Antonio Perez
Analyst · Brean Murray
Thank you, Sandy, and good morning, everyone. Our fourth quarter and full year results reflect a consistent and sustainable momentum that we are having with our core growth initiatives: Consumer inkjet, commercial inkjet, workflow software and services and packaging. We grew these products lines 23% in the fourth quarter and 18% for the full year, demonstrating that our unique value propositions continue to resonate with consumers and our business customers. In the fourth quarter, consumer inkjet had its largest revenue quarter since we launched the product line in 2007. We grew printers and ink revenue 40% in the fourth quarter, when compared to the prior year. We built momentum each quarter during this year as we introduced new products, expanded our distribution channels, particularly in the Office Store segment and resolved supply constraints that we had in the first half of the year. We continue to expand our installed base as we grew our printer volumes by 45% during the year, including 63% printer volume growth in the fourth quarter. This is remarkable growth when you consider that the industry grew less than 5% and is a testimony to consumers' acceptance of our value proposition because we maintained our price premium compared to the market. In addition, we know that we are reaching the right consumers, those who print the most, as we grew our ink revenues 86% during the fourth quarter and 77% for the year. More importantly, because of our increase in scale, we doubled our gross profit dollars in 2010 and we expect to sustain this momentum heading into 2011. We are on track to become profitable during 2011 and to generate positive earnings for the total of 2012. Our Commercial Inkjet business also had its largest revenue quarter of the year in the fourth quarter and achieved a number of key milestones. The transformation in the graphic industry to digital printing is happening now. Our PROSPER Press is ready and we are prepared to lead our customers through this transition with our color and black-and-white PROSPER Presses. Our presses, based on our breakthrough Stream Technology, deliver offset class quality, offset class speed, media flexibility and lower operating costs, combined with the ability to perform variable data printing. Their productivity is superior to any digital press in the market. We continue our PROSPER Press installations in all regions of the world. In 2010, our growth was primarily fueled by sales of PROSPER components as we quadrupled the number of printing systems that we sold. Our FLEXCEL NX revenue within Packaging Solutions tripled in the fourth quarter. Our FLEXCEL NX system is designed for a wide range of mainstream packaging applications and uses unique technology to deliver exceptional high-resolution print quality packaging, combined with significantly reduced production cost. This leading edge solution helps our clients stand out in the market with packaging that really grabs customers' attention on the shelf and drive sales. We doubled our installed base in 2010 when we placed our 100 FLEXCEL NX system in the fourth quarter. As with our growth initiatives, our rapidly expanding installed base will drive higher margin annuities in future periods. Finally, our Workflow Software and Services business, which integrates all of our offerings, picked up momentum in the back half of the year, growing by 21% when compared to the second half of 2009. The growth was driven by strong demand for business across the services in the emerging markets. I am very pleased with the strong performance of this core growth businesses which are critical to our digital future. In the fourth quarter, we continued to see industry-related challenges in three of our mature businesses, Prepress Solutions, Digital Capture and Devices and Entertainment Imaging. As a result of the difficult market conditions in these businesses we fell short of our 2010 revenue targets. Revenue in our Entertainment Imaging business decreased 19% for the year. During 2010, we saw industry-related volume declines as the major studios made and released fewer feature films. In addition, the growth in demand for 3D movies has accelerated the conversion to digital screen. At the end of 2010, 30% of the first-run screens worldwide were digital screens. One of the revenue decline was in line with the updated forecast we gave you in the second quarter. The biggest challenge for the Entertainment Imaging business, and our other traditional FPEG business, is increase in commodity costs. Silver prices were higher than 2009 levels all year, but between September and December, the price of silver rapidly increased by about $10 a troy ounce to break points that we have not seen for over 25 years. The increasing silver costs impacted our results in 2010 and is significant as we enter 2011. Entertainment Imaging and our other traditional business teams will aggressively take costs out to better align our cost structure with the top line and the silver costs realities. We are also hedging and we are indexing our new contracts to silver pricing. We will also continue with our successful initiative to expand into adjacent growth markets where our material science expertise offer us real revenue opportunities, such as thin film for digital display and specialty chemistry. These programs are gaining very good traction and will help to mitigate the higher revenue declines in our traditional businesses. For example, in 2010, revenues from these programs represented already 13% of FPEG revenues. We expect that this percentage will grow to 30% by 2013. These initiatives are all cash accretive and are likely independent of silver. Our Digital Capture and Device business, excluding nonrecurring intellectual property licensing revenue, decreased by 21% as customer demand in the digital still camera, particularly in the point-and-shoot category where we participate, declined significantly in the fourth quarter. This was a steeper decline than we anticipated or experienced in the prior three quarters. We do, however, continue to gain traction with our award-winning pocket video cameras, growing both revenue and market share. We doubled revenue in the fourth quarter and grew by approximately 170% for the full year. We continue to focus on profitability rather than chasing volume and we made progress. Excluding nonrecurring intellectual property revenue, Digital Capture and Devices finished the year with a higher gross profit rate in comparable gross profit dollars on 13% lower revenue. We will aggressively follow this strategy in 2011 and focus on the profitable segments of this market, trading top line growth for improved earnings. Despite 4% year-over-year Digital Printing volume increases, Prepress Solutions revenue declined 6% for the year and 8% for the fourth quarter. As we have previously indicated, the decline was primarily due to the competitive pricing environment, especially in Europe, where industry overcapacity continued to have the most negative impact. We recently launched our innovative new TRILLIAN Plate, which brings an impressive combination of outstanding productivity and performance. It significantly lowers the lower cost of ownership when compared with typical digital process plates that are in the markets today. We are now ready to scale this product offering and it will position us well to compete in the current pricing environment. In the fourth quarter, we continued to see very strong demand for our prepress output devices, with 19% year-over-year volume growth. This is a positive sign since we know that this increase in our installed base of computer-to-plate devices, or CTPs, will yield consumables growth going forward. Also we continue to see strong Prepress Solutions growth in the emerging markets, which for Prepress Solutions represents already over 20% of its business. Our business grew 14% for the year in those regions. In fact, for the year, we saw a double-digit growth in the emerging markets in all of our GCG businesses. We believe that because of our broad and integrated commercial portfolio and the positive market dynamic, we will continue with strong growth in the emerging markets in GCG. Now let's turn to intellectual property and cash. We successfully executed our intellectual property strategy in 2010. We exceeded our goal for generating new innovative patent applications, and we entered into three significant intellectual property arrangements, including adding a new license during the fourth quarter. Each of these agreements is in line with the three fundamental objectives that we have for our intellectual property licensing program, which are design freedom, gaining access to new markets and partnerships and generated cash and earnings. In anticipation of a question about Monday's news from the U.S. International Trade Commission Action, it is important to remember that this is one step in a longer process. And that the full ITC commission will ultimately determine the final outcome of this case in May. Beyond that, I don't intend to say anything further related to outstanding litigation. While our cash performance was off of our projections we finished the year $1.6 billion cash balance. As a result of the refinancing activities we completed early in the year, we have no significant debt maturities until 2013. I'm comfortable with our cash position, which will enable us to continue to invest and scale our growth initiatives and execute our strategy. Overall, I'm pleased that despite a smaller top line than we had anticipated, we delivered earnings and are well within the range that we had targeted and we accelerated momentum with our core growth initiatives that are so important for our future. I will turn now to Ann who will provide more details on our financial performance.