Tom Szlosek
Analyst · Melius Research
Thanks Mark and good morning everyone. Let’s start by highlighting some recent commercial achievements on page two. In Aerospace, we signed a 15-year component service solutions agreement with Dubai based Emirates airlines to maintain aftermarket components on the airline suite of Airbus. A-380 and Boeing-777 aircraft, Honeywell will provide Emirates with 24x7 aircraft on the ground support and 24-hour critical shipment of Honeywell, Avionics and mechanical parts helping emirates reduce departure delays and cancellations. In PMT, we announced the Kuwait integrated petroleum ministries company will use a range of process technologies from Honeywell UOP. For the expansion of this refining and petrochemical complex, South of Kuwait City. Upon completion, this will be the largest integrated refinery and petrochemicals plant ever constructed in Kuwait. UOP has been winning internationally all year with about 70% of its wins coming from outside the US and this is another great example. In late November, announced the acquisition of SCAME Sistemi, a Milan based provider of all in one fire and gas detection systems that uses single interface and supervisory software platform. SCAME Sistemi adds new fire and gas safety capabilities to our existing portfolio of connected building solutions. When combined with Honeywell’s wide-ranging fire and gas product portfolio SCAME’s industrial controllers and management systems will provide powerful integrated solutions for customers. Installers and operators will benefit from seamless integration that provides access to critical information alerts and control. The acquisition also presents you with global growth opportunities in the company’s high growth region including the Middle East, Asia and the Americas. In safety and productivity solutions, we launched a new rugged Android based tablet called ScanPal EDA70. This tablet is design to support the most advance connected mobile user facilitating the large file transfers, video streaming and remote access to business applications quickly, the workers can more effectively manage a wide variety of task. It’s ideal for scan sensitive workflows including in retail, customer engagement and field maintenance. We expect further new product launches on the Android platform throughout the coming years. Also in SPS we launch Sensepoint XRL connected Gas Detector for hazardous environment that protect people in assets from hazardous gas like carbon monoxide and methane. Unlike other fixed Gas Detector Sensepoint XRL is Bluetooth enabled, which allow users to install, commission, maintain and control detector from a smartphone using Honeywell Sensepoint app. And lastly, we announced our agreement to acquire 25% ownership stake in China based FLUX information technology and separately just started joint venture 75% owned by Honeywell with FLUX to serve markets outside of China. Please turn to slide 3 for more information on this exciting global partnership. FLUX develops and implements warehouse management systems and other supply chain software solutions for customers in multiple industries and is a leading player in China's ecommerce, pharmaceutical, retail, third-party logistics and manufacturing sectors. The company has solutions deployed in more than 400 warehouses and manages more than 12 million square meters of warehouse space. FLUX is a great fit with our safety and productivity solutions business and will help expand our capabilities within the connected supply chain. The warehouse management system space is growing more than 10% a year in the Asia-Pacific region. In addition to warehouse management solutions the FLUX portfolio includes other offerings like transportation management and order entry capability to complement our existing portfolio of supply China solutions. Now this will help Honeywell to more broadly serve our customers. We are thrilled about the opportunity that the Honeywell and FLUX combination we bring. Now let’s turn to slide 4 to discuss our updated fourth quarter and 2017 full year outlook. For Honeywell in total we expect both fourth quarter and full year EPS to be at the high-end of our previous guidance ranges with full year EPS up an expected 10% year-over-year very strong results. Reflected in the fourth quarter EPS is funding of additional restructuring projects that will benefit 2018 and subsequent years. We now expect that our fourth quarter effective tax rate will be in the mid-teens versus previously guidance of about 21%, which has enabled this additional restructuring. Our 2017 guidance excludes the fourth quarter pension, mark-to-market adjustment, which at this time is expected to be about 50 million based upon current discount rates and asset return assumptions subject that finalization at year-end. The Q4 and 2017 guidance also does not include the estimated cost to prepare our homes and transportation systems businesses for these spins. We’ll provide you with more color on the spin-offs and the related cost later in the call. We’ve updated our fourth quarter and full year organic sales guidance to reflect stronger and calibrated sales building on the robust orders and backlog growth throughout 2017. Vigorous activity in the aerospace aftermarket driven by air transport repair and overhaul activity in sales of spares in business aviation and continued growth in gas processing in catalyst in UOP. We now anticipate fourth quarter organic sales growth between 7 and 8% and full year sales growth of about 4%. Our reduced segment margin outlook from our previous guidance reflects the impact of lower security volumes and unfavorable product and regional mix in HBT. The dilutive impact of higher sales and then calibrated and a combination of unfavorable mix of equipment versus catalyst sales and an unplanned plant outage in PMC. For the full year, we’re expecting about 60 basis points of margin expansion, so still a strong result overall and in line with our long-term target of 30 to 50 basis points a year. We’ve earned a free cash flow where we’re affirming our full year guidance of 4.6 to 4.7 billion, representing a 5 to 7% increase year-over-year, primarily driven by our continued focus on improving working capital. All-in-all, we expect a strong finish to 2017. Let’s move to slide 5. A year ago, Darius introduced his four key priorities for the company. Accelerate organic growth, continue margin expansion, become a software industrial company and deploy capital smartly. I’d like to update you on how we’re progressing on these items this year. To accelerate organic sales growth, we’re expanding our commercial excellence effort, increasing our sales force in targeted regions and businesses by about 4% and revitalizing our product line to our company wide velocity product development process. We’ve also introduced a companywide management operating system including tools and metrics to give us regular visibility on our sales and order progress and performance. The results have been clear, 2017 marks a significant sales growth inflection. While we’re proud of what we’ve achieved, we know that our improvement is there a need to continue and this remains a focus for us in 2018. Growing profitably and continuing our track record of margin expansion is the second key area of long-term focus. We continued our deployment of HOS Gold across our businesses including launching a new working capital playbook that I’ll touch on a little bit more later. We expect to fund more than 300 million in high return restructuring projects in 2017 including footprint reduction and cost structure improvements that will provide ongoing benefits, especially as we prepare to spin-off businesses comprising more than 7 billion in revenue. We also continue to rationalize the approximately 115 ERP systems we have across the company to value engineer our product cost and to develop software and aftermarket base business models. So, our margin expansion story is far of the motto. This was the foundational year or evolution into a software industrial company. We install general managers in each of our strategic business groups that are responsible for their connected enterprise. We also further developed our Honeywell Sentience platform and are working on creating applications that solve complex problems for our customers, leveraging the data as being generated by our large install base. We’ve some work to do in this area but our early customer wins have been encouraging. We intend to showcase much more of this at our annual investor day at the end of February, meanwhile we’re on track to grow roughly 20% in 2017 and our connected enterprise businesses. Also, our track record of smart capital deployment continues. At our annual investor conference in March, we committed to deploying 6 billion in capital this year. Fast forward to today, we expect to deploy that 6 billion including repurchasing of about 1.5 billion in Honeywell shares in the fourth quarter alone bringing up total 2017 repurchases to 2.9 billion. We also took advantage of our strong credit rate standing in today’s variable interest rate environment to refinance 1.6 billion of our debt, which will extend certain maturities and decrease our interest expense going forward to an all-in weighted average cost of borrowing of less than 2%. Our balance sheet remains strong giving us plenty of capacity to reinvest in the businesses and in M&A, while also returning capital to our investors. I will talk more about our 2,000 capital deployment priorities later. On page 6, we outlined our primary end markets and provided an initial assessment of our outlook for each. The green arrows are indication that we expect market conditions to improve in 2018 while the grey flat arrows indicate that we expect market conditions to remain relatively similar in 2018. I want to highlight a few key points here. First in Aerospace, we expect to see increasing production rates in narrow body aircraft along with continued production ramp in new models, primarily the A350. Slightly offset by production rate slowdowns in other wide body aircraft. In the Business Jet market, we expect that the approximately 4% decline and the overall industry in 2017 will temper, but used aircraft pricing will continue to be a headlines and new deliveries. And the aftermarket, we expect mid-single-digit growth in air transport flight hours with decoupled growth from connectivity and mandate pushing Honeywell’s growth above the market. Growth in the Business Jet aftermarket is expected to be robust given the ADS-B compliance mandate deadline and demand for connected aircraft solutions. We’re well positioned to sell serve customers in both areas. Next in oil and gas, we expect petrochemical market growth of about 4% driven by increased construction and demand for packaging, plastics and transportation fuels. Oil and gas industry CapEx is expected to decline in 2018, while OpEx is expected to grow modestly. The basis for our 2018 plan and HPS and UOP is that oil prices remain in low to mid-50s per barrel. The refining market is expected to be robust driven by continued demand or cleaner transportation fuels. The U.S. natural gas market, which is primarily serve by UOP Russell business is expected to slow as sources of low production wane. 2017 was a strong year for Russell, we won more than 15 new prior units in the U.S. Again, this backdrop, we believe P&T will continue to outperform executing and strong backlog of new order and continuing to expand our market leading positions through technology differentiation and growth from our breakthrough initiatives. In the industrial productivity segment, which in composes both the safety and productivity solutions business and the non-oil and gas related exposure and process solutions we expect to see improve activity that will drive continue demand for our products and services. In HPS demand for cyber security, plant efficiency, asset life and our automation management should continue to drive strong orders growth in our short cycle software and service offerings. In SPS, where we serve customers and distribution, warehouse, manufacturing, retail and transportation logistics, we expect that global macro trends will slightly improve. Growth in ecommerce will stand out as our customers continue to implement differentiated warehouse solutions. The last two sections on this page encompass the primary end markets for our future spinoff of homes and transportations systems, while strong we don’t expect to sit and change in these markets in 2018. So, for all of Honeywell, the environment is positive and with the backlog up about 6% across the long side portion of the portfolio we are nicely positioned for growth in 2018. We are conscious of the fact that approximately 60% of our business is short cycle, so we will continue to monitor the dynamics there closely. With that, let’s move to slide 7. We want to provide some color on some of the key inputs to the 2018 planning. We’ve received questions about accounting changes required for 2018 including the pension, revenue recognition and tax accounting standard changes. None of these is expected out of material impact on our 2018 results. We’ll see slightly higher reported revenues and segment profit in aerospace from the revenue accounting change. The geography of certain cost below segment profit will change as a result of the pension standard but this will not impact segment margin or EPS. The tax accounting change is expected to offset most of the benefits from the revenue recognition change at the Honeywell level. Seeing [ph] expansions our US pension plan remains in great shape with funding greater than 100% of the projected benefit obligations. In 2018, we do expect a higher tax rate closed to 25%, we also anticipate lower restructuring funding. Foreign currency translation is expected to be a minor headwind for us in 2018. We had hedged more than 60% of our 2018-euro exposure and the impact from all those currencies is expected to be minimal. Also, as we previewed, our CapEx spend continued to come down and we expect it will be decline 15% in 2018. We are still making investments required to drive future growth but we are now past the peak investments in PMT capacity and are actually reaping the benefits from past investments today. Our plan does not reflect possible US tax legislation; we’re monitoring the reconciliation of the housing of senate bills and are encouraged about the enhanced global cash mobile that could result if reform is enacted. As things currently stand, or upfront charge related to mandatory repatriation of non-US earnings would likely be more than a billion which will be paid ratably over an approximately eight-year period. We’re still assessing the impact of the potential legislation to our ongoing tax rate if the legislation comes to fruition we’ll update our 2018 effective tax rate guidance. Our 2018 plan assumes a weighted average share count of 762 million shares. Last week, our Board of Directors approved an $8 billion share repurchase authorization which will serve us well as evaluate alternatives for deploying cash from our operations. The anticipated dividends from next year’s spin-off and the repatriation opportunities that will arise of US pact reform is indeed enacted. Our plan does not include the one-time cost associated with the planned spin-offs of our homes and transportations systems businesses. Later in the presentation I’ll update you on our progress to prepare for those transactions as well as in our current estimates for those cost. I am now on page 8. Our HOS gold operating rigor with a focus on new product development, productivity initiatives and repositioning combined with recent investments in the portfolio has positioned us well for continued performance. We anticipate organic sales growth of 2 to 4% in 2018 driven by favorable conditions in our end markets, our emphasis on high growth initiatives like commercial excellence, continued penetration in high growth regions and the robust orders and backlog growth in our long cycle businesses in 2017 which I mentioned earlier. Anticipated segment margin expansion of 30 to 60 basis points is in line to the long-term target there is outline in October and reflects our continued emphasis on the Honeywell operating system, commercial excellence and execution and previously refunded, restructuring projects. Earnings per share is expected to be between $7.55 and $7.80 or growth of 6% to 10% year-over-year excluding the spin-off costs. Normalizing for tax this EPS growth is 13% to 17%. We expect strong free cash flow performance targeting growth of more than 20%. Stronger net income, lower CapEx and better working capital performance will be the drivers here. The playbook for 2018 is not changed and we are confident about the year ahead. But turn to slide 9 for more detail about our 2018 earnings per share. We’re planning another year of high quality earnings for Honeywell with most of our EPS improvement coming from operational growth and execution including volume leverage and commercial excellence, as well as our productivity efforts including fixed cost reduction and benefits from restructuring projects we funded in 2017 and prior years. Regarding below the line items restructuring funding will be less than we had in 2017 considering the elevated level of funding in ’17 enabled by the lower plan tax rate. We also anticipate higher pension income of about 100 million. The effective tax rate will be higher in 2018 as a result of accounting benefit from fewer stock option exercises and lower benefits from tax planning. In 2017, we actively drove the realization of various foreign tax credits and those benefits are not expected to repeat in 2018. And as we said earlier, our 2018 financial plan does not reflect any impact from the potential U.S. tax legislation. The last slide among slide 9 is the share count impact on earnings per share. The 1.5 billion shares repurchase in the fourth quarter will result in a roughly 1% lower diluted weighted average share count of about 762 million shares in 2018, which contributes most of the benefit you see in that other count. Overall, excluding the spin offset ratio costs and pension mark-to-market adjustment we anticipate 2018 earnings per share 755 to 780, up 6% to 10% or up 13% to 17% as I said earlier normalized to the 2017 tax rate in both periods. The reported EPS over the course of 2018 will be lower as a result the spin-off related separation costs. Let me move to the business segment on slide 10. Starting with Aerospace organic sales are expected to be up 1% to 3%. In commercial OE, we expect low-single-digit growth due to an increase in volumes from narrow body platform offset by weakness in the business share OE market, which while improved will still be a slight headwind in 2018. Longer term, we’re still conservatively planning for the business shed only market to recover at the end of 2018 or in early 2019. In the commercial aftermarket, we anticipate mid-single-digit growth fuel by the strong market conditions I mentioned earlier. Defense growth should be firm driven by core U.S. and international defense offering and partially offset by continued weak demand in space and commercial helicopter. There are some signs of growth in the commercial helicopter market overall, but in the medium and heavy industry where Honeywell participates excess inventory and slow build rates are still happen in growth. Transportation system should again be a strong contributor driven by gas turbo penetration. Like last year, our forecast reflects a slight decline in light vehicle diesel sales more than offset by continued increases in light vehicle gas turbo penetration. In commercial vehicles, we anticipate roughly flat market with highway growth offset by a slowdown on highway vehicle demand in both China and in the US. Our long-term strategy is selecting the right platforms to invest in aerospace and building our install base will again serve us well in 2018. We’re well positioned on attracting new business jet platforms, for when the business jet market does recover and our large install base is driving both traditional and decoupled growth in the aftermarket. Aerospace margins are expected to expand 40 to 70 basis points driven by that volume leverage. Also, productivity, net of inflation and commercial excellence. In HBC, we anticipate organic sales growth of 1 to 3%. The building solutions combined with new product introductions in environmental and energy solutions and in security and fire will continue to drive growth in high growth regions including double-digit growth in China. We expect low to mid-single digit growth in our distribution business as ADI [ph] continues to expand it internationally and business solutions executes on its strong backlog and accelerates its outcome based service offerings. A3T’s expected margin expansion of 30 to 60 basis points will be driven by savings from prior restructuring actions and ongoing commercial excellence and productivity initiatives. Our 2018 performance materials and technology guidance reflect the inclusion of smart energy. We announced the move of that business from HBT into PMT in early October. Because of the synergies between smart energy and our process solutions business. Both leverage the connectivity and data management competencies with Honeywell – platform and generates new offerings that help our utility and other customers operate more efficiently. Both the project based businesses and smart energy will benefit from process solutions expertise in developing attractive recurring streams from an expense install base. 2018 with PMP sales are expected to be up 3 to 5% organically as we continue to outperform in a stable yet low for longer oil and gas environment. EOP is expected to deliver another strong year with high single digit growth driven by a strong backlog, particularly in engineering and services revenue. We expect low to mid-single digit growth in process solutions with advances across the portfolio primarily fueled by demand for our short cycle software solutions and control products and by our connected planned solutions. Advance materials are expected to be up low single digits due to continued demand for our – line of low global warming materials. PMT segment margins are expected to be up 20 to 50 basis points driven by commercial excellence and productivity net of inflation. As we’ve mentioned, the mix of sales in UOP can by lumpy and recently has been migrating to higher content of process technology and equipment versus licensing and catalysts and that has dampened the shorter-term margin outlook in PMT. However, we continue to build a strong backlog and grow our install base which positions the business for sustainable long-term revenue and margin growth. In safety and productivity solution, sales are expected to be 4 to 6% on an organic basis in the safety business we anticipate low to mid-single digit driven by new product introduction for the gas and high risk personal protected equipment segment and the realization of benefits from our direct selling strategy in the retail segment. In productivity, we expect to grow mid-single digits driven by robust orders and backlog growth and calibrated and an improvement in productivity products as we launched next generation products on the android platform. Margins in SVS are expected to grow 30 to 60 basis points driven by volume and productivity, net of inflation. And as expected, we will have a dilutive impact on margins from Intelligrated business, but this improves overtime as we augment our project oriented install based build-out with software and service offering similar to what we did in our HPS business. Now on slide 11. Our 2018 plan calls for significant free cash flow growth year-over-year greater than 20%. We thought it would be helpful to bribe you with some history and context, they give us confidence in our projection of 5.2 billion to 5.9 billion of free cash flow in 2018. On the left you can see our historical free cash flow growth, as well as the red new line that show free cash flow as a percentage of sales for both Honeywell and our core peers respectively. We believe this is a good measure of our free cash flow performance and a good indicator that our 2018 plan is achievable and not out of range for our historical performance with that of our peer companies. We have an incredible plan to deliver these results, we’re now passed our heavy CapEx investment cycle. At its peak our CapEx is 1.1 billion per year for 2014, ‘15 and ’16 as we built the now very profitable production facilities for [indiscernible] global warming materials and UOP catalyst in PMT. In 2018, our CapEx will decline to about 900 million. In addition, every business and function in Honeywell is focused on improving working capital. We’re on track for an improvement in our 13-point working capital turns in 2017. This after having declined each of the last three-years. So, there has been an uptake in our performance that we intend to sustain. [indiscernible] and I are personally reviewing metrics related to each element of working capital on a monthly basis. Each business has a leader that [indiscernible] for driving results in each area of working capital and working capital performance is a key metric including the incentive pay calculation for every member of our management team. Working capital management is now part of our Honeywell operating system playbook, which is facilitating cross functional best practice sharing across our portfolio. We have introduced new HOS tools that are reducing order to cash cycle time throughout our business and we’re working with our suppliers to decrease their required lead times. I expect working capital to modestly decrease next year despite 2% to 4% expected organic sales growth, which will result in further working capital turns improvement. Our pension plans will not require significant contribution 2018 given their strong funding levels and we expect that our cash contributions for legacy liabilities will be similar to 2017. We’re confident that our free cash flow will be strong in 2018, our targeting growth there will be two times our earnings growth. Let me move to slide 12. The chart on the left shows our 2016 and estimated 2017 uses of cash as well as our 2018 capacity broken out by uses or potential uses of cash. We fully expect to achieve the committed 6 billion of capital allocation in 2017. And if you look at 2016 and 2017 combined we will have deployed nearly 130% of our free cash flow through a combination of reinvestments in the business via M&A and returns to our shareholders via dividends or share repurchases. Our balance sheet remains strong and the capacity for capital deployment will be robust in 2018 driven by the attractive free cash flow and dividends from our spin-off transaction. Further, if the U.S. tax reform legislation is enacted they were likely be more capacity for U.S. capital deployment. However, it was not reflected any impact of that legislation of plans. We’ll provide more color on the 2018 capital deployment at our Annual Investor Day in late-February at which point the legislation outcome and its impacts on Honeywell should be clear. Couple of other points I mentioned on the page, we’re committed to continuing to grow our dividend. At our February investor day, Darius will share more of his thoughts on the rate of dividend and growth to expect. Second, we continue to target approximately 2.5 times leverage is defined by Moody's to maintain our credit rating which has served us well in the debt market. On page 13, we’ve provided a brief update of our progress to spin-off our homes and global distribution business and our transportation systems business in the two separate publicly traded companies. Since our announcement on October 10, we have established a cross functional team that includes both Honeywell employees and outside advisors and appointed a dedicated transition leader who is overseeing both ends. Team members are working on the spin-off full time to ensure there are no distractions to meeting Honeywell’s financial commitments. The team is leveraging the work plans and lessons learned from our spin-off of advance last year. The spin-off team has two objectives, first to establish the capabilities within each of the two businesses to ensure a readiness for day one. And second, to isolate and eliminate any stranded cost at [indiscernible]. We’re already begun to aggressively branded cost and are using restructuring funding to ensure projects are funded quickly and that returns are realized rapidly. We’re also working on the structure of each transaction to ensure that the legacy liability is mostly specs and environmental. Our properly allocated amongst three resulting companies. As we mentioned in October, our objective is at the two spins with high yield credit ratings with access to the credit markets. As indicated previously, for 2018 our earnings per share and free cash flow guidance exclude separation cost related to the two transactions. We’re estimating these to range from 800 million to 1.2 billion for the full year including 5 to 700 million of cost related to internal pact spreads. These costs are in line with comparable industrial spend on a percentage of enterprise value basis. We’ll provide you with an update on our spin-off progress in late February at our Annual Investor Day. Let’s turn to slide 14 to wrap up. We expect that to finish strong in 2017 with higher than anticipated organic sales growth and earnings per share that is at the high end of our guidance range for both the fourth quarter and full year, will strengthen our end markets combined with our growing backlogs, give us confidence in our 2 to 4% organic growth projection for the year. We also expect continued margin expansion in 2018 and our sales and margin performance is expected to contribute to another year of high quality earnings growth. Honeywell’s balance sheet remains strong with room for continued aggressive capital deployment and we’re off to a good start on our transformative spin-off which are on track from completion by the end of 2018. Honeywell is well positioned for another great year in 2018. And with that Mark let’s move on to Q&A.