Operator
Operator
Welcome to the Corning Incorporated Quarter One 2016 Earnings Results. It is my pleasure to turn the call over to Ann Nicholson, Division Vice President of Investor Relations.
Corning Incorporated (GLW)
Q1 2016 Earnings Call· Tue, Apr 26, 2016
$150.66
-1.54%
Same-Day
+0.42%
1 Week
-3.12%
1 Month
+4.73%
vs S&P
+4.53%
Operator
Operator
Welcome to the Corning Incorporated Quarter One 2016 Earnings Results. It is my pleasure to turn the call over to Ann Nicholson, Division Vice President of Investor Relations.
Ann H. S. Nicholson - Division Vice President, Investor Relations
Management
Thank you, Sean, and good morning. Welcome to Corning's first quarter conference call. With me today is Wendell Weeks, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Tony Tripeny, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; and Jeff Evenson, Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer. Before we begin our formal comments, I'd like to remind you that today's remarks contain forward-looking statements that fall within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These remarks involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially. These factors are detailed in the company's financial reports. You should also note that we will report our results using core performance measures. These core performance measures are non-GAAP measures. A reconciliation can be found on our website. We have slides posting live on our website that are accompanying our formal comments, and they will be available on our website later this morning. Now, I'll turn the call over to Wendell. Wendell P. Weeks - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Thank you, Ann. Good morning, everyone. As we said in this morning's press release, we are pleased that first quarter sales in Display, Environmental, Specialty Materials, and Life Sciences met or exceeded expectations. Demand in Optical Communications was as strong as we expected, but deployment issues with new manufacturing software interrupted our cabling production and interfered with our ability to fill customer orders. Now, we are well down the path to resolving these problems, but we estimate that they reduced first quarter sales by approximately $100 million. The combination of reduced sales and spending to overcome the issues reduced first quarter net income by about $40 million. Absent this, Optical Communications results would have been consistent with expectations. Even with this impact, however, core EPS was…
Ann H. S. Nicholson - Division Vice President, Investor Relations
Management
Thank you, Tony. Sean, we'll now open the lines for questions.
Operator
Operator
Thank you. And our first question will come from the line of Patrick Newton with Stifel. Please go ahead. Patrick Newton - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.: Yeah, Wendell, Tony, Jeff, thank you for taking my questions. I guess number one is, given the expected close of the Dow JV in the current quarter, could you elaborate a little bit further on your intentions with the $4.8 billion in proceeds? I think that investors have varying opinions of the use of cash within your capital allocation framework and the pace at which it can be harnessed. So I guess at a minimum, should we anticipate a buyback to offset dilution from the loss of equity earnings? And then given the substantially tax-free transaction, are there any structural timing issues that prevent the immediate access to the proceeds? R. Tony Tripeny - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: So Patrick, good morning. Let me take that question. I think that from an overall standpoint, let me first start about the timing of the transaction. I mean we expect it to close sometime during this quarter. We're on track. We've made a lot of progress with everything that needs to get done. We feel pretty good about that. We said all along that when we do close, that we would discuss more what we do plan to do from a cash standpoint. I think it is reasonable to assume that over a period of time, as we make this transaction, that we offset the dilution on the equity earnings at some point in time, although we're not actually talking about a very specific timing on that. In terms of the cash availability, as we've mentioned that from an overall standpoint, there are restrictions relative to the cash availability, but that's cash…
Operator
Operator
Thank you. Our next question will come from the line of Steven Fox from Cross Research. Please go ahead.
Steven Fox - Cross Research LLC
Management
Thanks, good morning. Just looking at the Optical business a little bit more and color, could you talk about some of the end markets and how they performed and how you think they're going to perform going into the second half of the year, specifically wireless, fiber to the home and data center? And then I'm just curious, given what I understand lead times to be on some of the optical cables, how you expect to make up some of the lost sales. It doesn't sound like it's going to be an easy task to regain some of that share, given what might have shipped during the quarter. Thanks. Wendell P. Weeks - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Thanks, Steven. So let's start with the situation in OpCo. First, the main dynamic in the numbers were the problems we had on implementing this software solution. This hurt. I mean, we've had to apologize to our customers who totally rely on us in certain segments. Thank goodness that actually enterprise started a little slow this year, but our big telecom network providers totally felt this. And you got to remember, we've gained so much share over these last several years because of our advantaged product sets that we have customers that basically rely on us for 100% of their deployment. So no question, our real extending lead times there have meant we've had to apologize to our customers and do our best to get those back on track. But also, we owe our investors an apology because we missed an opportunity to beat expectations and get off to a great start to the year. So now it's further added degrees of difficulty for us to be able to climb steeply to the back half and still hit everybody's expectations for…
Steven Fox - Cross Research LLC
Management
Yes, that's very helpful. I appreciate that. And then just as a quick follow up, just directionally in terms of gaining content per device that you've talked about since the analyst meeting, should we expect some of that in the second half of the year? And if so, is there any hints you can give us on how that would sort of play out? And then I'll pass the baton. Thanks. Wendell P. Weeks - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Well, one again, so on one hand in Gorilla, as you heard from Tony, we're seeing less growth. It's sort of IT and small, right. On the other hand, we see the opportunity for revenue enhancement and it's going to come in sort of two broad areas. First, that as we introduce more advantaged glass products, just in our base glass business, we expect price to stop going down. Okay. That still has to happen, right, and the customers still have to love it, but that ought to be enhancing our gross margin. And then second, we will be increasing our revenue per device through other ways by adding value. Right, and that's an example we just talked about on the Vibrant Corning Gorilla Glass, which basically moves us to selling a part, and then a customized part, in terms of the images that are on it. We have other efforts going on in terms of the parts business to serve our customers at that higher revenue spot. And then finally, we have some other new value add products that you've heard us talk about, but now we expect to commercialize, like fire technology for wearables, et cetera. Exact timing on how it comes in, my friend, is hard to call, because there's technology adoption. But yes, we would feel that that sort of revenue enhancement could help us close some of that gap that we see with the small end market.
Steven Fox - Cross Research LLC
Management
Great. That's very helpful. Thanks very much.
Operator
Operator
Thank you. Our next question will come from the line of Mehdi Hosseini from SIG. Please go ahead.
Mehdi Hosseini - Susquehanna Financial Group LLLP
Management
Thanks for taking my question. Just as a follow up to the Gorilla commentary, what gives you confidence that this is not ASP pressure and just a reflection of lower volume due to demand? R. Tony Tripeny - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Well Mehdi, as we take a look at what we expected at the beginning of the year versus today, and what's really has happened in the market, is lower demand for handheld, and also lower demand from a tablet standpoint. We expected tablets to be down this year, but they're going to be down a little bit more than that. And so that takes our overall area growth, which we had expected to be up in the mid single digits or so down to the low single digits. From a pricing standpoint, our contracts get set at the early part of the year. So we feel good from an overall pricing standpoint. And the reason that we think our sales can be up mid to high single digits has to do with the value adds that Wendell talked about in the previous answer.
Mehdi Hosseini - Susquehanna Financial Group LLLP
Management
Got it. Thank you. And then just looking at your cash flow, there was a cash burn from operation, and can you help me understand what happened there? I see you're – go ahead. Go ahead. R. Tony Tripeny - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah, sure. So, I think the first thing that's important to focus on is our adjusted cash flow, which also includes the impact from the hedges, and when you take those positive impacts from the hedges, we had about $110 million of cash flow from operations. That was down from last year, and two major drivers of that, the first being lower profitability in the overall business, and then the second item is, we had a big cash tax payment that happened in the first quarter of this year. As we look out for the entire year, we feel good about our ability to generate the operating cash flow kind of consistent in line with what we did last year. So there's nothing to be concerned or alarmed about on that, and Q1 is usually or always our lowest cash flow generating quarter.
Mehdi Hosseini - Susquehanna Financial Group LLLP
Management
Got it. Thank you.
Operator
Operator
Thank you. Our next question will come from Doug Clark from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Douglas Clark - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Hi. Thanks for taking my question. Two quick ones and then a follow up. The first one is on, have you seen any impact from the earthquakes in China? Not as much for your facilities or the glass industry, but for the rest of the TV supply chain? And then secondly, can you help quantify how big the impact to gross margins is for the corporate average in the second quarter from the power outage in the Specialty Materials segment? R. Tony Tripeny - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Sure. I think from an overall supply chain standpoint, it is our understanding that there was some impact on the Taiwan earthquake. And so we clearly would have seen that in March, in terms of some of the utilizations. In terms of the impact in gross margin, of course it will depend a little bit on how this all gets itself resolved, but we would have guided our gross margins to be 42% if we hadn't had this issue. So think of it somewhere, half a point, something like that. Douglas Clark - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Okay, great. And then a follow-up question, interesting that nobody's really asked on the Display business yet. But there, I think you mentioned during the prepared remarks that utilizations from the panel makers have started to move back higher. Does that suggest that the first quarter indeed was kind of the lowest point for utilizations and we should see a recovery throughout the rest of the year? And then similarly and relatedly, are you seeing further shift to thinner glass, kind of 0.3, 0.4 millimeter glass, and if that's…
Ann H. S. Nicholson - Division Vice President, Investor Relations
Management
Next question, Sean.
Operator
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Vijay Bhagavath, from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Vijay K. Bhagavath - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.
Management
Yeah, hi. Good morning. Hi, Wendell, Tony. Two questions, if I may. The first is, if you look at your Optical Communication business, in addition to the manufacturing issues you noted, was there any weakness in any of the end markets you sell into in Optical? Would be very helpful to hear. Thanks. R. Tony Tripeny - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Okay, well I think Wendell talked about that before. The enterprise market did start off a little weak at the beginning of the year. If you take a look at our slides, you'll see that sales were down, a lot of that of course driven by the issue with our software implementation. But it did start off a little weak, but it definitely picked up as the quarter progressed, and is very strong right now. And the carrier market has been strong the entire time. So we feel very good about the end markets in Optical.
Vijay K. Bhagavath - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.
Management
Perfect. And then, Tony, a quick follow on for you. Cash flow generation in Q1 was quite weak. Help us understand what drove the weakness in cash flow. Thanks. R. Tony Tripeny - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Sure. I mean, I think I already answered that, Vijay.
Vijay K. Bhagavath - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.
Management
Perfect. Thanks.
Operator
Operator
Thank you. Our next question will come from the line of Rod Hall from JPMorgan. Please go ahead.
Rod B. Hall - JPMorgan Securities LLC
Management
Yeah, hi, guys. Thanks for the question. I guess I have two. The first one is, we're tracking a lot of OLED capacity provisioning out in the marketplace, and I'm just curious if you guys have an expectation for when OLED really starts to take share in the smartphone market. Is that next year that you would expect that, late this year? Can you just give us some color on that? And then, what the impact on your own business would be? And then secondly, on Optical Communications, I just wanted to follow up. I think, Wendell, you had said that carriers are very reliant on you guys. I'm assuming that means you haven't really lost much share, but it's more an impact on projects. And I wonder if you could comment on regionally at least, where projects may have been slowed down in terms of optical build out. Thanks. Wendell P. Weeks - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Thanks, Rod, and thanks especially for the question on OLED because I was worried if no one asked, I would just have to tell them. So that when Tony and Ann go out to talk to investors, they'd be able to have a reference point. So, but let's start with your OpCo question. Very observant, Rod. So a rough piece is, that's why we expect to recover in the back half a significant hunk of our OpCo businesses is there's some of it that you just can't get the product or the systems anywhere else. But there's also a hunk in cable that is just going to be lost, that you could get an alternative at the cable component level. The region you feel it the most in for us has been North America, right. So that's the region that's felt it the worst. We felt it everywhere, because once we get a constraint of our capacity, we sort of draw it down. But North America has felt it the worst, because that's the area where we had the software implementation points, and telecom customers tend to qualify specific product sets in particular production facilities. So that's where we felt it. It's why we're pretty encouraged we can recover, as well as the fact that things are really tight right now in fiber and cable. So that's our thought on OpCo. Before I move to OLED, does that work for you, Rod?
Rod B. Hall - JPMorgan Securities LLC
Management
Yeah, that'd be great, Wendell. Thank you. Wendell P. Weeks - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: So OLED. So for those of you who aren't following it quite as closely as Rod, the OLED capacity that has been largely announced or discussed has been for a technology called polyimide OLED. Let me start with what the impact is on us and then give you a little background. So the impact on us is that the adoption of this P-OLED technology will increase Corning glass sales. Now, that seems unusual, right, so probably we should take a moment to explain it. So a little over five years ago when OLEDs first began emerging as a number of the different OEMs started to promote them, we developed a strong point of view on how OLED would play out versus LCD. So the first step is you got to separate between large size and small. These are very different applications and they use different types of display technology, today and going forward. In the large size, which is 90% of glass volume roughly, we believed strongly then and continue to believe that OLEDs will be at best a niche product, and we thought that because we could see how LCDs would continue to improve and what we believed is that OLED's incremental cost would not be worth their shrinking benefits relative to LCD. And that's played out where we've gone from three major OEMs promoting OLED strongly to now just one. And certainly the market has played out in terms of demand, as we expected. We continue to expect that technological outcome for the foreseeable future. Now, in small there is a different matter. Small, about 10% of the market. We thought then and now that polyimide OLEDs were very, very interesting and we thought they were interesting because you could potentially conform them behind a nice piece of our Corning Gorilla Glass and get a very different customer experience where you'd have displays bending around corners, and therefore very small bezels, and long term, the potential for a flexible display. So that's where we focused our strategic and technical energy. And as a result, what we've done is we've developed a very advantaged product and very, very, very high market shares. So as a result, even though polyimide OLED consumes less glass, this is way more than offset by our share gain in this technology. Plus, because this is a small part of the market, we don't see any overall impact to overall glass supply and demand in any sort of meaningful way. Rigid OLED versus LTPS, LCD, they're going to split that market. That's not that big a deal. Now as goes to timing, so we have a really good idea on timing, but we can't really discuss it, because that would disclose our knowledge of our customers' exact product plans and that wouldn't be appropriate.
Rod B. Hall - JPMorgan Securities LLC
Management
Is it, Wendell, is it fair to say that most of that capacity in the industry comes online next year as opposed to this? Wendell P. Weeks - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: So I think what makes that question hard to answer is I don't know whether or not you've got the totality of what people's capacity plans are, right. Clearly we are going to see very robust growth in capacity in this space. How that will then tie to how and when products are introduced is a little more complicated question that starts to get more confidential. But, usually you can count on announced capacity increases by the types of players that can actually manufacture this to be relatively reliable.
Rod B. Hall - JPMorgan Securities LLC
Management
Okay. Great. Thank you.
Operator
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of George Notter from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
George C. Notter - Jefferies LLC
Management
Hi, thanks guys. I wanted to ask about the cost downs you mentioned. I have to apologize, I think I missed some of the details here, but I think it was $40 million in cost downs. I think you were talking about the Display business. Can you kind of walk back through the numbers you were referencing? And then what precisely are you doing there and why call it out this quarter as opposed to kind of the normal cost reduction efforts you guys go through? Thanks. R. Tony Tripeny - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: I think you're referring to the charge that we took in the first quarter that's not in our core results, but is in our GAAP results. It was about $109 million and it was across a number of businesses, particularly some industry, or some facility consolidations. And what we were highlighting was one, why the charge was there and then the second item was just it continues in our journey to always be the lowest cost manufacturer. From a cash standpoint, it equates to, once all the charges are taken, that it's about $40 million of cash. The annual savings is about $50 million and that's obviously why we did it.
George C. Notter - Jefferies LLC
Management
Got it. Thank you.
Operator
Operator
Thank you. And then our next question will come from the line of Wamsi Mohan from BoA Merrill Lynch. Please go ahead.
Wamsi Mohan - Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Management
Yes, thanks for taking the question. One of your initiatives, if we just step back here and look at sort of over the last few years has been bringing stability to the Display business. Now in the context of seeing the best pricing you've seen in five years in Q1 and improving from here on and improving inventory situation, your Display core net income declined 24% on a year on year basis. So can you talk about stabilizing the business from a profit context in the context of these results? And you're still guiding 300 basis points of gross margins decline year on year. Can you talk about why the gross margin isn't improving more sequentially when you are seeing such a nice uptick in display volumes? Thank you. R. Tony Tripeny - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Sure. Let me take the first question. What it's going to take to stabilize our display earnings, we've always said it's a combination of two things. One is moderate price declines and the second is volume growth. And what you saw in the first quarter, although the price declines were moderate, our volume on a year over year basis was actually down. And so that's the key driver of the reduction in profitability. In terms of from a, and so as you look out moving forward, as we get into quarters where we have moderate price declines and we have significant volume increases, we certainly are going to get much closer to having stability in our display industry, or in our Display business. That's fundamentally what we have been focused on and we do believe that what's happened from a pricing standpoint over the last two years gives us greater confidence in the ability to do that. On your second question in terms of gross margins, we would have had a greater expansion on gross margins if it wasn't for the power outage in Taiwan. It will depend a little bit on actually how much that ends up costing us. But you could think of it in terms of half a point from a gross margin standpoint. So that when we get into the second half of the year, when we don't have that impact, we don't have the impact from the software implementation, and we have higher volumes, we expect continued gross margin expansion getting much closer to where we were in the first half of last year.
Ann H. S. Nicholson - Division Vice President, Investor Relations
Operator
Thanks, Tony. Operator, we'll take one last quick question.
Operator
Operator
Thank you. Our last question will come from the lane of James Faucette from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. James E. Faucette - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Thanks very much. Wendell, I wanted to follow up on the OLED question on a couple of just updates on other future initiatives, particularly what progress you've seen if any around Iris, as well as what feedback has been after kind of the reports you've released in conjunction with Ford on the auto glass opportunity, especially coming out of some of the recent trade shows and supplier shows in that space. Thanks. Wendell P. Weeks - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Great. Well thanks for the question. Iris continues to get strong engagement from the grants and you're right to ask that in or around OLEDs because it is a way to get sort of sub 5-millimeter thick LCD technology, which is starting to put you right in the zone of OLEDs. So that is part of one of those technological innovations. So we're continuing to see good, strong interest in it. Fascinatingly enough, the fastest moving set of brands in this space are in China. And what we are seeing is real up and coming brands use this as a way to differentiate their very large TVs. So it's way too early to call this idea a success, to add a third piece of glass to a TV. I think let's keep asking the question as we roll forward. We should know a hunk more by the end of this year, how much momentum this tech has got or not. But so far, I would color it as continuing to be quite intriguing to our brands, basically because you can get thinner TVs with smaller bezels, and that helps you…
Ann H. S. Nicholson - Division Vice President, Investor Relations
Operator
Thanks, Wendell. Wendell P. Weeks - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Great. Well, thanks everyone for listening. Once again, apologize for the execution issue in telecom. Other than that, we are marching along as we anticipated to do. We look forward to updating you on strong sequential growth and the closing of the Dow Corning transaction.
Ann H. S. Nicholson - Division Vice President, Investor Relations
Operator
Thanks, Wendell. We have a few IR announcements. Our annual shareholder meeting is this Thursday, and you can listen in on the web. We will also be at the JPMorgan conference on May 24 in Boston, and the Sanford Bernstein conference on June 2 in New York City. Thank you all for joining in. A playback of the call is available beginning at 11:00 today Eastern, and will run until 5 p.m., Tuesday, May 10. To listen dial 800-475-6701. The access code is 390718. The audio cast of course is available on our website during that time. Sean, that concludes our call. Please disconnect all lines.