Ken Lamneck
Analyst · Raymond James. Your line is now open
Thank you, Glynis. Moving now to our 2017 operating plans. Across the markets where we do business industry analysts expect flat to low single-digit growth in hardware sales in 2017 and mid single-digit growth in software and services sales. Our plans for 2017 are focused on driving growth in excess of the market across our operating segments. Where we’re given continued weakness and major global currencies against U.S. dollar we expect that our reported growth in U.S. dollars will be in the low to mid single-digit range before giving effect to the addition of Datalink to our business. As previously discussed we expect Datalink will add an additional 600 million in net sales in 2017. The IT industry is stable and yet constantly changing which provides opportunity for Insight to continue to bring value to our clients, partners, teammates, and shareholders. We believe that the investments we made organically and through recent acquisitions combined with our global scale, strong data center, software and services capabilities position us well to compete the marketplace in 2017. Our operating priorities in 2017 are clear. In North America our core business is helping in growing the 2017. We will focus on accelerating that momentum getting to 2016. We’ll continue to invest and leverage our best in class digital marketing platforms and field sales engagement models or a new enterprise clients and more business with existing clients with our competencies around supply chain, software, cloud, and to bring additional value to our technical and consulting services capabilities. Our strategy includes the development of more mature offerings around work play services, hybrid cloud, internet of things, cloud, and acts as a service for both domestic and global clients. In addition we will continue our initiatives to improve and scale our Insight’s sales business. In the back half of 2016 we added approximately 180 teammates to our Insight sales model in Conway, Arkansas. In 2017 we will continue to invest in sales and marketing resources in Conway and other U.S. locations as well as sales enabling platforms that drive digital marketing, predictive analytics, web automation, and Cloud aggregation all aimed at improving the productivity of our sales teams. And we will be focused on integrating Datalink seamlessly into our organization. Our first priority is to ensure stability of the business operations and retention of talent. To ensure we meet this objective we are approaching integration on two fronts. The first is centered around the sales, marketing, and service delivery parts of the business. Sean O'Grady previously Chief Operating Officer of Datalink has joined Insight as Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Datalink business within Insight. Sean will lead the integration efforts working with Steve Dodenhoff, President of the U.S. business. Together they are focused on ensuring that operationally the business continues with as little disruption as possible while they access the sales and profitability opportunities of the combined business. The second is focused on integration of systems and back office functions. We've completed quite a few IT integration system projects over the last few years including integrating all the more recent acquisitions and our Asia Pacific and Canadian business onto our SAP platform. We believe we have model supported by cross functional teams across the business that has proven it works well for these projects. We expect to convert the Datalink business to our common systems in the first half of this year. Moving on to EMEA, our EMEA business has been on a multi-year journey to transform to a cloud and services oriented business. In order to fund these initiatives the team is focused on improving the sales execution and profitability of the core business. Over the past few years the EMEA team has more than doubled the earnings from operations of the business and revitalized the sales engagement model. At the same time they've expanded their services offerings around license and cloud consulting services and introduced new managed services offerings across the region. In 2017 our EMEA business continues with the same strategy with a focus on getting new clients, share, and market relevance in key markets, scaling solutions and selling more broadly in region, driving high performance sales organization, and improving the performance of certain underperforming markets. And finally our Asia Pacific business will stay the course on its strategy to selectively expand hardware capabilities across the region and to deepen its relevance to new clients and its relationship with existing clients have broadened the cloud and services offerings we bring to market. In support of this strategy we recently completed the acquisition of Ignia in Perth, Australia. With this integration into our business expands our capabilities in areas of application design, [indiscernible], mobility and business analytics. In 2017 we will extend the Ignia operations to Eastern Australia for new and existing Insight clients. Moving on to our outlook for 2017, for the full year 2017 with the addition of Datalink which we acquired on January 6, 2017 we expect our business to deliver sales growth of 12% to 15% compared to 2016. We also expect adjusted diluted earnings per share for the full year of 2017 to between $2.80 and $2.90. This outlook assumes amortization expense associated with acquired intangible assets of 16.7 million, effective tax rate of approximately 37%, and capital expenditures of $15 million to $20 million. This outlook does not assume any severance and restructuring or acquisition related expenses. Thank you again for joining us today. I want to thank our teammates, clients, and partners for their dedication to Insight. That concludes our comments and we will now open up your lines for questions.