and we had access to $40 billion of committed revolving credit facilities with zero drawn. These lines are available to draw at any time and they don't have financial covenants ratings triggers or material adverse change clauses. As you know, our credit rating was downgraded from A to BBB+ with a stable outlook in early fourth quarter. This impact has been manageable with less than $15 million of collateral postings and a smooth transition to a Tier two commercial paper program. We continue to target a sustainable rating in the single A range. Now, I'll take you through financial policy and leverage. We remain committed to our financial policy of a target single A rating a leverage level of less than 2.5x net debt-to-EBITDA and ultimately a dividend level in line with our peers. Deleveraging both GE and GE Capital is a priority and we have significant sources to achieve our goals. As Larry mentioned, we view these businesses differently with different balance sheets and capital structure needs and therefore we analyze their leverage separately. Our goal is leverage for the GE industrial businesses of less than 2.5x net debt-to-EBITDA. We plan to make significant progress toward this goal by the end of 2020 and as a reminder when we speak about net debt, we're talking about debt adjusted for pensions, operating leases and a portion of preferred stock and cash. Measured on this basis, GE Industrial net debt at the end of 2018 was $55 billion. As we look out over the next couple of years, we expect to have roughly $50 billion of industrial sources that can be used to delever and derisk the company. These sources include $18 billion of debt and pension transfer to Healthcare and more than $30 billion of cash proceeds from the monetization of up to just under 50% of Healthcare, 100% of our remaining stake in Baker Hughes GE and our stake in transportation. These sources will be used in part to reduce GE net debt by more than $30 billion including repaying a significant part of the $14 billion of debt transferred from GE Capital and reducing commercial paper. The parent also plans to contribute $4 billion to GE Capital in 2019 to maintain adequate capital levels there. At GE Capital, we have a plan to reduce our debt to equity ratio to less than 4x by the end of 2020. GE Capital began the quarter with $70 billion of debt and ended with $66 billion while our total assets measure $124 billion. For the year, we made significant progress at GE Capital paying down $21 billion of external debt, taking down leverage by 1.4 turns including reducing commercial paper from $5 billion to zero. GE Capital ended 2018 with $15 billion of liquidity. Over the next two years, we expect to generate additional sources of cash from asset sales, including $10 billion in 2019 from completing our GE Capital $25 billion asset reduction plan. We'll have cash from the pay down of most of the debt transferred to GE and capital support from GE. We have reached an agreement in principle on WMC that we expect to conclude expeditiously. And in 2019 and 2020, GE Capital will pay down $25 billion of scheduled debt maturities and continue to contribute about $2 billion per year of capital to our insurance businesses as previously disclosed. We now don't expect to issue new debt until 2021. We are planning approximately $4 billion of capital contributions to GE Capital in 2019. This includes $1.5 billion for the WMC agreement in principal announced today and ensuring we have adequate risk-based capital levels for our current portfolio. Going forward, we anticipate funding any insurance capital requirements or strategic options through a combination of GE Capital earnings, asset sales, liquidity and GE parent support. While we have more work to do, we continue to make progress in strengthening the balance sheet. Next on Power. Orders were down 19% in the quarter. Gas Power Systems orders were down 26%. For the year, Gas Power Systems orders were down 40%. We ended the year with a $9 billion backlog, which was down 8% year-over-year. This is consistent with our outlook for a 25 to 30 gigawatt market for the foreseeable future. Power Services orders were down 20%. Steam orders were up 61% and grid orders were down 13% for the year. Power revenue was down 25%. Gas Power Systems revenues were down 21%. Power Services revenue was also down 21%. During the quarter, we took $400 million of charges related to our CSA contracts, which impacts revenue. Excluding these charges Power Services revenue was down 11%. Steam revenue was down 30% on lower America's and Europe volume and grid was flat. Moving to profit. The segment loss $872 million in the fourth quarter. We performed our normal CSA reviews and while total utilization on the book is flat, we have seen lower utilization on some of our units in some geographies and some pricing pressure in contracts relative to ongoing market dynamics and we updated our assumptions to reflect a revised outlook in these areas. In addition, we had our normal cost standard updates, which included updates to our cost standards including the impact of the stage-one blade issue as expected. This resulted in the $400 million of charges that I previously mentioned. In addition, we also incurred about $350 million of costs related to Gas Power Systems projects. Similar to the third quarter, we continue to experience project execution issues resulting in liquidated damages as well as partner execution issues. Grid profit was down year-over-year impacted negatively by the buyout of the Alstom share of the JV. These items had a significant impact on Power's results and overall, we see the heavy duty gas turbine market is flat over the next few years and see significant opportunity to improve our own execution. Next on Aviation, which had another great quarter. Orders of $8.8 billion were up 12%. Equipment orders grew 20%, driven by continued strong momentum of the LEAP engine program up 56% versus prior year. Military engine orders were up 69% driven by the F414 and service orders grew 7%. Revenues of $8.5 billion grew 21%. Equipment revenues were up 13% on higher commercial engine partially offset by lower military volume. Specifically, we shipped 379 LEAP engines this quarter up 177 units year-over-year. And in total, we shipped 1,118 LEAP engines for the year. We're still behind on deliveries by about four weeks but the business expects to be back on schedule by mid-2019. Services revenue grew 26% with spares rate up 10% driven by higher fleet utilization and spare parts consumption from strong air traffic. Segment profit of $1.7 billion was up 24% on higher volumes, improved price and operating productivity and compared to the fourth quarter of last year, we shipped almost 90% more LEAP engines. Despite the negative mix from higher LEAP shipments operating profit margins of 20.4% expanded 60 basis points in the quarter and 130 basis points for the year. The LEAP engine continues to perform very well with a 58% win rate on the A320neo family and 81% win rate in the narrow-body segment when you add in Boeing 737 MAX and Comac C919. Utilization rates are over 95%. We continue to improve the cost position of the LEAP and over the last two years, we've taken out more than 40% of the cost of the engine and are ahead on the learning curve initially laid out for the program. The overall program will break even around 2021. Now, I'll provide some additional transparency on the engine transition in the narrow-body market. The mixing from CFM56 to LEAP resulted in a margin drag of approximately 160 basis points in 2018 and 130 basis points in the quarter. The business is successfully offsetting this margin pressure through continued growth in aftermarket services, military and changing the mix of company-funded R&D spend. In summary, another strong year for David and the aviation team. In renewables, renewables orders were up 19% versus prior year driven by onshore equipment up 9% and services up 32% on strong repower units. We shipped 44% more megawatts and onshore wind and saw strong orders bookings 3 gigawatts in the fourth quarter and 8.6 gigawatts for the year and we gained share. Revenues of $3.4 billion were up 28% mainly driven by onshore wind up 34% on both higher new unit shipments and repowering volume. Segment margin of 2% was down 330 basis points for the quarter and profit of $67 million was down 51% mainly driven by negative price, liquidated damages for execution delays on a handful of complicated projects including some legacy Alstom projects and higher losses in hydro and offshore as we began fully consolidating these entities in the fourth quarter. The consolidation presented a headwind of about 220 basis points. Recall that we had to book loss reserves at the time of the Alstom deal and we continue to burn through the negative cash flow impact of those projects. The business has seen favorable cash tailwinds from the PTC cycle, pricing is improving and we continue to see strong product cost reduction and while we're seeing some adverse impacts from tariffs, we're working to mitigate them with pricing and supply chain actions. For Healthcare, orders of $5.8 billion were up 2% organically. On a product line basis, Life Sciences orders were up 13% organically with bioprocess up 20%. Healthcare Systems orders were down 1% organically, which was about what we expected as we were comping a very strong fourth quarter in 2017. Revenue of $5.4 billion was up 6% organically. Healthcare Systems revenue grew 4% organically and Life Sciences was up 10%. Segment margin was 21.8% expanding 10 basis points reported and 110 basis points organically, which excluded costs incurred in preparation for a separation in 2019. Profit was $1.2 billion up 2% on a reported basis and 12% organically. Organic profit growth was driven by volume and cost productivity partially offset by inflation, price and higher program investment. As the Healthcare team continues to prepare for separation, they closed out a solid year. Moving to oil and gas. Baker Hughes GE released its financial results this morning and Lorenzo and Brian will hold their earnings call with investors today following ours. Next for Transportation and Lighting. Since we last spoke in October, we signed an agreement to sell Current to American Industrial Partners and the Justice Department has closed its review of the pending merger between GE Transportation and Wabtec. Last week, we also announced amended transaction terms to further support our deleveraging plan. GE will increase its stake in Wabtec from approximately 10% to approximately 25% resulting in increased cash proceeds of approximately $2.2 billion as we sell down our stake. We will still receive $2.9 billion in cash from Wabtec at closing and both transactions are expected to close in early 2019 subject to customary closing conditions. Finally, I'll cover GE Capital. Net loss from continuing operations was $86 million in the quarter, including a tax reform adjustment of negative $128 million. Adjusted continuing net income was $43 million. We completed our annual GAAP loss recognition testing in our runoff insurance portfolio, which resulted in an after-tax charge of about $65 million to increase reserves. As part of the test, we unlocked our future policy benefit reserve and updated key assumptions related to the book. The two largest drivers being the changes to our assumptions and morbidity improvement of a negative $1.2 billion offset by discount rate impact of $1.9 billion. Recall that statutory testing not GAAP drives funding. We expect to conclude the statutory testing in mid-to-late February and consistent with our existing insurance funding plan, we continue to expect required statutory funding of approximately $2 billion in the first quarter of 2019. We are managing this runoff portfolio with new management and increased board expertise and focus. To provide additional information to further clarify our insurance obligations, we plan to include enhanced disclosures related to our insurance book in our 10-K, which will be released in mid-to-late February. We'll include a wide range of items from the profile of our book to morbidity and mortality assumptions to lapse rates, premium increases and related sensitivities. With that I'll turn it back over to Larry.