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Hertz Global Holdings, Inc. (HTZ)

Q2 2016 Earnings Call· Tue, Aug 9, 2016

$5.70

+1.88%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Hertz Global Holdings Second Quarter 2016 Earnings Call. At this time, all lines are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. I would like to remind you that today's call is being recorded by the company. I would now like turn the conference over to our host, Leslie Hunziker. Please go ahead.

Leslie Tolan Hunziker - Senior Vice President, Investor Relations, Hertz Global Holdings, Inc.

Management

Good morning, everyone. By now, you should all have our press release and associated financial information. We've also provided slides to accompany our conference call that can be accessed on our website. I want to remind you that certain statements made on this call contain forward-looking information within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of performance and, by their nature, are subject to inherent uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially. Any forward-looking information relayed on this call speaks only as of this date, and the company undertakes no obligation to update that information to reflect changed circumstances. Additional information concerning these statements is contained in our earnings press release issued last night and in the Risk Factors and Forward-Looking Statements section of our second quarter 2016 Form 10-Q. Copies of these filings are available from the SEC, and on the company's Investor Relations page on our website. Today, we'll use certain non-GAAP financial measures, all of which are reconciled with GAAP numbers in our press release, which is posted on our website. We believe that our profitability and performance is better demonstrated using these non-GAAP metrics. Our call today focuses on Hertz Global Holdings, Inc., the publicly traded company. Results for the Hertz Corporation differed only slightly as explained in our press release. With regard to the IR calendar, on September 14, we'll be attending Morgan Stanley's Fourth Annual Laguna Conference on the West Coast. We hope to see some of you there. But if you can't make it the fireside chat portion of the presentation will be webcast. This morning, in addition to John Tague, Hertz's CEO and Tom Kennedy, our Chief Financial Officer, on the call we have Jeff Foland, our Chief Revenue Officer, who will be on-hand…

Operator

Operator

Certainly. And our first question will come from the line of Chris Agnew with MKM Partners. Your line is open.

Christopher Agnew - MKM Partners LLC

Analyst

Thanks very much. Good morning. The first question, I wanted to ask about, I think you mentioned retail turned positive year-over-year. I was wondering, did that refer to the month of June or was it at some point in June and how are you defining retail? And then I also wanted to ask if you could give a little more color on why average rental length and smaller vehicles were headwinds for pricing, particularly relative to what you thought at the start of the year. I'm just trying to understand why smaller vehicles – presumably, you knew your mix going into the year – why those are a headwind? Thank you. John P. Tague - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Well, I think those are headwind as it relates to the year-over-year comp not necessarily our fleet plan in particular. Length of keep in some ways was constructive for sure in terms of the increase and was also driven in part by the strong insurance replacement market on in and off-airport. So we saw that in a number of areas. As it relates to the retail pricing comment I am going to turn that over to Jeff. Jeffrey T. Foland - Chief Revenue Officer & Senior Executive Vice President, Hertz Global Holdings, Inc.: Good morning, Chris. Retail published pricing is essentially the pricing that customers can find published on online travel agency sites, through hertz.com, dollarthrifty.com and so forth, and also that business that our loyalty program members would be booking directly with us. It represents between 20% and 25% of our business. So there's a lot of bookings that are made that are not published retail pricing that go through areas such as affinity groups, various forms of contracted business and so forth. So the published retail pricing…

Christopher Agnew - MKM Partners LLC

Analyst

Got you. Thank you. And then if I could one more. Can you break out what some of the stranded costs were? Thank you. Thomas C. Kennedy - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive VP: Yeah, Chris. Examples of that would be general corporate overhead that was allocated to HERC such as Senior Executive Management, some properties locations, some other general overhead. There was corporate overhead that directly – went direct corporate overhead that went with the spin. Clearly, we had expected some corporate overhead. It was very difficult to estimate exact the amount until you got through the transactions. As you can appreciate, these transactions, these separations are complicated. You go through the process to try to estimate, which we did have a very good estimate on direct corporate overhead that would go to indirect, and how that fall out. There was some changes in how intercompany sell and how corporate expenses then got funneled finally when you get the separation done. We were not pleased with it end up being $25 million, but I would note that when we first announced the spin back in March of 2014, we had estimated that these stranded costs would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 million to $70 million for the company that made significant progress. We unfortunately had a little larger number than we had originally expected when we finalized the separation.

Christopher Agnew - MKM Partners LLC

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question will come from the line of Anj Singh with Credit Suisse. Your line is open. Anjaneya K. Singh - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC (Broker): Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. First off, I guess, in light of what you described as meaningful improvements in pricing sequentially, but decline still being unacceptable, could you give us a sense of what your expectations were for pricing improvements at 2Q in the second half? And as we look at what you think the biggest limiting factors are right now to your revenue performance, is it more systems related or is it more related to the mix and ancillary-related issues that you had in the quarter? John P. Tague - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. I can't give you the specifics around (35:06) but you know look I think that our expectation in terms of RPD trends improvement was moderately heavier than we experienced. Having said that, when we talk about remediation, much of it is already underway and the realization of the trend we stepped off within June and the results we are seeing with in July. So we are supported by a strong foundation in terms of industry conduct, a good foundation of the trends we see exiting June and leading into July. In addition to that, we are getting improvement in systems that's in place now. I don't want to create the impression that you plug it in and the money starts coming down from the tree. It takes data cleaning time and experience but we believe the changes we are making now are going to be very highly leveraged. And I think we're turning the dial a little bit differently in terms of moderately differently in terms of volume, length…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question will come from the line of Chris Woronka with Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.

Chris J. Woronka - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Hey, good morning, guys. I want to ask you to go back to the back half expectations. You had really great utilization pick up in the U.S. in the second quarter. Do you think – you can, is there a notional maximum utilization that you could get second half if pricing does not pick up as much as you initially thought? Jeffrey T. Foland - Chief Revenue Officer & Senior Executive Vice President, Hertz Global Holdings, Inc.: Yeah. Hi, Chris, Jeff Foland here. So, as you noted, we've been running reasonably high utilization. A significant focus of ours as we stated for a while now is to make sure that we are very efficient in how we use the assets that we have deployed in the marketplace. Do we think that we – the absolute frontier of what we can achieve in that area? The answer is likely no. At the same time, we don't expect that utilization will have to increase much beyond where it's currently at for us to drive the results that we need to going forward. We understand it's running at high utilization today. Our objective is to keep it high and try to improve it from that point. John P. Tague - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. We're focused very much, and obviously, our biggest value drive here is when we can increase cars available for rent by decreasing out-of-service and supply chain spend. And that's where much of our ability to improve this has come from.

Chris J. Woronka - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. That's helpful. And then I just wanted to follow up on the insurance issue you guys found in Europe in the second quarter. Was that – maybe could you give us the genesis of that? Is it something you tend to have more visibility on or could there still be some further adjustments? Jeffrey T. Foland - Chief Revenue Officer & Senior Executive Vice President, Hertz Global Holdings, Inc.: It is clear. I mean, reserving for insurance claims is a very specific scientific process through actuaries up and actuaries in. And what you do is, we do two times a year, we get an outside actuarial study which it factors all the historical claims and how they may be developing from a settlement standpoint relative to how they may have originally been reserved. And what we identified in this example was in the UK, specific to UK. We had some sectors of business we are in, in prior years for which we reserve for but the claims on those businesses came in, have been developing adversely, and as a result we had to increase the reserve a lot relative to those original reserves we had on books for those. What it is it's not normal course I would say, the size, the magnitude. Every once in a while I think businesses experience this adverse development have to increase the reserves. We do reserve on a daily or monthly basis based on our daily transactions and assumed accrual rate for this year's activity that will ultimately be used to pay for future claims. So this goes back to prior periods for which unfortunately the claims have just had developed adversely and it wasn't anticipated adjustment to the reserves required to support those claims that ultimately are developing, getting settled for this line of business which we've now exited, to be clear. So it's not a prospective we believe and perspective issue, but it's essentially increasing the amount of reserves we have for the ultimate settlement of whatever remaining claims we have for this sector business we're no longer participating in. John P. Tague - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. I think the key from a management perspective going forward is to develop more robust leading indicators on this and that's one of the capabilities we're developing that also led to for example the change in debit card policies on location-specific acceptance within the U.S. So this is really a key opportunity going forward is to use this more rich data that we have coming in to actually change how we sell and what we sell, and to affect this corrective outcome much earlier in the cycle. But in this case, somewhat counterintuitively, it was a very small revenue line with a very bad outcome, and we simply exited the segment.

Chris J. Woronka - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. Very good. Thanks, guys.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Brian Johnson with Barclays. Your line is open.

Dan M. Levy - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst · Barclays. Your line is open.

Hi, yes, this is Dan Levy on for Brian. Thank you for taking the question. I just wanted to ask on the volume in 2Q – the U.S. volume in 2Q, you had 6% growth, 5% before adjusting for DTG account change and that's quite robust and that's really a lot better than the run rate we've seen in the recent quarters. It's better than the organic run rate that we've seen in the business. So, can you just provide a little color on that growth and in particular given that the growth happened to coincide with weak pricing and increased utilization, is it possible that some of the incremental volume was taken at lower price? And, I guess, just wondering little color on the interplay between volume and price would be appreciated. John P. Tague - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. I'll ask Jeff to give you a more detailed background on that. But I think it's important to understand there were some underlying events that drove demand up as we talked about, broad recalls against the Takata airbag, very severe weather that drove insurance replacement. So, strong off-airport growth that was somewhat possibly temporary and event driven. But Jeff can provide more detail. Jeffrey T. Foland - Chief Revenue Officer & Senior Executive Vice President, Hertz Global Holdings, Inc.: Yeah. I'm (45:44). Look, our objective is to grow with the market in terms of volume in the on-airport environment in particular. That's the goal. We, obviously, want to maximize the efficiency of the revenue that we can generate from that in the form of revenue per available car day. And as John mentioned, we had quite significant growth. About two-thirds of the same store growth in the quarter off-airport dealt with weather-related and recall-related replacement types of business. John P. Tague - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Which, obviously, have a longer length of keep and was somewhat a contributor to that overall. So we don't have obviously all the comparative data in but we believe our on-airport growth will be very consistent with sort of at or moderately below overall industry growth and that's what we're targeting.

Dan M. Levy - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst · Barclays. Your line is open.

Okay. So, with that in mind, I mean, could you quantify what percent of the retail pricing in the quarter was due to mix? Thomas C. Kennedy - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive VP: Well, so customer segment mix was between 20% and 30% of the decline in RPD on a year-over-year basis. Now a portion of that is driven by softness in the corporate contracted business sector, of which we need to improve and we certainly have plans to improve moving forward. As we go to drive traffic to compensate for that softness, that contributes to some of the customer mix rate softness that you would see in the RPD results.

Dan M. Levy - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst · Barclays. Your line is open.

Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question will come from the line of Michael Millman with Millman Research. Your line is open.

Michael Millman - Millman Research Associates

Analyst

Thank you. Following up on that last comment, while there was a negative impact from off-airport, typically we've been told that good LOR is very profitable. So was there some offset here between (48:05) and profit? Also you mentioned that I guess your market price business is about 25% of total. So, to what extent is the flexibility in the remaining business or how often can you change the prices on that? And then, I was wondering if you could give timeline on when you expect and how much improvement do you expect as you implement your technology regarding fleet and pricing? Thank you. John P. Tague - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: I think I'd take the first two questions there and drive you to the margin line, which I think is sort of evidence of the comment that you make. If I exclude the charge in the UK, the company's overall EBITDA margin actually would have been very comparable, I think within 10 bps as the public comp. So that sort of validates that at the margin line we're competitive but that's not good enough and it clearly has a remaining opportunity gap in terms of the quality of revenue RPD performance, but even if we closed a moderate amount of it would lead to a strong industry margin performance. So I think that is an indication there. In terms of the specific rate of progress looking forward, as we said, we closed – 6 points of the decline year-over-year were closed between April and June exit. And we see further improvement in July as we've gone through and early indications around August are positive as well. So that's how we're sort of set up at this stage. Jeffrey T. Foland - Chief Revenue Officer & Senior…

Michael Millman - Millman Research Associates

Analyst

Thank you. Just touching back on the non-market pricing piece of the business, can you give us some idea of what extent there is some flexibility there, to what extent there isn't flexibility there? John P. Tague - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. Look, I think that the improvement in retail pricing year-over-year that we saw in the quarter we'd view as a leading indicator and while there is not a direct correlation in terms of magnitude and timing, there is certainly is a correlation and I think you will see the rest of our pricing obviously ultimately will tend to directionally follow that outcome. I don't think that we are fixed in place and you are going to see a disconnect in that relationship.

Michael Millman - Millman Research Associates

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question will come from the line of John Healy with Northcoast Research. Your line is open.

John Healy - Northcoast Research Partners LLC

Analyst

Thank you. I wanted to talk a little bit more about the pricing in 2Q. I think you said a couple times now that the published retail pricing turned positive in the quarter. I'm still trying to wrap my head around how that happens and your RPD is still down, call it, 8% percent. If retail is only 25%, what's going on with the 75% of the business and how much was that down in the quarter? John P. Tague - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: As Jeff indicated, while it turned positive it was relatively late in the quarter when it did turn positive. I would combine that with my comment that said, we exited 6 points better than we started. So, as it was turning positive, it is really not versus the 8 point decline. It is versus a number that's much better than that. So, as I said, I don't think that we see other pricing as necessarily not being related to and this is a directionally indicative leading indicator and we don't expect this – I would say, not a tale of two worlds in the context it did occur very late in the quarter and we expect other pricing on a related basis will move in time.

John Healy - Northcoast Research Partners LLC

Analyst

And I just wanted to ask about the charge in the UK. Was that an accrual or was there something that was written down? I was really confused on kind of what happened there necessarily that made it a charge? Thomas C. Kennedy - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive VP: Yeah. John, it's an accrual for future expected settlement of claims related to historical claims that have been developing adversely. So it's an accrual increasing the reserves in the balance sheet and charge for the P&L for that increase estimate and ultimate settlement on these claims.

John Healy - Northcoast Research Partners LLC

Analyst

Okay. Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. We will go to line of Rich Kwas with Wells Fargo Securities. Your line is open.

Ron J. Jewsikow - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Good morning, this is Ronnie Jewsikow on for Rich Kwas. Just had a quick question on the corporate segment EBITDA line, as it came in a little – I guess, a little lower than we would have expected, given Q1 was down $27 million year-over-year, I mean, down $27 million compared to minus $44 million in 2015? But this quarter was roughly flat with year-over-year. How should we think about that moving forward Q1 relative to Q2? Thomas C. Kennedy - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive VP: I think what you're referring to is the corporate segment and our GAAP financials and recall that we had a gain related to the sale of the car share that flowed through that in Q1. So it's an unusual item in our GAAP that's out of the adjusted earnings to be clear but I think that's what you are referring to.

Ron J. Jewsikow - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Okay. Actually, it's the adjusted EBITDA line. It was minus $42 million versus minus $47 million last year. But Q1 improvement was much more substantial minus$27 million versus minus $44 million. I was wondering, if there's any other, kind of, drivers of that delta now should we think about in the back half? Thomas C. Kennedy - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Executive VP: Yeah. I don't know specifically. And I think that'd probably have to be on a follow-up call. I think one item in last year's item on corporate related to an accrual of $9 million for the settlement of a future legal case that was in 2015's 2Q that wasn't in 2016 but I would have to probably look through with you and we could do it off-line and call me, Leslie and take you through the corporate line.

Ron J. Jewsikow - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Okay. And then I just had one quick question on pricing as well. You guys mentioned that published pricing is probably a reasonable leading indicator. I recall that most of your corporate contracts have been renewed at the same or better rates. Is there a reason that corporate pricing wouldn't have turned positive at the end of the quarter? Jeffrey T. Foland - Chief Revenue Officer & Senior Executive Vice President, Hertz Global Holdings, Inc.: Well corporate contracted pricing takes many forms and in most cases it takes the form of fixed rates combined with a variety of share commitment. So it's not directly tied to published retail price in the marketplace. In the quarter we renewed 96% of the accounts that were up for renewal during that quarter and 67%, about two-thirds of those accounts were renewed at constant or improved economics during that time period. So that's reasonably consistent with what we've had previously but once again the mechanism with respect to how pricing works for corporate contracted business and published retail business are a little bit different.

Ron J. Jewsikow - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

All right. Thanks for that color and thanks for taking my questions.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And with that Tague, I'd like to turn it over to you for any closing comments. John P. Tague - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thanks very much for joining us today and as I said trends are improving and we look forward to more positive conversation as there is evidence of that in the third quarter. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And ladies and gentlemen, today's conference call will be available for replay after 10:30 A.M. today until midnight September 9. You may access the AT&T Teleconference Replay System by dialing 1-800-475-6701 and entering the access code of 398152. International participants may dial 320-365-3844. Those numbers, once again, 1-800-475-6701 or 320-365-3844 and enter the access code of 398152. That does conclude our conference call for today. Thank you for your participation and for using AT&T Executive Teleconference Service. You may now disconnect.