R. Bruce McDonald
Analyst · Deutsche Bank
Thanks, Steve, and good morning, everybody. Starting off with Building Efficiency here on Slide #6. We had a good financial quarter for Building Efficiency. So if you think about the last 3 or 4 quarters, we're sort of on a trend here of seeing relatively soft top line growth, but a very healthy expansion in our margins. And we saw that again here in this quarter here. So if you look at the overall numbers, as we highlight here, our sales were flat at about $3.5 billion. Foreign exchange really for Building Efficiency wasn't a factor here in the quarter. So generally speaking, a fairly flat quarter. If you look at that geographically, Asia was up 7%; GWS, Global Workplace Solutions business was up 4%, though this was offset really with softness in Latin America, Europe being the sort of 2 biggest markets that were down. If you look at North America, we're down about 7%, and we continue to see softness in discretionary project work and delays in booking new solutions business. Just commenting on residential, which flows up within one of our subsegments here, in the quarter, we are benefiting from the upturn in that market. Our revenue was up 16% and unit shipments were up about 9% in the quarter. So we are seeing the uptick that the players are seeing on the residential side of the market. Looking at our orders and backlog, as Steve indicated, our backlog was flat at about $5.1 billion. If you look at our order intake in the quarter, it was down 9%. Again, a mixed bag geographically here. Asia kind of led the way. It was up 12%. So we continue to see good growth there in Asia. In fact, we're seeing that sort of accelerating. In the Middle East, which tends to be fairly lumpy, we're down about 8%. In North America, we are down 16%, with both systems and solutions being down double-digit. Although I would note that if you look at our service business, it was down only 1%. So we're starting to see some signs of improvement in the order intake in our service business. And I'd just kind of remind folks that that's one of our highest margin businesses, and for a long time now, we've been talking about delays in discretionary project work, so that's an encouraging sign. Elsewhere, geographically, Europe and Latin America were down 13% and 15%, respectively. If you look at the segment income, 19% growth to $172 million here in the quarter. If you look at the margins in Building Efficiency, we had an 80 basis point improvement, up to 4.9%. The sort of main drivers, I guess, would be twofold. It'd be, one, the benefit of the pricing initiatives and some of the cost reduction and restructuring activities that we're starting to deliver impacts the bottom line here. I'd also note that we did have some favorable commercial settlements on some of our contracts in the quarter. Turning to automotive on Slide 7. I guess our automotive business overall, we came -- it came in a little bit softer than our expectations, really driven by Europe. If you look at the sort of drivers there, it's really delays in flexing out our direct labor workforce. I'll talk a little bit more about that later on. From a sales perspective, you can see we were down about 1%. Because a large portion of our business is based in Europe, the euro in the quarter was about $1.30 versus $1.35 last year. So on an exchange adjust basis, we were up about 1% overall. If you look at that by product lines, Seating sales were up about 2%, again, adjusted for inflation. Interiors was sort of flat. And Electronics, which is the most heavily exposed to Europe, we were down about 5%. In terms of China, we sort of made it -- one of our takes here commenting on the momentum that we're seeing in China. Really terrific quarter over there. You can see that our sales, which mostly come through nonconsolidated joint ventures, were up about 21% in the quarter, up to $1.4 billion. So we're pleased to see that. And that really is in comparison to passenger car production in China being up about 3%. If you look at segment income, down -- roughly half of what it was a year ago at $101 million. Steve touched on some of the factors, but maybe a little bit more color here, higher engineering and product launch costs and operational efficiencies. If we look at Europe, we continue to see near term profitability pressures as we face delays in flexing out our labor. So you look at our results here in Europe, they're kind of flowing through as we expected. We talked about the -- having about $0.08 to $0.10 of non-qualifying restructuring cost. Those primarily fall us -- for us in the second quarter. It's probably $0.02 or $0.03 in this quarter and $0.06 or $0.07 in Q2. We didn't expect that we would be able to execute some of our social plans and things like that in the first quarter. That sort of falls here in the second quarter. So if you think about auto, what you're kind of seeing here is a little bit of labor inefficiency in the first quarter as we wait for our social plans to get approved. In the second quarter, we'll see less of that. It will be done by the end of the quarter, but we will have the substantial -- the bulk of the non-qualifying costs flowing through in the second quarter, and hence, the weakness of our second quarter outlook for automotive. If you look at the business by product line, we did well in Interiors. We started seeing the benefit of some of our cost reductions. We've lowered our losses. But nevertheless, if you look at our overall margins, they're at 1.9%, about half of what they were a year ago. Geographically, I mean, we're sort of phasing that out, but just to provide some color there, we saw good improvement in our underlying profitability in both North America and Asia. Those were both higher on a year-over-year basis. Europe continues to be the challenge. Our margins in Europe were about negative 4.5%. In terms of Power Solutions, on Slide #8, you can see our sales were up about 4%. If we adjust for foreign exchange and lead differentials, our underlying revenues were up about 7%. OE volumes were up 9% and aftermarket volumes were up about about 1%. And as Steve indicated, if we just look at the North American aftermarket, which is our biggest sector, in the quarter, unit volume shipments were down about 4%. And as Steve mentioned, we were up year-over-year in October and November. We really saw it drop-off in December. From a bottom line perspective, you can see we're down about 3% versus last year, but a very strong quarter with margins of 16%. We're really benefiting from the volumes. The benefit of our vertical integration, in particular the Florence, South Carolina starting to come online here in the quarter as we expected an improved pricing that we took last year. So that's sort of flowing through as a benefit on a year-over-year basis. And then the only comment I'd make maybe here is if you looked back at our slides from last year, we did have a nonrecurring equity gain in 2012. That obviously makes for the year-over-year comparables a little bit difficult. Just turning to the financials on Slide #9. As we talked about earlier, revenues coming in at 10.4% (sic) [$10.4 billion], a 1% increase adjusted for FX. If you look at the gross margin, you'll see we're down about 20 basis points on a year-over-year basis. We saw margin expansion in Building Efficiency, and that was really offset by the lower gross margins that we saw in automotive business in Europe. You can see SG&A, a small increase on a year-over-year basis. If you look at it as a percentage of sales, it's up about 20 basis points to 10.1%. All that increase is really investments that we're making in innovation and new products and our emerging market infrastructure. Equity income at $85 million. You can see is sort of down versus last year. That whole delta is really attributable to the slightly higher investments in some of our joint ventures and then that onetime gain in Power Solutions that I referred to earlier. Then lastly on Slide #10 here, just going through the net financing charges, up about $61 million. That's kind of the run rate that we've been operating over the last 3 or 4 quarter -- or 2 or 3 quarters, I'm sorry. It's up versus last year. If you recall, we did a bond issuance in Q1 of last year, and so you just sort of see in the -- us terming out some of our debt. So we have slightly higher financing costs, those generally in line with the guidance that we provided at the beginning of the year. In terms of our tax rate, we had a clean quarter, 20%, which is the same level as last year. You can see income attributable to noncontrolling interest, down about 5%. And that really reflects the buyout of one of our minority partners in our plastic joint venture here in North America. And then lastly, you can see our earnings per share at $0.52 were down about $0.10 from last year which really attributable to the shortfall in the segment income. So with that, I think we'll open it up for questions.