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Iron Mountain Incorporated (IRM)

Q4 2015 Earnings Call· Thu, Feb 25, 2016

$112.47

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the conference call. I will turn the call over to Melissa Marsden, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Melissa Marsden - Senior Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Thank you, Cathy. Welcome. Good morning, everyone, to our Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2015 Earnings Conference Call. This morning we'll hear first from Bill Meaney, our CEO, who will discuss highlights and progress toward our strategic initiative; followed by Rod Day, CFO, who will cover financial results and guidance. After our prepared remarks we'll open up the phones for Q&A, and as we've done for the last few quarters, we have posted our earnings commentary and supplemental disclosure package on the Investor Relations page of our website at ironmountain.com, under Investor Relations/Financial Information. Referring now to page two of the Supplemental, today's earnings call and slides will contain a number of forward-looking statements, most notably our outlook for 2016 financial and operating performance. All forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties. Please refer to today's Supplemental, the earnings commentary, the Safe Harbor language on this slide and our most recently filed Annual Report on Form 10-K for a discussion of the major risk factors that could cause our actual results to differ from those in our forward-looking statements. In addition, we use several non-GAAP measures when presenting our financial results and the reconciliations to these measures, as required by Reg G, are included in this Supplemental reporting package. With that, Bill, would you please begin? William Leo Meaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thank you, Melissa, and good morning, everyone. We are pleased to report strong fourth quarter and full year financial and operating results that in every respect met or exceeded our expectations in constant dollars, with reported EPS for the quarter beating expectations. Our results continued to demonstrate the durability of our core storage rental business, even in these volatile times. Total revenue in constant dollars was in line with our guidance and constant…

Operator

Operator

Your first question comes from Andrew Steinerman with JPMorgan. Andrew Charles Steinerman - JPMorgan Chase & Co.: Just to say it very clearly, the only change in the 2016 guidance relative to the last time we spoke was FX and paper prices, right? Roderick Day - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yep. That's right. Andrew Charles Steinerman - JPMorgan Chase & Co.: Okay. I wanted to dive a little bit into tape services decline. I know this is not a new thing in terms of frequency of rotation. But the decline, this is North American tape, was larger this time. What's your anticipation in sort of getting to that bottom of that cycle in terms of frequency? And how do you think the service side of tape will do this year? William Leo Meaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thanks, Andrew, and good morning. No, I think it's pretty much the same as we said I think on the last call. I think it's bouncing between kind of the high-single-digit to low-double-digit declines in terms of what I would say our core service revenue associated with the transport of the tapes. And I think as we called out the last few quarters is that where we were on the paper record side of the business maybe two or three years ago, we're still watching that till it starts flattening out or we see the inflection point. And we don't see that inflection point right now, but at the same time we don't see it getting worse than what it is. I think what you'll see is, you'll see some bouncing around in terms of the net service revenue on the data management. I mean, quite frankly, I think we've done a pretty good job on building…

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from George Tong with Piper Jaffray. George K. F. Tong - Piper Jaffray & Co (Broker): Morning. I'd like to go a little bit into the services business as well. Can you elaborate on the timing of internal initiatives that you think can drive upside or improvement in services' internal growth in 2016 versus 2015? William Leo Meaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Okay, so good morning, George. So I think there's kind of a couple aspects. There's some that – there's a number of things that you're touching upon or referring to that Patrick Keddy went through on Investor Day, things that we're doing just to get more margin out of some of our existing core service areas which have seen a drop in activity, so that's really around the transportation side. And I think we feel pretty good where that's coming out. I think you'll continue to see some improvement during the course of the year, but a lot of that is in flight. I think the bigger part of it is how we bring on some of the new service areas which are less smooth, but on a year basis these are project-driven. So you can think of it as like a defense contractor: there's a certain amount of prospecting and then there's a certain amount of reaping or harvesting. So you'll see on a quarter-by-quarter basis, you'll see some movement around that, but we have good visibility over the course of the year to be able to predict where the year will end up. So I think what you can expect as we go through the course of the year is we think that we will have similar slight uptick in terms of where we came in for the year…

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Kevin McVeigh with Macquarie. William Leo Meaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Did we lose you, Kevin?

Operator

Operator

Kevin, your line is open. Kevin McVeigh - Macquarie Capital (USA), Inc.: Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? William Leo Meaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, we got you, Kevin. Yep. Kevin McVeigh - Macquarie Capital (USA), Inc.: I apologize. Sorry about that, I was on mute. Apologize. Hey, so in terms of any updated timing on Recall? Do you still see it as Q2 type event? Or does that get pushed out a little bit based on – just any updates on that if you can to the extent you can provide further clarity on discussions with the regulators before? Just any thoughts around that? William Leo Meaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Kevin, I think you were covering us during the PLR, no? Kevin McVeigh - Macquarie Capital (USA), Inc.: Yes. William Leo Meaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: So I think you probably know how I'm going to answer this one. As I said in my notes, it's not much that I can say beyond – or anything I can say beyond in my remarks. So I think you could probably appreciate that... Kevin McVeigh - Macquarie Capital (USA), Inc.: Sure. William Leo Meaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: But we remain excited about the deal. As I said on my prepared remarks is that we're engaged constructively with the four key regulators, and we're working hard to drive this to a close. But I can't – I think you could probably appreciate I can't say much more. Kevin McVeigh - Macquarie Capital (USA), Inc.: I figured I'd try, Bill. William Leo Meaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, I knew someone was going to try; I just didn't know who it…

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Shlomo Rosenbaum with Stifel. Shlomo Rosenbaum - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.: Thank you for taking my questions. Could you just give us a little bit of color as to some of the service projects, the nature of those projects that are causing things to kind of go up and down, become a little bit more lumpy? Just a practical on the ground, what exactly are you guys doing? And then afterwards, can you just give us an update on the EMC partnership announcement last April and how that's moving? William Leo Meaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Okay. Morning, Shlomo. I'll just give you kind of a couple examples that give you an idea. Some of them are large scanning projects, so there's some that are in flight with government contracts for instance, and they have a certain – that's why I kind of alluded to kind of like defense contracts, those things have a kind of a tilling, fertilizing, seeding process and then a harvesting side. And those are typically very large scanning projects that are associated with storage. So we're not going in to compete with an ACS or a Xerox per se. I mean, they may be competing, but we're going after contracts where we think we really have a strong skill set that's associated with just not the scanning, but also the classification of the records and in many if not most cases the actual storing of those records. But those are long lead time projects that come through at different times and hence you see the kind of spike that we saw in Western Europe when those things come through. Others are, again, what I would call kind of BPM-type projects that are associated with storage. So…

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Ellman, with Mayo Capital Partners.

Michael Ellman - Mayo Capital Partners LLC

Analyst

Thanks for taking the question. I was hoping you could just offer me a bit of clarification about the guidance summary on page 13 of the document. I'm not sure that I understood all of Rod's remarks. Do I understand that your guidance for adjusted OIBDA for 2016 is the $950 million to $970 million range that I see in the second column from the right? Roderick Day - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yes. Yeah, that's exactly right. So page 13, it's the second last column on the right is our 2016 guidance based at January 2016 FX rates. So...

Michael Ellman - Mayo Capital Partners LLC

Analyst

January 2016 FX rates? Roderick Day - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yeah, exactly. So that's...

Michael Ellman - Mayo Capital Partners LLC

Analyst

Okay. Roderick Day - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: ...our best view of guidance as we sit here...

Michael Ellman - Mayo Capital Partners LLC

Analyst

All right. So just sort of taking the midpoint of that range, that would be $960 million, and then you present your estimated capital allocation at $555 million to $595 million? Roderick Day - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yep.

Michael Ellman - Mayo Capital Partners LLC

Analyst

Okay. And your dividend obligation is currently about $412 million at the $1.94 rate? Roderick Day - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Right.

Michael Ellman - Mayo Capital Partners LLC

Analyst

Okay. So the dividend obligation, plus the midpoint of the capital allocation guidance would be $987 million? Roderick Day - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Right.

Michael Ellman - Mayo Capital Partners LLC

Analyst

Okay. And so in your guidance for adjusted OIBDA you've obviously excluded the anticipated going forward expenses for the Recall consolidation which you've estimated at $15 million to $20 million? Roderick Day - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yep.

Michael Ellman - Mayo Capital Partners LLC

Analyst

And so are there any other foreseeable expenses that, being one-time in nature, you're also excluding from your estimate of adjusted OIBDA? Roderick Day - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: No. No. So we have restructuring costs, but they're actually included within adjusted OIBDA, but they have a phasing impact as I referred to earlier.

Michael Ellman - Mayo Capital Partners LLC

Analyst

Okay. All right, I guess that would be it. Could you possibly clarify in your capital allocation estimate of business and customer acquisitions of $140 million to $180 million, how much is acquisitions of business and how much is the money that you invest when you establish a new contract with customers? Roderick Day - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: That's really our M&A spend, so that's – we refer to business customer acquisitions, but it's really the M&A spend. William Leo Meaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. I think the way you should think about it is that – I think I understand where you're kind of going with it, is that if you're trying to bring it down to cash available for distribution and investment, is that...

Michael Ellman - Mayo Capital Partners LLC

Analyst

That would be fair. William Leo Meaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. Okay. So that's what I figured you were trying to get to. So if you look at 2016 and you take the midpoint of the guidance, you should get to $495 million, and then you had $412 million for the dividend, I mean, it's $411 million, $412 million. So you subtract that out and then there's about $65 million for growth racking, but that is actually for growth. So actually if you think about it, it's the $495 million less the $411 million and then that gives you a number that's available for growth basically, for investment and growth. And so the first call in that cash available is $65 million, which is for the organic growth that we get from our customers every year. So even if you take out, and that's for 2017 revenue if you know what I mean, right, because you're putting the racking investment in 2016, so that when the growth hits you in 2017 you can actually put those boxes on the shelf. So then even after you take the growth racking which gives you the mid-2% range that we highlighted in terms of internal growth, in terms of our storage business that leaves you about $19 million for cash available for discretionary investment. Now, that's versus 2015 actuals of about $3 million left over after you paid for racking. So we've actually – even with the further FX headwinds coming into the 2016 based on January rates, you see the improvement from $3 million to $19 million, but again, that's also already including $65 million for growth, so that 2.5% organic storage volume growth that's coming in. Now when you come down and you're trying to – to your point about M&A is – so you say: well, how are we able to delever and still be able to do M&A? Because of course when we're doing the M&A we're buying EBITDA as well associated with that. So we're – so that's how the whole thing works. So we are issuing debt to do the M&A because obviously $19 million doesn't fuel our whole M&A program. But between the $19 million that we have for beyond internal growth of storage, we also borrow, but on a net-net basis in terms of what it does is debt-to-EBITDA you see a deleveraging as well. So that...

Michael Ellman - Mayo Capital Partners LLC

Analyst

Is there a debt-to-EBITDA target that you have, say, for the end of 2016? I think you said you were at 5.6 times currently? Roderick Day - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: 5.6 I think, and we aim to hold it around that level, it would be 5.5 times to 5.6 times by the end of the year. And over the next three years it will come down to 5.2, excluding the Recall deal. If we did the Recall deal, actually allows us to delever faster than that.

Michael Ellman - Mayo Capital Partners LLC

Analyst

Okay. Very good. Thank you very much. William Leo Meaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: And the only thing I would do is just one last thing, Michael, is if you go to our Investor Day deck it lays it out quite well because it shows you what happens to – we do it both on a standalone and with Recall, but it shows you how we grow dividends during that period of time, how we grow the M&A and how we delever during the period of time. And you'll see the cash available or the CAD in the appendix of that deck.

Michael Ellman - Mayo Capital Partners LLC

Analyst

Okay, thank you. William Leo Meaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: All right.

Operator

Operator

At this time, there are no further questions. Do we have any closing remarks? William Leo Meaney - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: No, I think that's it, operator. Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

This concludes today's conference. You may now disconnect.