Earnings Labs

Phibro Animal Health Corporation (PAHC)

Q4 2015 Earnings Call· Thu, Sep 10, 2015

$51.31

-5.47%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
AI summary not yet generated for this transcript. Generation in progress for older transcripts; check back soon, or browse the full transcript below.

Same-Day

+3.61%

1 Week

+9.72%

1 Month

-5.63%

vs S&P

-8.53%

Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Phibro Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year June 2015 Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will be given at that time. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference CFO, Richard Johnson. Please go ahead sir.

Richard G. Johnson

Analyst · David Risinger with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open

Thank you, operator and good morning. Good day everyone. Welcome to the Phibro Animal Health Corporation earnings call for our fiscal fourth quarter and fiscal year ended June 2015. On the call today as usual are Jack Bendheim, our Chief Executive Officer and myself Richard Johnson, the CFO. I will provide an overview of our quarterly and annual results. We'll also talk about our fiscal 2016 guidance and then we'll open the lines for questions. Before we begin, let me give you the standard reminders that the earnings press release, financial tables, can be found on the Investor Sections of our website at pahc.com. We're also providing a simultaneous webcast of today's call which can be accessed on the webcast as well. Today's presentation slides and a replay and transcripts of the call will also be available on the website later today. Our remarks today may include forward-looking statements and actual results could differ materially from those projections. For a list and descriptions of certain factors that could cause results to differ we refer you to the forward-looking statements sections in our earnings press release. Our remarks today will also include references to certain financial measures, which were not prepared in accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or U.S. GAAP. We refer you to the non-GAAP financial information section in our earnings press release for a discussion of these measures. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable U.S. GAAP measures are included in the financial tables that accompany the earnings press release. And with that, I'll turn it over to Jack Bendheim for some inductor remarks and we'll take it from there. Jack? Good morning.

Jack C. Bendheim

Analyst · Guggenheim Securities. Your line is now open

Good morning, thank you, Dick, and thanks to all of you for joining us on this call this morning. Our fourth quarter results were solid and capped a fiscal 2015 that we are very proud of. Our fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA grew a healthy 12%. While we are disappointed with our overall topline growth of 1% we were able to drive revenue growth in our core Animal Health unit in low single digits. Nutritional Specialty products and Vaccines led the growth in another double-digit growth performance. Our MFA categories experienced negative quarter-over-quarter growth due in large measure to the transitional effects of the currency shocks in some of our markets. As a reminder, we largely sell our products around the world based in U.S. dollars and the effect of a rapidly strengthening dollar is that when our prices translate into local currencies, our customers can see their price increases dramatically which in turn can slow their purchasing. The strength of our business model is that we are still able to grow despite turbulence in the markets and we saw more and more of our high margin vaccines and nutritional specialty products markets where our products have tremendous room to grow. As we look to our new fiscal year, we are expecting another very strong year, led again by double-digit growth in Nutritional Specialties and Vaccines. While currency volatility remains a wild card we expect MFAs and others to deliver mid single digit growth as certain markets transition away from the use of antibiotics for growth promotion. Of course some of this transition is driving our impressive Nutritional Specialties revenue expansion. We anticipate that the investments we made in this last year in growing our sales and technical teams by approximately 50 employees will continue to drive growth as we enter more markets and sub markets and see more customers with more products on a regular basis. We will continue to invest in people and operations in 2016. Our CapEx will be focused on expanding our capacity in nutritional specialties and vaccines as well as driving continued cost reductions. Entering fiscal 2016 with our net leverage ratio at our comfortable blow two and a half times EBITDA we are well positioned to invest in acquisitions that will meet our strategic and financial objectives. I will now turn it back to Dick to give you some more color on our completed quarter and our guidance for the coming year and I look forward to answering any questions you may have at the end. Thank you.

Richard G. Johnson

Analyst · David Risinger with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open

Thanks Jack. So, turning first to the fourth quarter consolidated results on page four of the webcast presentation, we had net sales of $185 million in our June quarter. That's about $1 million or 1% growth over the same quarter last year. That growth was led by the Animal Health segment with over $3 million growth or 3% Mineral Nutrition just above last year and Performance Products with a down quarter compared to last year. Overall it was a volume story throughout our businesses, volume growth in Animal Health, in Mineral Nutrition and volume declines in Performance Products. We did see pricing declines in Mineral Nutrition, that's the nature of that business where prices are very flexible and transparent to our customers as they move with the commodity markets and as I think we all know commodity markets have been in some steep declines lately. More on that as we get to a little more detail on that segment. In spite of only $1 million of sales growth we grew gross profit to almost 33% of sales, growth of $6.5 million or 12% that was driven by a number of favorables that was favorable business mix. So growth in the Animal Health segment versus the other parts of the business, it was driven by favorable product mix even within the segments and it was also driven by reduced manufacturing costs from beneficial currency movements. We manufacture several of our significant products either in Brazil or in Israel and the dollar has strengthened against both of those currencies, in particular the dollar has strengthened against the Brazil currency and that makes our manufacturing costs, our local costs lower and favorable to us. At the SG&A line, we reported, actually reported a decline in SG&A, but when we set aside a one-off…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Louise Chen with Guggenheim Securities. Your line is now open.

Brandon Folkes

Analyst · Guggenheim Securities. Your line is now open

Hi it's Brandon Folkes on for Louise. Just firstly, has avian flu impacted far Phibro at all and do you have any insights or thoughts on when it may peak again and how we should think about the potential impact going forward?

Jack C. Bendheim

Analyst · Guggenheim Securities. Your line is now open

I mean that is the question that everyone in the industry thinks about all the time. So, the avian flu which affected the U.S. poultry business last year did not have a very big effect on our business. It hit the turkey producers in Minnesota pretty hard and hit the egg industry, the layer industry very hard in the Midwest. And as you know, no different than even the flu warm weather flu subsides and in cold weather it reemerges. So, everyone is sort of is waiting to see as the birds migrate again south as it gets colder and the birds, strange Avian, right the birds that are carrying the flu, the influenza, how virulent and what path they will take. So I think there was expectations it will hit, no one exactly knows on which corridor. I mean clearly the industry is buttoning up their facilities, increasing its bio security, but it still remains an unknown. So I mean, a long answer for a short question, so far has no effect on our business, has had a minimal effect and remains to be seen what happens this coming year.

Brandon Folkes

Analyst · Guggenheim Securities. Your line is now open

Great, thanks very much.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from the line of David Risinger with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

David Risinger

Analyst · David Risinger with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open

Great. Thanks very much. Good morning Jack and Dick. I have a couple of questions. I guess maybe two for each of you if that’s okay. So Jack, maybe you could just talk about the MFA business in terms of just how the market is evolving and your share trends versus competitors and the pricing outlook? And then if you could maybe expand upon your comment that you could pursue external transactions that would be helpful also? And then Dick could you just please characterize what the FX hit is that you’re expecting in fiscal 2016 or said another way, what would your organic revenue growth guidance be ex-currency? And then with respect to the tax rate outlook beyond 2016, can just tell us what you expect to have at the end of the year in terms of NOLs and how we should think about the tax rate beyond fiscal 2016? Thanks very much.

Jack C. Bendheim

Analyst · David Risinger with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open

David, thanks. Outlook on medicated feed additives, overall our business is still growing around the world. And as you know so well, I mean the more animals that get raised the more exposure that you have to bacteria, the more - the greater the movement from small farms to larger farms and is the right thing to do is to treat sick animals as opposed to them getting sick. So, on balance we see our business growing around the world. Now there is obviously some, there were changes because in the markets, predominantly the United States, the industry, the protein industry which is our biggest customer they are moving away from the use of antibiotic for growth. It was always a misnomer, but the just - the standard feeding of antibiotics without presence of that prediction of seeing a bacterial disease is something clearly the industry has shied away from and will move from completely within the next year and a half. So that is lessening the business. At the same time, the effect that those products have had again, as you know so well the protein industry is one industry that knows how to count and doesn’t waste money. So it doesn’t for the fun of it feed antibiotics because of the calcium carbonate you get as a carrier to have bones strong. I mean it is doing some effect. So, what we're seeing is a shift and we are shifting to some of our nutritional specialties to aid the farmers, the growers in preventing and controlling the various bacteria that you are going to get. So what we’ve seen here and we look at our business, I mean in the way we told you many times, I mean our goal is to service this industry wherever they are.…

David Risinger

Analyst · David Risinger with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open

That is helpful, thanks.

Richard G. Johnson

Analyst · David Risinger with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open

So, the couple of things you asked about, so first on revenues, we expect very little difference between our revenue guidance from - we don’t expect currency to have a significant effect on our revenues for 2016 or a significant direct effect let me put it that way. Again we sell these products are priced or referenced in dollars in most markets around the world where we’re selling internationally. So our dollar sales price stays more or less unchanged. We do have the indirect effect of the sticker shock as the phrase go that we may – people maybe a little more reluctant to buy a product. We’re taking limited actions in very targeted specific areas if we need to go in with some transitional discounts to help our customers sort of make that transition to the new reality of the exchange rates they’re facing. Short answer, our sales growth is and the guidance is really our organic growth. Looking at the tax rates, I’d say we probably have a good two years of NOLs. We will enjoy a low tax rate as we go through our NOLs. We probably have two more years of that. I think our tax guidance for 2016 gives an effective tax rate in the call it 17% neighborhood and that will climb over time, it will climb once the NOLs are exhausted, it will probably climb to the low to the mid 20s without having a lot more detail here in front of me. But that will be two or three years from now. Okay?

David Risinger

Analyst · David Risinger with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open

Great, thank you again.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Erin Wilson with Bank of America. Your line is now open.

Erin Wilson

Analyst · Erin Wilson with Bank of America. Your line is now open

Hi just a quick follow up on that tax rate question, you said low to mid-20s longer term, I think previously you had said 30%.

Richard G. Johnson

Analyst · Erin Wilson with Bank of America. Your line is now open

Yes, right. So I’m mixing a little bit of apples and oranges here and I apologize for that. The low to mid-20s is on an adjusted net income basis. The 30% was a GAAP tax provision basis. So I still think on GAAP, we will call it 30, but I think we will be on a cash basis we'll be below that number for several years still.

Erin Wilson

Analyst · Erin Wilson with Bank of America. Your line is now open

Okay. Great and where do we stand now with the regulations regarding antibiotics? I know there were some small adjustments at the VFD more recently, you had originally estimated a potential impact of like $15 million to $20 million associated with these changes potentially. Have you started to see some of the label changes, basically where do we stand broadly speaking with the FDA?

Richard G. Johnson

Analyst · Erin Wilson with Bank of America. Your line is now open

We released our 10-K at 6:00 AM this morning, and so I’m sure you’ve gotten to Page 99 or whatever it was where we updated the risk factor language and we updated those numbers and the numbers now updated are $10 million to $15 million. So basically what that means is, we’ve seen and it is down from the 15 to 20, you calculate, you quoted, so that means that we’ve seen a bit of a drop there in that area. Yes, the VFD regulations came out recently and I’ll let Jack talk more about it.

Jack C. Bendheim

Analyst · Erin Wilson with Bank of America. Your line is now open

Basically, what’s going to happen, the industry is in negotiations with the FDA over exact language. But right now the thinking of the FDA is to do everything at one time over a 48-hour period, sometime in the winging days of December 2016. So everyone will have a chance, the government will look at everyone’s labels, suggest the changes. It will be up and then at the push of a button the old labels will no longer be in use and new labels. And I did a lot of research around this as you can imagine, inventories in the field, people may use it and all of this and the FDA has been very conscious of the industry, very conscious of the uses. I mean remember these products are safe and effective and they have been for 30, 40 years. So it’s not a safety issue. We just want to, just getting it right to make sure that nothing gets wasted and the consumers are protected which is obviously FDA, the reason FDA exists.

Erin Wilson

Analyst · Erin Wilson with Bank of America. Your line is now open

Okay, great and the EMA recently outlined some regulations around the maximum residue limits with virginiamycin. If I’m understanding it right this could be a positive for your business, can you kind of elaborate on that?

Jack C. Bendheim

Analyst · Erin Wilson with Bank of America. Your line is now open

Virginiamycin as you know so well, we spoke about it often is a great antibiotic, great molecule which basically leaves no residues by the way of applications. We’ve never taken a few years. We have applied for basically what is the called the minimum residue level, MRL maximum residue level and so I think we’ve applied, took us about four or five years and they just released it. It’s good, it just shows what we’ve been saying the product is safe and effective. It leaves no residues. People are going to use it comfortably. So, half a peg growth, but it’s we think it’s going to be very positive for the business continuing with some growth going forward.

Erin Wilson

Analyst · Erin Wilson with Bank of America. Your line is now open

Okay. And one – sorry, one last question on OmniGen in Europe and then also the efforts in China for that product?

Jack C. Bendheim

Analyst · Erin Wilson with Bank of America. Your line is now open

Sorry, could you repeat that?

Erin Wilson

Analyst · Erin Wilson with Bank of America. Your line is now open

Could you speak to the traction overall that you’re seeing with OminGen in Europe as well as your efforts in China and where that stands?

Jack C. Bendheim

Analyst · Erin Wilson with Bank of America. Your line is now open

We’re increasing our headcount in Europe, we might be the only people hiring in Europe. We are increasing our headcount in Europe to market the product. We have seen some of the effects, but also some of the side effects you read about the protest in Belgium of all farmers complaining that things are not as nice and neat. I mean, what we had said and the reason we're there is promise that just not get paid anymore just sort of for having cows and producing milk. It's going to be a competitive market and the most productive farmer with the most milk and the best quality milk is going to win and that’s where our products come in. We've been in that business a long time in the United States. So the trend is good and our business in Europe continues to grow. In China we've begun doing some in China tests with product at various large dairies. So far the results look positive, but it takes a while to do all the calculations. We remain optimistic about China, Europe is growing. Our business in the United States continues to grow as well as in other markets and in Latin South America we are certainly increasing our penetration of some of these specialties in the dairy industry. And now we saying in fact the dairy prices are down internationally. Again it pulls for all kinds of products because the quality, the healthy animal, all these things that we’re dealing with, it really pays for the farmer to spend the money.

Erin Wilson

Analyst · Erin Wilson with Bank of America. Your line is now open

Great, excellent, thanks.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Matthew Brooks with Macquarie Group. Your line is now open.

Matthew Brooks

Analyst · Matthew Brooks with Macquarie Group. Your line is now open

Good morning guys. I was wondering, you've made some comments about the impact of commodity prices on sales, can you say a little bit of more about that, maybe use of specific commodities example of how it sort of impacts the sales line?

Richard G. Johnson

Analyst · Matthew Brooks with Macquarie Group. Your line is now open

Yes, so our mineral nutrition business which is $225 million business last year, it sells, fundamentally it sells trace minerals for animal feed. So it’s all of those trace mineral elements that just like a human an animal needs for a healthy diet. So its products like copper sulfate, zinc sulfate, iron oxide, manganese oxide, cobalt, iodine, selenium, et cetera, etcetera, etcetera, I’m showing off and so for example Zinc, I think Zinc six months ago was, help me out Jack, $15,00 a ton and now it is…

Jack C. Bendheim

Analyst · Matthew Brooks with Macquarie Group. Your line is now open

No, Zinc was – dollar a pound and now it's in the selling of the $0.80 a pound.

Richard G. Johnson

Analyst · Matthew Brooks with Macquarie Group. Your line is now open

Now it’s $0.80 of pound.

Jack C. Bendheim

Analyst · Matthew Brooks with Macquarie Group. Your line is now open

Copper is dropping, I mean all the metals around the world is dropping.

Richard G. Johnson

Analyst · Matthew Brooks with Macquarie Group. Your line is now open

Yes, so copper used to be a year ago it was 3.25 and now it is 2.25 somewhere in there. And so this is a business that our mineral nutrition business in the entire industry pricing is completely transparent. So our customers, know they can, they have the internet too, they can look up commodity prices and they see what copper is at. So these derivatives are all priced off of the base metal. And so our prices move up and down, this absolutely in lock-step with the market prices and we tend to keep our unit dollar margin. So typically we sell this by the ton, so we’ll keep X dollars a ton, whether we’re selling it at a dollar or pound or $0.80 a pound, so that’s a long answer.

Matthew Brooks

Analyst · Matthew Brooks with Macquarie Group. Your line is now open

Okay, that’s good and you said the CapEx was going to increase, can you tell us what’s behind that, what you’re going to spend extra money on?

Richard G. Johnson

Analyst · Matthew Brooks with Macquarie Group. Your line is now open

Well, we try never to spend money until we absolutely have to on CapEx. So we had forecast CapEx for our fiscal 2015 to be higher than it came in at. So some of that is just deferred or delayed spending on projects that have been in the works for a while. New projects are really around capacity expansion I would say entirely in our animal, capacity expansion in our animal health segment, whether it’s expanding for nutritional specialty products, for vaccine. And the other thing we're continuing to do is when we see good cost say, when we see a good return on a capital investment manufacturing that gives us good quick cost savings, we'll spend that CapEx also. So it isn’t any one big thing. It is just a number of initiatives and but they add up to a bigger number.

Matthew Brooks

Analyst · Matthew Brooks with Macquarie Group. Your line is now open

Okay and on China and OmniGen can you tell us, do you sell that product directly to the dairies, I know some other animal health products in China gets sold to sort of the local government body which then sells it to the farmers?

Jack C. Bendheim

Analyst · Matthew Brooks with Macquarie Group. Your line is now open

So we have our own people who are sort of detailing products, promoting the product, but we don't do the actual sales. We work through a distributor. As it happens in this case a company which is probably owned by the Chinese government, they are the importer of record and they do the actual distribution of the product, but we are out there with their sales people promoting the product and running technical seminars, et cetera, et cetera.

Matthew Brooks

Analyst · Matthew Brooks with Macquarie Group. Your line is now open

What's the name of the company?

Jack C. Bendheim

Analyst · Matthew Brooks with Macquarie Group. Your line is now open

I don't think we released it.

Matthew Brooks

Analyst · Matthew Brooks with Macquarie Group. Your line is now open

Okay. And can you say lastly what percent of the cost of your products come from manufacturing in Israel and Brazil?

Richard G. Johnson

Analyst · Matthew Brooks with Macquarie Group. Your line is now open

We in our risk factors in the 10-K it tells you individually that our Brazil operations account for something and that Brazil accounts for something and I'm scrambling to look it up here and…

Jack C. Bendheim

Analyst · Matthew Brooks with Macquarie Group. Your line is now open

Yes, we'll look it up for you.

Richard G. Johnson

Analyst · Matthew Brooks with Macquarie Group. Your line is now open

So our Israel, both our manufacturing and local operations accounted for 22%, I'm sorry, 20% of sales. Brazil, between what we make there and what we sell there, 21% of sales.

Matthew Brooks

Analyst · Matthew Brooks with Macquarie Group. Your line is now open

Okay.

Richard G. Johnson

Analyst · Matthew Brooks with Macquarie Group. Your line is now open

Okay?

Operator

Operator

Thank you. I'm showing no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the call back to Richard Johnson for any further remarks.

Richard G. Johnson

Analyst · David Risinger with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open

Well, we wish you all a good shanah tovah and talk to you next time. Take care everyone.

Jack C. Bendheim

Analyst · Guggenheim Securities. Your line is now open

Thank you.