Operator
Operator
I would like to welcome everyone to the Iron Mountain second quarter 2009 earnings call and webcast. (Operator Instructions) I would now like to turn today's call over to Stephen Golden, Vice President, Investor Relations.
Iron Mountain Incorporated (IRM)
Q2 2009 Earnings Call· Thu, Jul 30, 2009
$114.36
+1.55%
Same-Day
+0.14%
1 Week
+0.10%
1 Month
+0.41%
vs S&P
-3.43%
Operator
Operator
I would like to welcome everyone to the Iron Mountain second quarter 2009 earnings call and webcast. (Operator Instructions) I would now like to turn today's call over to Stephen Golden, Vice President, Investor Relations.
Stephen Golden
President
Thank you and welcome everyone to our 2009 second quarter earnings conference call. After my announcement this morning, Bob Brennan will give his state of the company remarks, followed by Brian McKeon who will deliver the financial review. When Brian is finished, we'll open up the phones for Q&A. We certainly had a busy June this summer, meeting with both equity and credit investors in Chicago, L.A., London and New York. We'd like to thank you all for taking the time to meet with us and we certainly appreciate your council and continued support. I'd also like to ask you to mark your calendars as our 12th Annual Investor Day will be held on Tuesday, October 6, 2009 in New York City. This year we will be holding the event in the Hudson Theater in the Millennium Broadway Hotel on 44th and 45th. Stay tuned. We'll be releasing more information as it becomes available. The best way to stay informed is to sign up for email alerts at the investor relations page of our website. Per our custom, we have a user controlled slide presentation on the investor relations page of our website at www.ironmountain.com. Referring now to Slide 2 of that presentation, today's earnings call and slide presentation will contain a number of forward-looking statements, most notable our outlook for our 2009 financial performance. All forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties. Please refer to today's press release, the Safe Harbor language on this slide and our current report on Form 8-K filed on May 8, 2009 for a discussion of the major risk factors that could cause our actual results to be materially different from those contemplated in our forward-looking statements. As you know, operating income before D&A, or OIBDA and free cash flow before acquisitions and investments among other metrics are metrics we speak to frequently and ones we believe to important in evaluating our overall financial performance. We provide additional information in the reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the appropriate GAAP measures as required by Reg G at the investor relations page of our website as well as in today's press release. With that, I'd like to introduce our CEO, Bob Brennan.
Robert Brennan
Management
Thanks Stephen. Good morning everyone. Iron Mountain's business remains strong. We continue to deliver stolid results and we expect that we can sustain good performance going forward. Our business is performing very well in this recession as evidenced by the fact that growth is solid and core revenues are expanding with core growth of 6% and internal growth of 4%. We will be below the aggressive targets we set heading into 2009, but we feel good about the expansion of our business and our prospects going forward as evidenced by the fact that our bottom line is very strong with OIBDA up 17% for Q2 on a constant dollar basis, and 19% for the first half on a constant dollar basis. As Brian will explain in a few minutes, our cash flows and our balance sheet also continue to strengthen. As many of you know, our strategy is to optimize our core business while investing in growth. This strategy is in full force as we manage to achieving our full year targets. Let me review the business by segment, beginning with our largest and best performing business, the North American physical business. North America has been working on an agenda of pursuing growth while increasing returns since we integrated the offsite data protection and hard copy records management businesses in 2005 under Harry [Epinhausen's] leadership and they're doing a great job pursuing both growth and productivity. Let me start with the growth front. We think about growing the business of the North American physical business through vertical segmentation and through the introduction of new services. I'll just describe a few of the key verticals. Financial services is a very large market for us where there's obvious pressure to reduce costs, but we also have a tremendous amount of opportunity as…
Brian McKeon
Management
Good morning everybody. Q2 was a solid quarter for Iron Mountain. Our results were highlighted by continued strong year on year OIBDA growth in the face of economic pressures that are moderating top line gains. Core revenues which comprised 87% of our total revenues in the quarter and are a key indicator of the health of our business, grew a solid 6% organically and offset expected weakness in our complimentary service revenues. As expected, the year on year strengthening of the U.S. dollar against our major foreign currencies lowered both reported revenue and OIBDA growth in the quarter by approximately 7%. The dollar did weaken materially within the quarter which resulted in gains in other income and our book tax provision. This resulted in an increased of our reported EPS of $0.18 per share. Excluding currency impact, revenues grew 17%, reflecting benefits from our continued focus on disciplined execution across our business. Overall, our Q2 performance was in line with our expectations and builds on the solid start to the year. We're positive about our business performance and outlook and remain on track towards delivering solid full year results. Today we will review our quarterly results and provide an update on our cash flow performance, capital spending and our current debt position. We'll also provide additional perspective on our 2009 guidance and the refinements we've made to some of its components. Slide 4 highlights the key messages from today's review. As noted, Iron Mountain delivered solid financial results in Q2 with performance trends similar to those we saw in the first quarter. Internal growth was sustained at 4% with overall growth constrained by an expected decline in complimentary service revenues including impacts from lower recycle paper pricing. Core revenue internal growth, while solid at 6% in the quarter, is tracking…
Operator
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Andrew Steinerman – J.P. Morgan. Andrew Steinerman – J.P. Morgan: Obviously a very fine job on productivity gains. I want to focus in on Bob's comments that you're optimizing the core while still investing in growth in strategy is in full gear now. Are we investing for growth right now or are we holding back on some of those investments this year which will shift investment spending into next year, or do you feel like we're doing the investments we want, we're not holding back and there's not any kind of delayed on investment intentions?
Robert Brennan
Management
We're not bridling the investment profile for long term growth. That would be stupid. I wouldn't do that.
Brian McKeon
Management
We're absolutely advancing investments and I think Bob was hitting on the key themes around penetrating vertical segments, new product emphasis and we were able to at the same time drove productivity improvements so that we can manage that balance and deliver solid bottom line gains.
Robert Brennan
Management
We are careful about prioritization. We're focused on the biggest opportunities and very small opportunities don't get as much attention, but we are very much focused on long term growth and we're not in any way bridling investment on the potential of our business.
Operator
Operator
Your next question comes from David Gold – Sidoti & Company. David Gold – Sidoti & Company: Just wanted to drill down a little bit more on the changes in storage growth both as the years progressed and on the forecast. I think as we look at it over the last couple of quarters, we've gone from 8% to 7% to 6%, a fairly good showing in our view given what's happening over there economically speaking. But a couple of things; one, I guess just your confidence from here that it truly hold which is what the guidance seems to imply, maybe modestly down, and then two, curious and this may be a tougher one to answer, but in our view being the first quarter was terrible economically speaking and the second quarter was a little bit better, are we seeing now a little bit of a lag or has it truly slowed a little bit in the second quarter?
Brian McKeon
Management
In terms of our outlook, our outlook is very consistent with our current trends, so I think that in terms of your question, and obviously that's a bit below the strong growth rates that we were posting coming out of last year and that impacted how we thought about our targets for this year. But I think our outlook is very consistent with the trends that we're seeing and they're consistent with the trends we're seeing year to date. So the pressure on productivity is level. It is something that we highlighted in our last call.
Robert Brennan
Management
It's a tough environment for selling. It is driven by the economy. We do see it settling down, but I don't see a lot of catalysts like a sudden resurgence either
Brian McKeon
Management
You should know that our outlook assumes that current conditions continue. We're not projecting an improvement so we think we've got the growth rate appropriately calibrated. We had some aggressive targets heading into this year. As you noted, we're still posting good growth but I think we felt it appropriate to calibrate to reflect current trends.
Robert Brennan
Management
And just to give you some color on how we think about it internally, we think we're doing a really good job. David Gold – Sidoti & Company: The improvement in margin, essentially could you give a sense of sustainability there? In other words, have we made any changes that are maybe shorter terms as things revert to growth that we might not be able to hold?
Robert Brennan
Management
I want to bridge that back to Andrew's question. We think about this business as a team for the very long term. We have the benefit of a resilient business and we have the benefit of a market that is expanding rapidly as a result of information growth and constrained IT budgets, and we think about the business for the very long term. So we're not doing anything to as I said before, bridle the business for short term results. It's just not how we operate. And that's been the philosophy since we've been a public company and prior to that when Alisa and Richard talk about days gone by.
Brian McKeon
Management
I would highlight one thing too, which is we've obviously very pleased with the results that we're seeing in areas like productivity gains and things that are supporting our performance. Those are results that followed investment. So the programs that we talk about, transportation improvement, pricing excellence, record center optimization, CFR, those are proactive investments that we feel very good about. I did try to highlight that we're going to continue advancing investments on that front. We're not launching a big initiative around global procurement as a company that involve some upfront investment that we think has great yield and payback over time. My sense is that the core of the question is around the things that we're doing short term in nature and not sustainable or we're managing the results, and I'd say that this is consistent with the approach we've been pursuing and highlighting. We are going to continue to invest, be focused and prioritize. We drive benefit that enables us to keep up. A lot of folks inside would say we scrutinize the investments very closely. David Gold – Sidoti & Company: So the questions mostly are more about thinking about the future. For instance, presumably even if you didn't bridle back on spend; there are factors in there like let's say salary freezes that when things come back, presumably you can't hold that. So just more trying to get a sense of how much of it is a function of the environment. Folks obviously understand salary freezes in this type of environment versus things revert to growth holding margins here.
Robert Brennan
Management
We are very disciplined in how we manage the business. We have not frozen anybody's salary and we're being very careful about where we invest. We're being very careful about what head count we bring on. We're being very careful about what projects get put in play. But there's no arbitrary like everybody gets a salary cut. We're not behaving that way.
Operator
Operator
Your next question comes from Andrea Wirth – Robert Baird. Andrea Wirth – Robert Baird: I want to go back to the guidance and make sure I understand it clearly. When you think about what you have been looking at for the year, essentially your first half revenue guidance did really come in line with expectations, so is it fair to say now we're assuming revenue growth stays essentially in line with where we're at right now for the rest of the year, but what you had been assuming is that that growth would actually get a little bit better throughout the year? That's the difference?
Brian McKeon
Management
Our current expectation is that our full year growth, our balance sheet growth is in line with current trends. I did highlight one factor which is in the third quarter; we're going to be up against our toughest compare on core service. Some of the dialogue that we have, in that we had fuel surcharges that were basically our position to offset fuel costs so we get a benefit in revenue and when we have an increase in costs and when the costs come down, our revenue comes down. We'll have a tougher compare on that in Q3 in the core service line, but effectively our outlook for the balance of the year is consistent with our recent trends. That is below where we were and that was the key news item, but we think we've got six months of experience in the current climate and we think that's appropriate given the trends that we're seeing. Andrea Wirth – Robert Baird: I wonder if you could give us an update on scrap paper prices. It looks like they actually did improve sequentially from last quarter. Just wondering how that's playing at all. Is it really enough to move the OIBDA line at all and is that playing any impact on that number being a little bit higher as well?
Brian McKeon
Management
We factored in some recent improvement. It's obviously still well below where it was last year. We were north of $200 a ton in the market and we had been trending in the $90 per ton to $100 per ton range. That's improved to about $110 very recently. It looks like a kind of calibration of supply and demand is coming through a bit favorably. Certainly supply has come down a lot and some of the Asian demand seems to be holding up okay, so we don't anticipate, we factored in those kind of levels for the balance of the year. We're not projecting continued improvement, so if we continue to see improvement on the at front, that could yield some benefit. But it looks a little bit better, but still well down year on year, so you'll still see those pressures in Q3. Andrea Wirth – Robert Baird: When you look at your CapEx expectations going forward in terms of the level of spend, should we still assume that this 10.8% level when you look, you said 2010 initially, do we go below that level for 2010 or do we actually go up from there?
Brian McKeon
Management
We'll give you an update on that, our preliminary view at I-day. Strategically we're absolutely trying to get that number down over time. Any given year you can have some movement and we're not prepared to go into the details on that yet, but we're absolutely trying to bring that number down over time and obviously we've made a lot of progress on that the last couple of years. Andrea Wirth – Robert Baird: I was wondering if you could give us an update on pricing, particularly North America.
Brian McKeon
Management
We continue to sustain the solid improvements we've seen in the North American records management business and we talk about moving that up into the 3% type range and we're as Bob mentioned, we feel very good about the progress we made putting sustainable processes to achieve that improvement and build on that over time. So that is a factor that helped our storage gross margins. It's obviously only one part of our business. When you look at other parts of our business, internationally, in digital, those are principally volume driven businesses. We're not doing the same of pricing strategies in every part of our business, but in the North American records management business, we've sustained that good progress. Andrea Wirth – Robert Baird: So you actually were at 3% North America records or you're still working towards that?
Brian McKeon
Management
In the year to date range we were in the 3% range for that business. I'm a little concerned just to be open about it that we confuse people with this. It's obviously, that's a number that incorporates price and mix. It's only one part of our business, but we've obviously highlighted that as an area of progress and we're in that same type of a range that we had talked about in our last call.
Operator
Operator
Your next question comes from Vance Edelson – Morgan Stanley. Vance Edelson – Morgan Stanley: Within the health care vertical, how would you characterize the customers' ability to pay for services right now when hospital administrators are facing tight financials from fewer elective procedures, higher bad debts and so forth? How is that working out?
Brian McKeon
Management
We don't see any material change in their ability to pay us, but we can help them because they're not having to outlay capital. That's where the big trend shifts to us, is that normally, if you're a mid market hospital, you have a choice to either send your patient to another hospital so you can have imaging services done because you can't afford to buy the storage, or you can turn to us and pay as you go. So it's actually, we feel that is a very strong market for us going forward and we have a lot of untapped potential. It's a business that builds over time like all of our businesses. It's a recurring business. But we'll continue to chip away at it, and we don't see any degradation from the receivables perspective in that segment.
Robert Brennan
Management
It's an area of focus, not an area of concern. We're managing that well across the business.
Brian McKeon
Management
I think Bob highlighted that. Across all customer segments the sales cycles are longer. It's a tougher environment to try to get new business, but we're certainly seeing a lot of interest in the services we offer. Vance Edelson – Morgan Stanley: How does the joint venture nature of the international expansion when it is a JV, how does that impact the ultimate returns that you hope to see, because you mentioned that hopefully those returns will hit the North America levels over time. Could you give us a feel for that?
Brian McKeon
Management
I think the right way to think about it is that we have a portfolio of businesses in our international markets, and so the joint ventures are, they're in the early stages of development. This is where we're working with partners to build the flywheel for the future. They are businesses that we anticipate investing and losing money in the early years and as those businesses mature and we buy them in over time, I know that's our strategic intent, they get on a track towards higher returns and our goals to get them to North American like levels.
Robert Brennan
Management
I mentioned Russia. We've been pouring a lot of money into that business with our joint venture partner. We're not making money on that, but they're doing a great job building out our footprint.
Brian McKeon
Management
I think it is an important point. We will always have a degree of a lag in our international returns versus our North American returns because we're explicitly investing in part of that portfolio to build for the future. But our strategy across the board is that we can build these businesses over time to North American like levels.
Operator
Operator
Your next question comes from Kevin McVeigh – Credit Suisse. Kevin McVeigh – Credit Suisse: I wonder if you can give us an update on the government vertical and how that's been trending. I know we've been investing a fair amount there. I wanted to get your sense about how trends are there?
Robert Brennan
Management
Not unlike other companies, it's slow. It's steady. There's a lot of spending going on there. We think the investments that we've made in these facilities that will allow us to offer compliant records management to anybody that does business with the government. That market will come to us. It's hard for some of our competitors to make those same investments. It's a lot of money in anticipation of revenue as opposed to reaction to revenue. But as people become more compliant and as the government insists on that compliance, we think the market will come to us. But like with all of our businesses, it's a flywheel. It builds slowly, but once it has momentum, we feel very good about it. We have a dedicated team down in D.C. that focuses on the market in co-ordination with our local teams, to focus on State and local governments. When we think about government that we're really focused on, the United States Government for the purpose of compliant Federal record keeping and we believe we have unique competitive advantage, and they're going to see their information grow, and they're going to see the requirements associated with protecting that growth. Kevin McVeigh – Credit Suisse: I wonder if you could spend a minute on the competitive environment. Obviously as we get deeper into this, on the storage business versus the destruction business, how competitors have been behaving.
Robert Brennan
Management
It's very mixed and can be erratic. From a storage perspective, I think that the industry understands the way we're managing the business and is following our lead. From a shredding perspective, that's a much or erratic business where we have to choose to decline business against certain competitors just taking the price perspective and we passed on that business. So it's really, I mentioned the large retailer where we got 2,100 locations and the two financial services firms that we won. So we're winning very large deals. That's meant to imply that there's a bunch of little ones that people are pricing aggressively because they're faced with economic scarcity, and we're passing on that business, and focusing where we have competitive advantage relative to chain of custody, relative to our footprint and our ability to handle very large projects with customers that don't focus on the overall cost of the program and it's hard to beat us across 2,100 locations.
Operator
Operator
Your next question comes from Franco Turrinelli – William Blair. Franco Turrinelli – William Blair: Maybe it doesn't even make sense to think about this way anymore, but when we were primarily talking about a physical business, we talk about new documents coming in from existing customers, new sales to new customers and then obviously the destruction at the back end. Maybe it doesn't make sense to think about it this way, but I was really trying to get a sense of which pieces of that equation have really changed relative to your expectations at the beginning of the year?
Brian McKeon
Management
I think it's right to raise the question. Our business is certainly a lot more complicated in terms of the different product lines we're in, geographies, etc. We did try to highlight within the physical business that we've sustained solid growth rates, that where we have seen a change relative to our expectations certainly in areas like destructions, as Bob mentioned, that's an area we have seen increases really much tied to the economic trends. It really was something that we saw start to increase in the fourth quarter and pick up more early this year and that's directly related to customers looking at cost controls.
Robert Brennan
Management
And us helping them with it quite frankly.
Brian McKeon
Management
I would say that the sales processes are not dissimilar to across the business that new sales are taking longer, and that's an additional factor with the margin. But fundamentally the business is growing and solid and it's just I think some of these factors are playing in and that's why we're updating you. Franco Turrinelli – William Blair: Is there a meaningful change in, I think you sort of alluded to this a little bit, but maybe I can drill down a little bit. Has there been a meaningful change in the rate of document production that you've seen, really just from employment levels and overall macro activity. You talked about it a little bit. I'm just trying to get a sense of how meaningful that is.
Brian McKeon
Management
Just to go back, we continue to see solid growth in our business and that reflects our business base, producing more records, and the factors that are changing are more related to some of these economic impacts, principally things like disruptions and to a lesser degree new sales. Franco Turrinelli – William Blair: Destructions, I thought destructions actually started to push up near term revenue but take away from future revenue. Am I still thinking about it the right way?
Robert Brennan
Management
They do have some benefit in the near term. That's right. It's something that's been building for a little bit and we're seeing some of those impacts here today. Franco Turrinelli – William Blair: Does destruction fall in core services? Yes, right?
Robert Brennan
Management
Yes. You see you have a lot of dynamics here. The earlier point about the complexity of our business, there's lots of dynamics in core services. We lost two points of growth from fuel surcharges, activity levels have moderated, so it gets a little complication, the dynamic. We're really trying to highlight as we're looking at our outlook, why our growth rates are a bit lower than we had targeted.
Operator
Operator
Your next question comes from Scott Schneeberger – Oppenheimer. Scott Schneeberger – Oppenheimer: Could you speak a little bit to what the largest verticals are, perhaps percent of total revenue and how that's different from going back three or fourth quarters?
Robert Brennan
Management
We don't break out the percentages but it hasn't changed materially over the last year. Financial services, health care, legal are our biggest segments.
Brian McKeon
Management
As a group financial services is the biggest. If you put together professional services, legal, accounting, that would be in a similar range to financial services and then obviously you've got health care as kind of next on the list in terms of just size. But they're all meaningful large verticals. We basically do records management across everything.
Robert Brennan
Management
When I called out the segments, government is still small for us and we see a lot of opportunity going forward. It's going to take time to build that business, but the others are very meaningful businesses for us. And we haven't seen a lot of movement in the percentage over the last four quarters. Scott Schneeberger – Oppenheimer: You mentioned when you're speaking on financial services, about litigation activity, regulation activity. Is that something that you're seeing here and now or is that something you're seeing building and think is an opportunity
Robert Brennan
Management
Both. We're benefiting from the litigation that's occurring between counter-parties on sub-prime, the consolidation with companies acquiring one another within the sector and how we can help them through that and we see more of that going forward. Scott Schneeberger – Oppenheimer: In digital, how is the competitive landscape. You mentioned sales cycles extending. What are you seeing more specifically there?
Robert Brennan
Management
Just look at the public comps, right. They're going backwards. So it's a very brutal environment for selling technology. I'm pleased actually with the growth. It wasn't what we expected, but the fact that our business expanded and it's because, again it goes back to the overall Iron Mountain Value proposition. Everything that we offer as a service is meant to reduce cost. So it allows us to keep people at the table. But if you're selling technology that's in any way nice to have, it's very tough out there. When I talk about companies that are going backwards, we're talking about some of the best companies in the technology industry that have sterling reputations. So we feel we're very much holding our own, but it's a tough, tough environment. Scott Schneeberger – Oppenheimer: So pricing is tough as well I would assume.
Robert Brennan
Management
It's very difficult to get people to pull the trigger on purchasing. Price negotiations are tough, but it's more getting them to move on buying, and so the sales cycles are taking longer. The pipelines are doing great. The top of the funnel is doing great. It's getting people through the funnel. I think if you listen to the commentary from some of the biggest names in the business they can offer very granular detail on that. We have the benefit of being a recurring business so we don't have to push the rock up the hill to the same extent. Scott Schneeberger – Oppenheimer: On your cost management and productivity initiatives, I now it's ongoing and persistent, would you say that the low hanging fruit is captured? What inning are we in of those initiatives and if you could take us a level deeper there.
Brian McKeon
Management
I would say we're, the inning reference is always a great one. We still see a lot of room here. I think a good way to think about it is, we're moving to different phases of opportunity so I know that procurement as kind of a next phase. It's an area we have a level of co-ordination but I think we can do a lot better. So we think there's a lot of fruit left to pick.
Robert Brennan
Management
We try to hold to our one hour limit so we're going to wrap up the Q&A now. Thank you all for your time and attention this morning. We very much appreciate you listening to us and your support.