Charles L. Szews
Analyst · Jefferies and Company
Thank you, Pat, and good morning. Oshkosh is on the move. Our MOVE strategy is delivering strong results for shareholders, and we have a positive outlook for the next few years. Today, we announced full year adjusted earnings per share of $3.62, which is $0.22 more than the high end of our initial range, when we first provided our expectations for the full year. In 2014 earnings, we're well ahead of the company's internal expectations for 2014, as of our 2012 Analyst Day, and we set out ambitious target to approximately double earnings per share from 2012 to 2015, despite an expected decline in Defense earnings of more than 90%. That was nearly a $2 per share headwind that we're overcoming. Our employees have given an outstanding effort across our company to deliver MOVE for our customers, shareholders and each other. We greatly appreciate their effort and their commitment to deliver MOVE, and we expect our employees will achieve our principal MOVE targets for 2015. Today, we announced our initial 2015 adjusted earnings per share estimate range of $4 to $4.25, which is within the target range that we set out at our 2012 Analyst Day. When we announced our 2015 EPS target range back then in 2012, we shared our detailed assumptions and expectations in how we would almost double earnings per share. We pointed out that a portion of the improved performance was dependent on markets recovering, at realistic but slower rates from historical lows. While we've seen recovery in some of our markets, it has been even slower than we originally anticipated. Fortunately, we've been able to deliver outstanding performance, with the optimized cost and capital allocation portion of our MOVE strategy to largely offset the weaker-than-expected market recovery. I'll talk more about where we are with MOVE in a few minutes. We know that there'll be challenges to achieve our 2015 earnings estimate range, especially when you consider the mixed global economic headlines. But while we have initiatives to grow globally, we're still largely a U.S.-centric company, with markets that yet back -- aren't yet back to prerecession levels. We believe that the U.S. economy will continue to improve in 2015. Most importantly, we expect housing starts in nonresidential construction, which are the principal drivers of our businesses, will continue their slow recovery in 2015. Recall that the MOVE strategy was developed and launched in an effort to develop superior returns for shareholders during a particularly difficult time for the company, when we're expecting much lower U.S. Defense spending for tactical wheeled vehicles due to the wind down of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. federal budget pressures. It's probably ironic then that today, we believe our Defense segment provides the biggest upside opportunities to grow our sales and earnings. I'll also talk more about this in a few minutes. Simply put, we believe we have the right team, the right market dynamics and the right strategy to deliver in 2015 and beyond. Please turn to Slide 4. Our team pulled together and delivered solid fourth quarter results with adjusted earnings per share of $0.96, both double prior year fourth quarter adjusted earnings, backed by continued strong performance in our Access Equipment segment. For the quarter, results were a little better than our most recent estimates, and that's not a bad way to start off the year or to finish the year. We also repurchased more than 5 million shares during the quarter. Given that recent volatility in the market, the average price per share was above where the stock is currently trading. However, we believe it was a good value. We would expect to continue to repurchase shares in 2015, of course, subject to prudent leverage, if we believe the stock at the time represents a good return on our investment. I'm also pleased to announce the 13% increase in our quarterly dividend rate to $0.17 per share. This $0.02 per share increase in the quarterly dividend rate raises our annual cash dividend to $0.68, and we remain committed to growing it over time. Please turn to Slide 5. MOVE's impact in our financial results is clearly evident in 2014. We improved operating income margins at all of our non-Defense segments, including another new record for the Access Equipment segment. Defense also outperformed our expectations, as this segment battled through another year of significantly lower U.S. DoD spending on tactical wheeled vehicles. Now we launched more than 20 new products across the company, with multiple offerings from both the Access Equipment and Commercial segment segments at ConExpo in March: a particularly noteworthy industry-leading 185-foot self-propelled boom, new hybrid booms and much improved concrete mixer controls. Our Fire & Emergency segment launched an exciting new Saber Enforcer and storm chassis at the fire department structure -- fire structures show in April, while our Commercial segment launched the industry's lightest weight front loader and an improved Zero Radius Arm side loader at Waste Expo in May. And of course, our team in Defense is now offering 3 new variants of M-ATV for international customers. The Defense team developed these variants, while also continuing to compete fiercely for the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. We also returned a significant amount of capital to shareholders, with their reinstated dividend and the repurchase of 8.3 million shares of common stock over the course of the full fiscal year. The impact of our Oshkosh Operating System was also more evident in 2014. We've rolled out training and tools in nearly all our 12,000 Oshkosh employees. The progress we have made and the maturation of our processes is impressive. All of this provides us with the tools to deliver our growth road map and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Now we still have work to do in the Fire & Emergency segment to greatly improve our operating income margins, but we have a good plan and a motivated team in place. Wilson will speak more about our actions in that segment. Please turn to Slide 6, and let's look at our MOVE's scorecard. The bottom line of our scorecard is that we're doing quite well for shareholders, as we initiated our adjusted earnings per share estimate range at $4 to $4.25 for 2015, again, within our EPS target range for the year. Consistent with last year, we are projecting that our markets will recover more slowly in 2015 than our 2012 Analyst Day targets. In fact, we've lowered our expectations for Europe during just the last 90 days. Fortunately, the team continues to deliver above target on our optimized cost and capital structure initiatives. We can see the benefits of disciplined cost reduction in the higher earnings and margins in each of our non-Defense segments, and we have runway to continued margin expansion in each of these segments beyond 2015. Also, opportunistic share repurchases have contributed to a more than 12% reduction in shares outstanding since our September 2012 Analyst Day. So the all-in initiative has really been an important driver of our results. This year, we've moved our expectation for the value innovation initiative to be above target, where was previously expected to be at target in 2015. We expect a steady stream of new product launches, each quarter across the company throughout 2015, that we anticipate will provide important benefits to customers and earnings. That increase is coming with higher underlying investments that are most visible in our lower margins than our Defense segment, as we invest heavily to win the JLTV program and to support our international sales efforts. We're working hard to bring those Defense upside opportunities home to Oshkosh. Lastly, our International expansion activities remain on track. We continue to add people and facilities around the world to bring the Oshkosh experience to more global customers. Again, the bottom line represents solid results for shareholders, nearly doubling earnings per share during a 3-year period, while our largest business has endured a sharp downturn. Let's turn to Slide 7 for a discussion of the Defense business. Our Defense team continues to demonstrate incredible resolve and commitment to both the war fighter and shareholders, as we manage operations in an environment of declining funding. We are encouraged by the performance of our vehicles during testing that occurred over the past year, under the JLTV-EMD contract. We believe that Oshkosh is a JLTV, and anything else would be something less for the warfighter. Nonetheless, the evaluation criteria for this proposal are more complex than anything we've seen, and certainly, our competitors feel strongly about their vehicles, so it would be a tough competition. We believe the RFP for the production contract will be issued in November, and we look forward to submitting our JLTV production proposal in January. Based on the latest announcements from the customer, we continue to believe the production contract will be awarded to the winning bidder next summer, probably in July, late July. We've talked about our efforts to capture additional international Defense business. We were awarded a contract in the fourth quarter for the Middle East for nearly 70 M-ATVs, and most of these sales are expected to occur in the third quarter. We still believe there are opportunities to sell several thousand M-ATVs to foreign customers, and we are investing to expand the range of M-ATV variants to support these opportunities. At the AUSA show in Washington, D.C. a few weeks ago, we highlighted one of our new extended wheelbased M-ATV variants. We're also eagerly awaiting an announcement from Canada on the winner of the MSVS program, which we believe will happen no later than next summer, but could possibly be awarded much sooner. Operationally, we've been quite active repurposing our Defense segment production facilities. We're in an environment of burst, of smaller contract awards and production runs. From a production standpoint, we have reconfigured our facilities to allow flexibility for shorter production runs, while at the same time, preserving our production capacity and workforce for a program like the JLTV. We recently announced the further plan, but unfortunate reduction in the size of our Defense workforce, slated for late in our first quarter. We believe this is a responsible decision, given the decreased level of production work we have scheduled beginning in December 2014, largely due to a break-in production of FHTVs, while we work with our government customer to file us a new contract for this program. As a result for the continued investment of future opportunities and the expected break in FHTV productions, our expectations for Defense segment operating income in 2015 are now below our Analyst Day target. In effect, we expect operating losses in this segment in the first 2 quarters of 2015, as we deal with that break-in FHTV production and devote large teams to JLTV proposal preparation and M-ATV variant development. We expect essentially breakeven, but positive operating income for the year, reflecting a return of profitability in the second half of 2015. Now if we are successful with the JLTV and the international opportunities, we should experience much stronger performance in Defense, starting in 2016, as the benefits of our actions and investments become evident. We think this is good business, and we're still expecting to achieve our overall EPS target range for 2015. I'll turn it over to Wilson now to discuss our non-Defense segment. Please turn to Slide 8.