Michael Barry
Analyst · Jefferies. Please proceed with your question
Thank you, [Diana]. Good morning, everyone. Joining me today are Mary Dean Hall, our Chief Financial Officer; and Robert Traub, our General Counsel. After my comments, Mary will provide the details around the financials, and then we’ll address any questions that you may have. We also have slides for the conference call. You can find them in the Investor Relations section of our website at www.quakerchem.com. I’ll start off now with some remarks about the fourth quarter. I’m pleased that we have delivered another quarter of solid earnings and strong cash flow, despite a variety of market challenges. We have accomplished this notwithstanding some significant changes in our external environment over the past year, including a much stronger dollar against many of the world’s currencies, lower oil prices and the impact that both of these had on regional steel production. Let me now talk about each of these in greater details to give you a better perspective in which to evaluate our fourth quarter results. Foreign exchange rates negatively impacted sales by 7% and earnings by 5%. Lower oil prices also impacted our results in a couple ways. On the plus side, we saw some expansion on our gross margins as there can be a lag effect between the changes in our product pricing and our raw material costs. On the other hand, our topline was negatively impacted by 3% since we did see some declines in our product pricing. We also saw some shifts in regional production especially in our global steel markets, which make up approximately half of our business. The stronger dollar enticed more steel imports into the United States negatively impacting North America steel production. In fact, steel production was off by 14% in North America versus last year. Globally, the story was not much better. In fact, all the major regions or countries showed declining steel production versus the fourth quarter of 2014. Overall, global steel production declined 4.5% in the quarter versus last year. However, on the positive side, most of the external data I have seen in – about the steel industry suggest that we should see at least flat to modest growth over the next several years. I would now like to make some comments about the quarter sales and I’ll do this region-by-region. North America showed a decline of 2% which was the same level as the foreign exchange impact. So given the large 14% decline in steel production you can see we are continuing to have good market share gains in North America. Our European or EMEA region showed a 6% increase in sales. This increase was primarily due to the Verkol acquisition and organic growth partially offset by significant negative foreign exchange impacts. South America continues to be our most challenging region and sales dropped 41% with currency and lower demand being the two largest causes for the decline. Overall, though, I think it’s important to point out that we continue to make money in South America and we have consistently reacted to the economic situation there as conditions change, through actions similar to our past cost streamlining efforts. In the Asia-Pacific region sales were down 15%, with the primary driver being lower volumes and exchange rates. Overall product volumes were down due to the weakness in the steel markets in China as well as different than normal and your buying patterns from customers. As you can see the sluggish global economic environment strong U.S. dollar and low oil prices are significantly impacting our business dynamics for the quarter. Nevertheless, we were able to grow non-GAAP earnings and adjusted EBITDA. In addition, we had strong operating cash flow in the quarter which led to a full-year increase of 34% in operating cash flow versus 2014. We were able to achieve these results from the benefits from our recent acquisitions as well as taking share in the marketplace. One way to see the share gain is to look at our overall product volumes and exclude acquisitions and also exclude the unique impact of Brazil, which is now less than 4% of our sales. When you do this our product volumes are up 1% in an environment where our largest market indicator steel production is down over 4% in the quarter. This type of differential between our actual product volumes and trends in the market we supply is a high-level way of getting visibility into our market share gains. We believe these share gains are due to our commitments to our customer intimacy model which puts the customers needs as our top priority and provides them with strong service and business solution. I believe this approach continues to differentiate ourselves in the marketplace. We have a great deal of initiatives in our base business lines and in each of our regions as well as through growing our recently acquired technologies around the globe. As I mentioned in the past using a baseball analogy, I see each of these initiatives as singles, our goal is to hit many singles to produce multiple runs and thereby show continuous growth even in tough market conditions. Over the next quarter, we expected our sales will continue to be impacted by low oil prices and a stronger dollar. In the case of raw material, we suspect that we are probably reaching the bottom at this time and we will eventually see some modest firming in raw material costs going forward. But this is really hard to determine with the fluctuations in the price of crude oil. Over time we would expect to see some potential compression in our gross margins. But if and when this will happen is hard to determine. So while there is a great deal happening around as the bottom line as I continue to be confident in our future. We believe that we can continue to grow our annual earnings and generate strong cash flow despite the market challenges. We will do this by executing our business strategies, which we project, will lead to continued share gains in the marketplace. Also, we continue to leverage our recent acquisitions by selling our newly acquired technologies on a global basis. And finally, we’ll continue to work on new acquisition opportunities such as the acquisition of Verkol last July. The combination of all these growth vehicles gives us confidence that 2016 will be another good year for Quaker. As we expect to grow both our top and bottom lines despite continue economic challenges and further foreign-exchange headwinds. In closing, I want to thank all of our associates whose dedication and expertise helps to create value for our customers and differentiate Quaker in the marketplace. People are everything in our business and by far our most valuable asset, and I’m very happy with the Quaker team we have in place throughout the world. And now, I’ll turn it over to Mary Dean Hall, our Chief Financial Officer, so that she can provide you with more details behind our financials. Once Mary has completed her comments on the financials for the quarter we will address any questions you may have. Mary?