Andrew Silvernail
Analyst · Robert W. Baird. Please proceed with your question
So I’m going to take a second here and just summarize 2016. As everyone knows, it was a difficult year in terms of the top line with challenging global industrial environment. At the same time, we did a really nice job on the bottom line and with cash flow. And so even with these mixed economic conditions throughout 2016, there were some bright spots and they were really around our Scientific Fluidics business, municipal and commercial markets, and all of those actually performed reasonably well in the year. And then we had some major headwinds really around the global industrial markets clearly within FMT and then the industrial pieces of HST. But I will say, as we had organic quarter growth in the third quarter and again organic growth in the fourth quarter and a promising start to January, we’re cautiously optimistic that we’re beginning to see a recovery. With that said, I’m hesitant and I’m hesitant, because I’m not convinced yet that we’re seeing a comprehensive turn and really I’m not because the global economic environment and very much the global political environment is volatile and it’s uncertain. And I think it’s prudent at this stage to be more conservative than aggressive. And as we built our plan for this year, we took in mind all of the volatility that’s out there. And as you guys full well know, we can respond very well on the upside. We have a very flexible operating model. We have a low overall labor content in our business. We really have no capacity constraints in terms of machinery equipment or facilities. So really it’s supply chain that becomes the sticking point in the upside. So we can respond very quickly. We would have outstanding flow through in case that happened, but we’re going to be prudent right now. And so as we exited 2016 and I look back, I’m very proud of how our team executed. We drove productivity. We improved working capital, and we continue to invest in our teams and the culture of this business. And we come into 2017 with a very strong balance sheet. We have gross leverage of 1.8 times and obviously, net leverage significantly below that. Cash flow was strong and we’re in a great position to exploit this via our capital deployment strategy. That’s fundamentally unchanged here for almost a half decade that we’ve been using and has been driving returns for us. As I mentioned, we did see positive order trends in the third and the fourth quarter. The initial signs in January are decent. And we’re hoping that the global growth challenges are leveling off. And but as I said, we’re going to remain cautious with the uncertain environment. We do believe that there’s a backdrop of low growth as we think about planning our 2017. And so we’re going to be prudent with this uncertainty of the economic and the political environments. As we look at the year, orders grew sequentially each month in the fourth quarter and the improvements were broad-based across our portfolio, so virtually every business saw improvements as we move through the quarter. And this resulted in organic order growth of 3%. In the second-half, half we had our first two sequential positive order growth quarters since the beginning of 2014. And so again, that’s encouraging. We also deployed over $0.5 last year. We acquired three businesses, as you know, and we also divested four businesses, and I’ll get into more detail here in a minute. But the four businesses that we divested weren’t aligned with our strategic objectives, and I’ll walk you through that here in just a little bit. As you know, deep segmentation has been a critical element of our success and really the fundamental, the foundation of our operating model. And the improvements in profitability, cash flow, and return on investment these past years have really been driven by these efforts. And over the last 18 months, we’ve taken this segmentation, which really had – has been focused on the product line in the customer level, and we’re thinking about our entire business portfolio. And we’ve categorized our businesses into growth outperform and fix. And as we sit here today about 70% of our portfolio is in the growth category, 10% is in the outperform, and 20% is in the fix. And so our strategy here with all of the businesses within these different categorizations is to provide a complete clarity of mission of goals, resource deployment across the portfolio, that’s going to allow us to drive innovation, improve customer service and satisfaction, drive profitability and improve return on investment. And so as we look at 2017, and I’ll walk you through this in some detail here at towards the end of my remarks. But we’re going to continue to invest aggressively around a series of areas and we think that’s critical to our long-term success. So in our growth businesses, we’re going to put about $0.10 or $0.11 of earnings so to speak into incremental investments in those businesses. And I think that’s key – it’s been key to us winning these past few years and it’s going to be very important to us winning going forward. And then, our fixed businesses, which again, I said is about 20% of our portfolio. In 2016, these businesses improved by about 300 basis points in profitability. And so, it’s been an important part of the profit execution seen across their businesses, in particular, in FMT, which you saw really strong margin improvement. And these businesses are either going to graduate to growth, or outperform, or eventually if we don’t think we can move them out of the fix category, we would consider divesting some of them. But I will say that that 20% is largely on track to graduate here, and we kind of give it a two-year timeframe. So they’re going to find growth in the future and our teams are executing very well around that. So with that let me pivot here and talk about our markets and some regions. So on the market side, energy – the trajectory is modestly better than it’s been obviously with the improvement in the price of oil that certainly is helpful. But there’s going to be headwinds, right. The CapEx cuts that came in the midstream and downstream are going to impact us this year and that’s going to hit our energy platform Band-it and ceiling to some degree. The downhole business, I think will improve and we are starting to see that on the banded side in particular. But I do think that the LPG market is going to be soft here in 017. On the industrial side and that’s really been the story for a couple of years now and the industrial markets remain challenged in 2016. We did see some stabilization towards the middle part of the year and as we move forward. And we are hopeful that we’re turning a corner, but obviously, we’re going to wait for more evidence before we’re willing to make a bet on that. Ag, depressed commodity prices, low farm incomes have been a huge headwind there. We have seen a slight improvement and we think that’s going to continue into 2017. Life sciences has been a real bright spot for us. It’s been an – that was an outstanding year in that market. Our core markets in bio, analytical and IVD have all performed well, and we think that’s going to continue to do so here in the future. And finally, municipal. All the indicators point towards continued modest growth in 2017. So we think that will be a plus. In terms of geographies in North America, the story goes back to the industrial recession that really existed here for a couple of years. And so, obviously, we’re hopeful of the signs of recovery, but again, we’re going to be cautious. Europe is really a mixed bag, depends on the country and it really depends on the business. Our dispensing and our water businesses, which are two of our bigger European-facing businesses have done quite well. But the performance across Europe is pretty spotty. And so we think that will probably continue in 2017. Asia, India has been terrific for us. We have – we really won in terms of market share and the business focus there. But China has been more difficult with really the industrial recession there also as they move from an investment-driven economy to a consumer economy. We do expect some improvement in China, however, in 2017. Let me turn to a little bit conversation on capital deployment. So, we’ve had this balanced discipline capital deployment strategy for sometime, and I think it works very well. Our overall goal is to drive spiritual [ph] shareholder returns and we have four pillars of this strategy. We’re going to fully fund organic growth. We’re going to take assistant quarterly dividends. We’re going to opportunistically repurchase stock and we’re going to execute strategic M&A. And so here we are with a very strong balance sheet, strong free cash flow, and this is going to give us leverage as we go forward, and we use that leverage well in 2016. So as I mentioned before, we deployed over $0.5 billion in three acquisitions; Akron, AWG and SFC, and those hit two different markets in three different countries. So really spread nicely across our portfolio and our ability to manage and integrate those businesses. The Akron and AWG really changed the face of our fire and safety business, and SFC did the same for our ceiling group. The integrations across the Board are going well and so we’re very positive about these acquisitions going forward and the benefits that we expect to see in 2017 are identical to what we talked about in the third quarter, and I’ll detail that here in a little bit. We did decide to divest some businesses this year four relatively small businesses. Hydra-Stop and two Optics businesses; one in Japan and one in Korea, and then our IETG business, which is in the UK. In total, those businesses had about $40 million of revenue for us in 2016, which obviously will trade-off against the benefits of the three acquisitions that we did. And again, I’ll walk you through the puts and takes of that here towards the end of my remarks. As we think about organic growth, we have continued to invest in organic growth across our businesses. But as we go into 2017, there are a few businesses that are going to get even more money and we’re going to get more aggressive around it. And that’s really around our bio, biopharma businesses, some product launches in water, next-generation of rescue tools, and local for local products in India, and then in some degree an increased investment in China, where we’ve recently opened a facility. And so we’re going to put money really it’s about the future. And as you know, investments for us, it takes time to germinate. The markets move slowly, but you have to be committed and you have to invest year-in and year-out, and that’s what will allow us to be successful in the long-term. On the capital deployment front, in 2016, we increased our dividend by 6% and we returned 38% of net income to our shareholders. And we also bought back 739,000 shares in the year at a cost of about $55 million, which is about 1 percentage here and that happened very early on in 2016. All right. I’m now on the 2016 financial results. That slide four, if you will join me there. So just a reminder, these results exclude the impact of restructuring actions, the gain and loss in divestitures in 2016 and 2015, as well as the pension settlement. But I will detail all of those for folks, so they can get their modeling correct as we go forward. All right. For the full-year, orders and sales were $2.1 billion, up 6% and 5%, respectively. Orders were flat organically and sales were down 1% organically. Organic orders and sales were really pressured by the weak economy that I’ve talked about in detail already around oil and gas in North American industrial. And then our margin actually this a good story. So we finished the year, but there’s a lot of moving parts, let me take a minute here. We finished the year at 20.6%, which was down by 40 basis points year-over-year. But keep in mind that had $14.8 million of fair value step up versus $3.7 million in 2015. So obviously, that’s a big impact. If you neutralize for that, our margins were up about 10 basis points year-over-year. But also keep in mind, that’s diluted – that has a diluted impact of acquisitions. So if you look at apples-to-apples, so if you remove the acquisitions and look at the base business versus base business, 2016 versus 2015, margins were up 80 basis points to 22.5%, so that really shows terrific execution in the base business pre-acquisitions and demonstrates that operating model continues to work. Cash flow, a great story. Cash from operations was $400 million in the year, $362 million of free cash flow, and that was up 12% over last year and 125% of net income. GAAP EPS was $3.53, adjusted EPS is $3.75, that was up $0.20, or 6% on an adjusted basis. Let me take a second and walk you through that $0.22 between the adjusted and the GAAP EPS. So we had a $0.03 charge from restructuring actions, I’ll talk about the benefits here in a moment. We had a $0.16 loss on the sale of four divested businesses and we had a $0.03 charge from the pension settlement. On a final note, of the $3.53 in GAAP EPS, there’s also about a $0.04 related to a favorable transaction FX in regards to intercompany loan that we acquired when we bought SFC. So that was favorable by about $0.03 in the fourth quarter and $0.01 in the first quarter. We have hedged that loan and so we won’t see the volatility here in the future. and so but it will be – those $0.04 will be a headwind as we think about 2017. All right. For the fourth quarter, organic orders were $547 million, that was up 10% overall and 3% organically, and we continue to see an uptick in those orders here that we started to talk about in the third quarter. Revenue was $530 million, up 6% flat organically, and organic sales were up slightly 0.3% in the fourth quarter. And although that certainly is modest, it’s the first positive organic sales growth that we’ve seen since the fourth quarter of 2014. Adjusted op margin for the quarter was 20.5%, that was down 50 basis points year-over-year, but again entirely due to the fair value inventory step up. And so exclusive of this charge, we actually improved margins by 40 basis points over last year. Fourth quarter free cash flow very strong, $106 million in the quarter, that was up 20$ from last year and a 143% of net income for the fourth quarter. GAAP EPS were $0.75, adjusted was $0.96, that was a $0.02 increase over last year. We had $0.21 between the Q4 adjusted and the GAAP EPS, and those are all the items that I mentioned before except there was a $0.01 of that that fell into the third quarter, so $0.21 fell into the fourth quarter. I will also note that we did have significant translational FX as we saw the dollar strengthened significantly in the quarter and that cost us about $0.02 in the fourth quarter. All right. So let me spend a few minutes here on the noise in the fourth quarter. I know there’s a lot of moving parts and I want to make sure everybody has these pieces really clearly. So as I discussed earlier, the four divestitures, we incurred about a $20 million pre-tax loss on the two businesses that we sold in the fourth quarter. That’s a $14 million net loss after the $6 million tax benefit that we realized. We also incurred a $3.6 million pension settlement in the fourth quarter. This charge was related to employees taking a lump sum distribution rather than future monthly pension payments. We did talk about this in the third quarter and it was on the low-end of our expectation. We also incurred about $3.7 million of restructuring costs. We noted that we were going to have some restructuring costs we talked about in the third quarter. These are related to severance and facility closures around acquisitions and plus an announced facility consolidation with our MPT platform. We will get about $4 million of benefit in 2017. Okay, let’s pivot now and let’s talk about the segments. I want to start with fluid metering, I’m on Slide 5. So we finished 2016, organic orders were down 2% in the fourth quarter and down 3% for the full-year. Sales were flat in the quarter and down 1% for the full-year. Op margin was a great story, up 190 basis points for the quarter, up a 100 basis points for the year, really terrific execution around productivity and even with difficult market conditions maybe except for water people really got after the cost structure and right-sized their businesses and we had just outstanding margin improvement. And so, as I mentioned before, we had great improvement in our fixed businesses and many of those sit in FMT and we’re a major portion of the margin improvement in the segment. In terms of some of the areas, water services has been strong. It was strong in the fourth quarter. Again, we think it will be solid as we – if you think about 2017. Industrial, the story I told already many times softness across the North American landscape. The impact of oil and gas have certainly been substantial and weakness in the chemical market in Europe also. So, while we do see some beginning signs of recovery, we’re pretty cautious here around this marketplace. Energy, it remains a tough story. Our mobile business, the downstream portions of the business that CapEx cuts just started late last year. Those are going to play negatively to those businesses, I think in 2017, so they will be behind the curve relative to what you’ll see in the downhole side, which I think will pick up faster and certainly some of our peers have seen that. But we will have some headwinds here early in 2017 around those markets. And finally, Ag, as I mentioned earlier, we have seen some positive indications, so we’re looking for kind of very small improvement in 2017. Okay, let’s turn to health and science, I’m on Slide 10. At the end of the day no real changes in our perspective in the health and science markets. Our overall life sciences and scientific businesses are doing really well, and they’ve been offset by weakness in industrial very similar to everything I’ve talked about with FMT. We had a very strong organic order quarter, up 7%, excuse me, on the heels of also a strong order quarter in the third quarter. So this is promising. For the year, organic orders were up 2%, but certainly we finished very strong in the order front with HST. Our sales were down 1%, both in the fourth quarter and for the year, but obviously, we come into the year with momentum. On the op margin side and again, I think, there’ll be a number of questions here on this. So let me take some time on this. They were down 330 basis points in the fourth quarter and down 100 basis points for the year. Both of these decreases were really primarily impacted by the step up in SFC. If you exclude that, margins would have been down a 100 basis points for the fourth quarter and 20 basis points for the year, and really all of that is due to mix. In 2015, we had a very strong overall profitability in our material processed business and that flipped around in the fourth quarter of this year and had relatively weak margins in MPT and that really accounts for that balance. We do expect margins in HST to be in that 23% range in 2017, so we expect that to rebound nicely as we go forward. In terms of the overall segments within health and science, industrial looks a lot like FMT, as I’ve already talked about, and we have seen again some early signs of improvement, but cautiousness generally. Scientific Fluidics and Optics, as I said before, really strong overall performance. The markets are growing. We’re winning share on new platforms. And so, overall, we have a lot of confidence in that business going forward around life sciences. Ceiling solutions is a mixed bag. Oil and gas has been weak, while the semiconductor market has been strong, and those two have really kind of balanced each other off. And then finally, MPT, as I mentioned has been mixed. This is a pretty lumpy business. It had a strong fourth quarter order book. So we think we’ll come out of gates relatively strong with MPT. But it has been a mixed bag between pharma and industrial businesses. All right. I’m on the last segment, diversified on Slide 11. Boy, it’s just an outstanding year for the teams here in diversified. The two major acquisitions really change the landscape for our fire and rescue business, and so now it’s all about driving the execution here. We finished very strong. Organic orders were up 9% in the fourth quarter, up 2% for the year. Our sales were down 3% for the year, but following orders, we had a strong finish at sales being up 3%. Op margin was down a 150 basis points, but entirely due to the step up that we had $7.5 million. So again, we are – this business is performing well and we expect to have really solid margin profile in 2017. Our dispensing was solid across North America, Europe and Asia. The X-Smart product line continues to have momentum and generally the dispensing outperformed. In fire and rescue, a nice uptick in the fourth quarter. As you know, this has been a business has been weak here for sometime and we saw strength across the markets and we had some nice wins in Asia, which we hadn’t seen in quite sometime. The team did an outstanding job with new product launches and they’re doing a nice job of integrating Akron and AWG and we’re on track to hit our goals with those acquisitions. Excuse me. On Band-It, the transportation business was solid. We are seeing some modest improvements on the oil and gas side that would be a good sign here for Band-It going forward. All right. Couple more slides here and really all about guidance for the year and for the fourth quarter. I’m on Slide 12. So we anticipate organic growth to be about 1% to 2% for the year and this should give us somewhere between $0.15 and $0.23 of incremental earnings for 2017. However, we’re going to have a pretty significant $0.12 headwind from FX. The – as you know, the dollar has strengthened significantly. We have exposure to the euro, the Swiss franc, the Canadian dollar, and the pound. And so, those are meaningful headwinds. And as I mentioned before, that’s broken down into about an $0.08 headwind on translational FX and the $0.04 that’s related to the intercompany loan that I mentioned earlier that we’ve hedged here going forward. But in total, as you guide into the back-half of the year and really sort of the back month or so of the year as the dollar strengthened, we lost a lot of ground, a $0.02 in the fourth quarter, and now in total, $0.12 of headwind for the year. As we look at acquisitions, last quarter we told you that that net of divestitures we thought that acquisitions would add about $0.25 to earnings incrementally. That number is now $0.24, but entirely due to the fact that we sold two other businesses in the fourth quarter. And so we’re right on our expectations of what those businesses should add to our portfolio. Share count will creep a little bit and it’s going to be a $0.03 headwind for us. The restructuring actions that I mentioned before are going to be a $0.03 tailwind, and they’re really related to rooftop and severance consolidation – severance items. We did have a couple of one-time corporate items in 2016 that are not going to repeat in 2017. About $0.04 is from the earn-out reversal that we talked about in the first quarter of last year. So if you remember, in our first quarter earnings report of 2016, we had a really strong overall quarter and because we had about $0.04 benefit from that earn-out reversal that obviously we won’t get again in 2017. And we did have a $0.02 of benefit coming from compensation-related items as the CFO change happened and some compensation was forfeited. We’re get about $0.02 of benefit from productivity net of inflation, so our teams have done a really nice job of offsetting wage inflation and very modest material inflation, but we will get $0.02 of net benefit. And then, as I mentioned before, we’re going to keep investing even with this backdrop of continued low growth. We think we need to continue to put money into our best bets and that’s going to be kind of $0.10 or $0.11 in 2017 of incremental spend. All right. I’m on our last page here on Slide 13, and a couple more items here on Q1 2017 and full-year 2017 guidance. So in the first quarter, we think EPS is going to be $0.91 to $0.93, organic growth kind of 1% to 2%, and operating margins ranging from 20.5% to 21%. The tax rate should be around 27%, and we are going to see kind of a 2% FX headwind here on the top line, and this is all based on the December 31, rate. So everything that I talked about relative to FX was based on the rates at the end of the year, which is our traditional practice. Corporate costs in the first quarter will be about $17 million. And if you look at the 2017 just a few more items. So full-year EPS should be $3.87 to $3.95, revenue growth 1% to 2%, and full-year operating margins at 21.5%. Again, we’re going to have about a 2% FX headwind based on the December 31 rates. And we think corporate cost will be around $66 million for the year, and finally, the tax rate should be around 27.5% based on the current U.S. tax rates in the global tax rates. Always, as we think about these things, we exclude the impact of acquisitions, costs, or benefits associated with them or any further restructuring that they might have. So with that, let me pause here, and Doug, let’s turn and open this up for questions.