Richard Holder
Analyst · Stephens. Please go ahead
Thanks, Robbie. Good morning and thank you, everyone for joining us on this conference call. Our intense is to maintain the process that we began in Q3 - on the Q3 call, so we’ll be using the deck, I’ll walk through Q4 full year, we’ll go through some guidance and then we’ll just move straight into Q&A. We move over to which should be Slide 4 in your deck the highlights of fourth quarter. We closed the acquisition of PEP on October 19th, which I think was a significant moment for us as an organization. Sales for the fourth quarter was 183.9 million in line with our guidance from - that we gave you in Q3. Acquisitions contributed 42.2 million during the quarter. Of note, Autocam’s margins continue to expand driven by our continuous adoption of the CAFE products as we expected and as we had been telling you often quite some time. Adjusted earnings per share of $0.25, again in line with our guidance. Adjusted EBITDA of 30.4. Our adjusted operating margins improved 290 basis points which we’re pretty proud of but I will tell you a little later on that it could have been a little bit better. Foreign currency impact in Q4 about 11.7 million in the quarter on the net sales line and that’s somewhere around 2 a little north $0.02 of EPS for the translation effect. Last but not least, the acquisition of PEP brings us closer to our diversified end markets as we’ve been talking about strategically for quite some times. And we’ll talk about this in great length and great detail at our upcoming Investor Meeting later on this month and so I would encourage everyone to either attend or at least dial-in. Moving on to adjusted earnings per share for the fourth quarter was again $0.25. Let me remind everyone that we issued 7.6 million shares in the third quarter, so we’re down from 2014 by $0.10. Adjusted net income is up year-over-year. So again we continue to trend in the appropriate direction. On the net sales line 183.9 million, up from a 153. Acquisitions contributed 42.2 in the quarter. We saw an $11.7 million currency headwind. When you think about the base business and I’ll define it as pre-PEP, the Autocam business was down about 5.7 million driven primarily by currency and sort of cleaning up Brazil. The Bearing group also was down about - right around 5.5 million as well. They had a headwind of 7.1 million in currency. So if you adjust out on the Bearing - for the Bearing group, while sales were down, volume was up because candidly we’re taking share. Now we’ll talk about some execution issues on that a little later on but again the story continues to fall in the place much like we’d hope. Moving on to Page 6, adjusted gross margin, Q4 last year were 21.4, were up 23.1, so 1.5 improvement. As you can probably surmise in your modal as we go through this year, adjusted gross margin will climb a little bit more; so again as expected. On the adjusted operating margin front, we continue to improve sequentially and we’re up year-to-year to 10.6 from 7.1. So again this story continues to sort of play out the way we’d hope. Moving on to Page 7, adjusted EBITDA from 20.5 to 30.4, up around 50% [ph] I guess. SG&A up about a $1 million as we continue to invest in the business primarily around the execution of our integration plans. If some of you remember, we talked a lot about bringing all in more application engineers, moving into different verticals and so on and so we continue to invest on SG&A front. Moving on to Page 8, as we dive into the businesses a little bit, the Autocam Precision group, they were down as I said earlier 5.7 million, again driven by currency and some of the headwinds in Brazil. But with that said, adjusted operating margins were up, so 12.7%. The core business was at an 11.5 also up, it just still a job, I think this year. And then the JV contributed - the China JV contributed 1.2 point of margin. Now one of the things we talked about continuously in the Autocam group is that as the adoption of the CAFE products increase, our margins will decline. So if you deep dive into the group, what you’d see is, is our dense sale going up which is all GVI [ph] and so our margins are climbing in line with those sales as well. So again the story is as we’ve been saying and feeling pretty good about the performance of the Autocam group you know ex-Brazil I suppose. Moving on to Page 9, the Precision Bearing group, again sales were down about 5.7 million. Again we had some issues in the quarter. We had somewhat expected push outs. We had a little bit of a poor mix. But as we can see in the next slide over, operating margins are down significantly. You know in spite of the mix and in spite of the push outs; I will tell you we just simply had the execution issues. We are pretty confident we have them fixed but candidly we did not flex the way we should have and we carry through some labor costs and some material costs that we otherwise should not have. We thought we had the whole plug, clearly we didn’t until we’ve gone back and adjusted the process and we had an operating system and we think we had it fixed now. There is good and bad I think associated with this story. I think the good is you know we’re able to see it, fix it and have the diversification of businesses to be able to overcome it. And the bad is we thought the plan was - descriptive plan was relatively tight and so we found we have an ability to do a little bit more adjustment. So all in all, we were able to compensate and we now have the problem fix going forward. Moving on to Page 10, Precision Engineered Products group, keep in mind that this was the acquisition of PEP and we’ve taken the Plastics group that was out of the legacy business and rolled it into PEP. I’ll combine it with the PEP acquisition to create the PEP group just like we did with the Autocam group and the worldwide acquisition. So when you look at net sales, 7.7 up to 49.1. So I mean I think this chart is probably more entertainment than substance given the comparison. And the same goes for operating margins from 5.3 to 20.6. But I think that then you can take away from this chart is that the acquisition performed as expected. And so again the plan and the expectations are holding together. Moving on to 11, fourth quarter summary, again we rolled the legacy plastics business into the PEP organization creating the PEP group. And as you well aware, we sold off the Rubber piece of the business. We rebranded our Bearing Components group to be now called the Precision Bearing Components group. That is impart because had carved out some pieces out of the acquisition of PEP that were Bearing related and move those into what was our Metal Bearing group, but it’s not only metal anymore, we are now in the plastic side and some potentially ceramic side, so we rebranded it to Precision Bearing instead of Metal Bearing because we’ve expanded outside of the metal move. Continued improvement in overall operating performance driven by the NN operating system. Again we continue to expand margins and the plan continues to hold together, so we think that’s incredible results in terms of expanding margins. PEP, continues to diversify our end markets segments and again we’ll talk a lot more about that later on in the month. Negative currency translation continues to skew our year-to-year comparison. So any point in time if someone want to kind of walk through the bridge, feel free to give Robbie a call and he will happy to give you all the ins and outs of translation and currency effects. And again we experienced a bump in the road in terms of execution inside of our Precision Bearing Components group. We have that rectified and I feel quite certain that we won’t see that issue again. Let’s move over to full year 2015, let’s go straight to Slide 13. I am not going to cover the entire deck; I am just going to cover the summary slide, so we can get the guidance in Q&A. So in terms of summary, sales were 667.3 million for the year. Acquisitions contributed 212.5. We completed the $182 million follow-on equity offering in Q3 in order to prepare for the PEP acquisition. We in fact made the PEP acquisition and completed it in Q4 2015. For the year, adjusted earnings per share of $1.53, adjusted EBITDA of 102.7 million, adjusted operating margins improved 140 basis points compared to 2014. All in, foreign currency impact of about 39.1 million compared to 2014 which rounds out to about $0.09 per share on the translation effect for EPS. And last but not least, our cost of debt and this is probably important for you guys doing the model, are down 29 basis points based on the movement of the 50 million from the high yield cut in the quarter high yield over to the much lower term loan B. As we move to - jump all the way to Page 22, first quarter guidance. As we look at the quarter, we think quarter will be between 205 million and 212 million. I want everyone to take note of the profile of the business, it’s a little different than it was sort of way back when we build through the year. So our stronger quarters are quarter two and three. We are pretty sure first quarter will be our low score. So the profile is a little bit different than we once had. So again, net sales 205 to 212, adjusted operated margin between 10 and 10.5, adjusted EBITDA 30 million to 35 million and adjusted EPS between 23 and 28. As we go to full year on Page 23, there are no changes, we are forming the guidance the plan we laid out to you in Q3. And I think that’s it. I think with that we can open the line for questions.