Jonathan Painter
Analyst · Sidoti
Thanks, Tom. Hello, everyone. It's my pleasure to brief you on our first quarter results as well as our outlook for the remainder of the year. Overall, we had a solid quarter with excellent gross margin and better than expected earnings per share performance. I'll begin today's business review with the financial highlights of the quarter. We finished the first quarter with revenue of $92 million, which was down 1% compared with the first quarter of 2014. Foreign currency translation had a significant impact on revenues, and excluding the effect of FX and acquisitions, our internal growth was up a strong 5%. Gross margin in the first quarter was excellent and near record at 48%. Our adjusted EBITDA was $13 million or 15% of sales, up 6% compared to Q1 of last year. Our GAAP diluted earnings per share of $0.62 in the first quarter exceeded the top-end of our guidance by $0.03 and was up 38% compared to Q1 of 2014. Our adjusted earnings per share was up 5% to $0.63. Our bookings of $108 million were the third highest in our history, but were down 6% compared to Q1 of last year, which was the second highest in our history. Excluding FX, our bookings were up 2% compared to last year. And our backlog at the end of Q1 2015 was a record $136 million, up 15% from Q1 of 2014. And finally, we set new record for parts and consumables bookings and revenue, which were up 4% and 8% respectively in Q1 compared to last year. We received a lot of positive comments about the slide we presented in the Q4 call, showing the impact of FX translation and acquisitions on some of our key metric. Since the U.S. dollars continue to strengthen against most major currencies in Q1, we thought it would be helpful to update that slide here in the Q1 FX rates. As you can see, the continued strengthening of the dollar, particularly against the euro, had significant impact on our Q1 results. We only did one small acquisition in Q4 of 2014, so the impact from acquisitions is relatively small. Finally, on the bottom row of the chart, we're showing you our internal growth, excluding the impact of FX, translation and acquisitions. You can see that our internal growth for Q1 was down slightly for bookings against a very strong Q1 of '14, and up 5% for revenues. Despite the headwinds on the strong dollar, we saw solid revenue and bookings performance in the first quarter. Our first quarter of $92 million was down 1% year-over-year, entirely due to FX translation. Excluding the impact from FX and acquisitions, our internal growth is 5% compared to the same period last year. Also, our revenue was below our guidance of $94 million to $96 million, entirely due to the effect of FX. Our bookings of $108 million in Q1 were down 6% from the first quarter of last year, which was the second highest in history. Excluding the impact of FX, our Q1 bookings were up 2% compared to the first quarter of '14. Our revenue for our parts and consumables in the first quarter increased 8% from a strong Q1 of 2014, and set a new record at $65 million. Parts and consumables revenue represented an unusually high 71% of our total Q1 revenue. And incidentally, I don't think 71% parts revenues is the new normal for us. And I expect this percentage will return to more typical levels as the year goes on. Excluding the impact of FX and acquisitions, our internal growth was 14%, driven by our Stock-Prep and Wood Processing product lines in North America. We also set a new record for parts and consumables bookings, which were up 4% over Q1 of last year to $68 million. Excluding the impact of FX and acquisitions, our internal growth was 10%. Five years ago, we identified growing our parts and consumables business as a major strategic objective. Over that time, we have increased our business by over 50% to $249 million for the fiscal year 2014, representing 62% of our revenue. We accomplished this through several focused internal growth initiatives as well as targeted acquisitions. I believe this has fundamentally changed our business both by improving our overall gross margins and reducing the volatility of our revenue. Next, I'll take a few minutes to provide an overview of our business activities and performance for each of the major geographic regions of the world. Let me start with North America. The North America market is our largest and continues to be our strongest in the world for us. Our revenue in North America was up 7% compared to the first quarter of 2014 to a record $57 million. Our Stock-Prep product line led the growth in this region, up 43%, driven by strong demand for our virgin fiber processing equipment. Our doctor, cleaning and filtration product line was also up, while our other papermaking equipment product lines saw modest revenue declines compared to a relatively strong Q1 of '14. While we have seen a step-down for the record setting bookings we had in the first quarter of 2014, the overall market condition is still quite good. Bookings in North America were $57 million, down 19% compared to Q1 of last year. As a reminder, in Q1 of 2014, we booked an $11 million order for Stock-Prep system for a tissue producer in Mexico. We saw good level of activity in the first quarter of 2015, including a large order for virgin pulping system. And looking forward, we continue to see a healthy environment, although the level of capital activity in the paper industry is slowing a bit, activity in the Wood Processing industry is quite strong, and we're working on several large projects we hope to secure this year. Finally, the market condition for spare parts and consumables continues to be very strong. In Europe, we had a moderate first quarter and this region continues to be one of our weakest. Our Q1 revenue in Europe was $16 million down 21% from Q1 of last year, primarily due to reduced capital sales across all product lines. FX played a significant role in the decline, and when excluding the impact of FX, our Q1 revenue was only down 2%. Q1 bookings of $19 million were also down 21% compared to Q1 of last year, but were up 4% sequentially. Excluding the impact of FX, our bookings were down 2% over last year. While overall market conditions in Europe continue to be somewhat weak, we are seeing some encouraging signs of increased project activity in the areas that have been some of the weakest in Europe, such as Spain, Italy and France. Going forward, we expect the weaker euro and up to a lesser extent ECB's monetary policies will lead to improved market conditions. In summary, I would say we're feeling a little bit better about Europe than we did this time last year. Next, let's take a look at Asia. As countries in Asia, other than China, begin to represent a growing portion of our revenue and business activities, we thought it would be helpful to present a slide that shows all of Asia rather than just China alone. The revenues and booking shown on this slide includes China, Japan, India and Southeast Asia, but most of us typically refer to as Asia. I should note, however, that the Middle Eastern countries are excluded from this region and are included in our rest-of-the-world category that I'll discuss in the next slide. As China makes up the largest single country in the region, my comments will be primarily focused on China. As many of you know, the situation in China is complex. On the one hand, we have a slowing economy and continued overcapacity. On the other hand, we're benefiting from the central government's continued policy of closing smaller high polluting mills, which in general did not represent our customer base. Last month, for example, the government announced plan to close 57 mills in Guangdong Province in Southern China. In addition, we are still seeing good project activity in Central and Western China, where there is regional undercapacity. Our Q1 bookings in Asia were strong at $23 million, up nearly double compared to the same period last year. The bookings performance was led by our Stock-Prep product line, where we booked several large OCC orders with combined value of nearly $9 million. One of which came from a major container board producer in Taiwan and two others for OCC projects in Central China. We also saw bookings in our doctoring, cleaning, and filtration product line more than double in Q1 compared to Q1 of last year, as a result of our efforts to promote our spare parts and consumables in China. One example of this is our doctor's holder, which had extremely strong bookings in Q1. The doctor holder is a perfect part for us to sell as it is a critical component of the doctor assembly, which ensures constant pressure and maintains the proper angle of the doctor blade across the length of the role. It's highly impactful on the performance of both the doctor and the paper machine itself. These are exactly the type of parts we like to sell to our customers. As we did with China and Asia, we though it would be helpful for our discussion to extend our discussion beyond South America, to include activities in area such as Africa, Australia and the Middle East. With this change and the inclusion of all of Asia with China, the regional sales in these quarterly update slides will cover all of our global sales. Our revenue in the rest of the world was $6 million in Q1, down 37% compared to the same period last year and down 35% sequentially, driven mainly by declines in South America. The market in South America and in particular Brazil, continues to suffer from weak growth, high inflation and increasing unemployment, all serving to create a strong drag on the economic recovery in the near-term. That said, I do continue to believe that the longer-term outlook for Brazil is good, driven by growing middle class and rising standard of living. Rest of the world bookings were up 10% to $9 million in Q1, due in large part to a $2.4 million Stock-Prep order received from a paper producer in South Africa, offset by declines in South America, which were down 30% compared to last year. Similar to other regions, FX has had a major impact on these results. Excluding FX, revenue was down 26% and bookings were up 31%. I'd like to close my remarks with a few comments on our guidance for Q2 and the full year 2015. In the second quarter, we expect to generate $0.69 to $0.71 of GAAP diluted earnings per share and revenues of $95 million to $97 million, followed by sequentially improving quarters for the remainder of the year. For the full year, we still expect to generate $3.05 to $3.15 of GAAP diluted earnings per share, which was our guidance provided in the last call. We have lowered our revenue guidance, however, to $403 million $410 million from $413 million to $423 million, due entirely to the impact of foreign currency. Although, the continued strength of the dollar also negatively impacted our outlook for earnings per share for the remainder of 2015 by $0.09, we expect that this will be offset by increased profitability resulting from improved gross margins. If we achieve our updated guidance for 2015, we'll grow our revenue by 0% to 2% and our adjusted earnings per share by 10% to 14%, despite an unfavorable impact from currency. Excluding the negative currency impact, we expect to grow our revenue 8% to 10% and our adjusted earnings per share 19% to 22% over 2014, and almost all of that increase will be from internal growth. I talked a lot about FX in my remarks today, and I want to emphasize how FX impacts us versus how it may affect other companies. As a reminder, we have operations all over the world, which for the most part have revenues and costs denominated in same currency. This reduces the impact of changes in currency on the financial result of our domestic and foreign subsidiaries, although we do have translation exposure associated with converting revenue and profit of those subsidiaries in the U.S. dollars for reporting purposes. It is far better to have a business that's doing well and growing in local currency, even if it translates into less U.S. dollars due to FX than to have a business that's declining in local currency or having its margin squeezed by FX, because costs and revenues are in different currencies. This concludes my remarks. But before I turn the call over to Tom, I want to point out to our listeners that this will be Tom's 55th consecutive, never missed one, quarterly conference call and also his last. Over the last 24 years, or as Tom would say, 98 quarters, Tom has been a major contributor to Kadant, and he is largely responsible for the excellent financial team that he's built and we have the benefit of. So we wish him well in his retirement. Incidentally, Mike McKenney has assured me that he has every intention of beating Tom's record. And starting with the Q2 call, we'll have his first, what's certain to be 56th consecutive earnings conference call under the McKenney era. With that, I'll turn the call over to Tom.