Daniel Blount
Analyst · Robert W
Thanks, David, and good morning, everyone. David took you through the operational highlights of the quarter. I'll focus on financial results. My comments follow the flow of our presentation and we start on Page 10. Overall, the first quarter was in line with our expectations and we remain on track for the full year performance we guided to you on our last call. In particular, we continue to forecast net debt reduction from operating cash flows in the $200 million to $220 million range. Note that this reduction is in addition to the debt reduction that will result from our recent equity offering. Taking a look at first quarter highlights, we see operating cash flow improved as we generated $6.1 million in the quarter compared to a use of $25.2 million in the first quarter last year. Income from operations at $68.6 million is $9 million higher than Q1 last year. Net income for the first quarter improved to $26.7 million from $6.3 million. This represents an improvement of $0.06 per share. And EBITDA for the quarter was $142.7 million versus an adjusted figure of $144.8 million in the prior year. February weather disruptions that David talked about impacted EBITDA by an estimated $3 million. Adjusting for these disruptions, EBITDA would have come in slightly better than the prior year. I'll provide further comments on EBITDA shortly. The largest year-over-year improvement was in net income, which benefited from continuing reduction in interest expense as we reduced net debt by $224 million over the past year and improved Q1 cash flow generation. Q1 interest expense dropped $5.7 million, or nearly 13%. Income tax expense was reduced to $5.7 million as we utilized the NOL and reduced non-cash charges. And lastly, completion of Altivity integration benefited 2011 results as $8.5 million of Q1 2010 charges did not repeat. Now let's move to the revenue waterfall on Slide 11. We see the net sales are just over $1 billion were down slightly, 0.3% compared to the prior year. As expected, price benefited the quarter adding $24 million to the top line. The improvement was principally driven by higher open market board pricing and contractual inflation recovery on our converted products. As we are over 80% integrated, for both of our price improvement comes from inflation recovery mechanism included in our packaging supply agreements. Recently, we have received numerous questions on this topic, so I'm going to take a moment to describe how the price recovery provisions work. First, let's talk about timing. The inflation recovery provisions are based on look-back calculations that are triggered on either 3, 6 or 12-month intervals. On average, the look-back theory is approximately 9 months. So to provide clarity, let's to take 2011 for instance. The inflationary exchange in input costs looking back 9 months principally into -- back into 2010 will be used to calculate the price recovery to be recognized in 2011. The second question is how is the inflation change determined? In the contracts, the inflationary change is calculated either by a producer price-type index, actual cost to produce or paperboard price movements. In summary, we recover our input cost inflation. And due to volatility, inflation rates are increasing, there may be a lag before full recovery, but the lag will resolve itself over a 9-month period. As a reminder, input costs in our business is generally defined as fiber, chemicals, energy and third-party purchased paper or paperboard that are used in our manufacturing process. For the final comment on pricing, let's look at 1 of our contract resets. We expect pricing to continue to be favorable throughout the remainder of the year, with Q2 pricing better than Q1. Now staying on Slide 11, let's turn to value the net. We see that we are off $32 million for the quarter. As David described, volumes were materially impacted by the weather disruptions and also by lagging demand in certain folding cartons and markets. If we look at industry data from the Paperboard Packaging Council, we saw that overall folding-carton volumes were down 3.2% in the quarter. Considering the weather issues, our volume decrease is in line with the industry figures. Just the conclude the side -- this slide, let's talk about sales by segment. Paperboard Packaging net sales were down a modest 1.2% as pricing essentially offset adverse weather and lagging demand. In Flexible Packaging sales, we had an increase of 3.6% and we were able to recover paper and resin cost increases. Volumes continued to lag in the industrial and construction sectors. Now turning to Page 12 in the deck. We see the slight decrease in EBITDA is the result of the following: $24 million of favorable price, $6 million of unfavorable volume and mix, about $36 million of input cost inflation, $23 million of performance improvements and $7 million of other which was principally tied to a higher long term stock and state incentives. I've already briefed you on the drivers of price and volume, so we'll turn to input cost inflation. In the quarter, we experienced most of our year-over-year inflation in third-party purchased paperboard and bag paper, secondary fiber, chemicals inks and freight. David provided details across trends on our key commodity inputs. I'll concentrate on how to interpret the rather large dollar increase, the $36 million that we saw in Q1. A data point that is helpful when thinking about Q1 inflation is that we benefited from deflation in Q1 2010 and as a result, incurred no inflation in that quarter. For the entire year of 2010, we incurred a $107 million of inflation. 80% was incurred in the second half of the year. A substantial portion of what you see in this year's Q1 inflation number is a continuation of the commodity cost levels we experienced during the second half of 2010. Bottom line is that due to aberrations in the prior year comps, we do not feel that Q1 inflation is a good indicator of year-over-year inflation levels expected to be incurred in the remaining quarters of 2011. As such, if you adjust Q1 inflation of $36 million for last year's deflation swings, the increase is estimated to be in the $25 million range. Now let's move to performance. Performance is generated based on continuous improvement and other performance initiatives and provided a $23 million benefit in the quarter. This keeps us on target for the $80 million of year-over-year benefit we expect. The largest contributions came from our mills and our paperboard converting operations. The mills produced approximately 4,000 more tons in the quarter, while the converting operations continued to benefit from consolidation and optimization. Exchange and other was a negative $7 million impact, the largest driver of which was higher long-term incentive compensation expense based on the increase in our share price during the quarter, which rose 39% to $5.06. Movement in our share price up and down will influence this number going forward. Now turning to cash flow debt and liquidity on Page 13. Net provided by operations was $6.1 million, compared to a use of $25.2 million in the first quarter of 2010. Due to the seasonality of our business, working capital normally increases in the first quarter and did so again this year. However, net working capital as defined by receivables plus inventory less payables actually fell by nearly $15 million as compared to last year. As in the prior years, we continue to actively manage working capital. Capital expenditures in the quarter were $36.8 million as compared to $18.2 million last year and our full-year capital expenditure target remains unchanged. Macon bio-mass and Perry, Georgia converting expansion projects are both tracking well as planned. Liquidity remains strong with no cash borrowings under our $400 million revolver and $109 million of cash on the balance sheet. The net proceeds of our recent offering will be used to purchase the assets of Sierra Pacific with the remaining approximately $130 million being used to pay down debt. And now moving to Slide 14, I'll summarize the guidance. As a result of the equity offering, we are improving our guidance on net leverage ratio to the 3.5x range by year end. We also have updated several other components of our guidance and I'll just quickly run through them. Capital expenditures will remain in the $170 million to $190 million range. Cash pension contributions will be between $45 million and $70 million. Pension expense of around $27 million, depreciation and amortization at $280 million range, interest expense of $145 million to $155 million and finally, as we've said before, net debt reduction from operations in the $200 million to $200 million (sic) [$220 million] range. And with that, I'll turn the call back over to the operator for questions.