Earnings Labs

Quad/Graphics, Inc. (QUAD)

Q1 2015 Earnings Call· Wed, May 6, 2015

$7.74

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Quad/Graphics First Quarter 2015 Conference Call. During today’s call, all participants will be in listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] Please note this event is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Kyle Egan, Quad/Graphics Manager of Investor Relations. Kyle, please go ahead. Okay, Mr. Egan, please go ahead.

Kyle Egan

Analyst

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. With me today are Joel Quadracci, our Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Dave Honan, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Joel will lead off today's call with key highlights for the quarter and Dave will follow with a more detailed review of our financial results followed by Q&A. I would like to remind everyone that this call is being webcast, and forward-looking statements are subject to Safe Harbor provisions as outlined in our quarterly news release and in today's slide presentation. Our financial results are prepared in accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. However, this presentation also contains non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, free cash flow and debt leverage ratio. We have included in the slide presentation reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to GAAP financial measures. The slide presentation can be accessed through the Investor Relations section of the Quad/Graphics' website under the Events and Recent Presentations link in the left-hand navigation bar. There are also instructions on how to access the slide presentation in our quarterly news release issued last evening. A replay of the call will be available on the Investor Relations section of our website after today's call. I will now turn the call over to Joel.

Joel Quadracci

Analyst

Thanks, Kyle, and good morning. I am pleased to report that our first quarter results were in line with our expectations and we remain on track to achieve our 2015 financial objectives. As a company we continue to focus on ways to grow market share, improve productivity and implement sustainable cost reduction initiatives while maintaining a strong balance sheet, invest in our business and pursue compelling acquisition opportunities. Slide 3 shows the five primary strategic goals in which we remained focus to transform our company. We believe these goals allow us to be successful despite ongoing industry challenges. Today, I’d like to focus specifically on our strategic goal to grow the business profitably. It’s a transformational time at our company and as always, we remained focused on finding a better way, a matter that is reflected in our brand promise to deliver performance through innovation. While we will continue to capitalize on compelling industry consolidation opportunities, - focused on transformative growth opportunities. One important way we do this is by listening to our clients and adding new products and solutions to help grow their business. For example in the first quarter, we enhanced our in-store marketing solutions offering with the acquisition of Marin’s International, a worldwide leader in point-of-sale display industry with products in more than 100 countries. Packaging is another area of focus for us. We entered into packaging with the 2013 acquisition of Proteus Packaging and last month, we acquired Copac Global Packaging, an international provider of innovative packaging and supply chain solutions headquartered in South Carolina. Further the company strategically sources manufacturing numerous end-markets in Central America and Asia. Proteus and Copac now roll-up under a new brand Quad Packaging. We will continue to make compelling investments designed to drive profitable organic growth and productivity improvements in…

Dave Honan

Analyst

Thanks Joel, and good morning everyone. Slide 4 is a snapshot of our first quarter 2015 financial results as compared to the first quarter of 2014. Sales were $1.1 billion in the quarter, consistent with last year and our expectations. Our adjusted EBITDA was $101 million, as compared to $107 million in 2014, and our adjusted EBITDA margin was 9.1%, versus 9.7%. The adjusted EBITDA variance primarily reflects ongoing industry volume and pricing pressures partially offset by additional earnings on sales from recent acquisitions. Also impacting our first quarter adjusted EBITDA were losses in Argentina of approximately $2 million. Declining economic and political conditions in Argentina led us to commence restructuring proceedings there during March. These proceedings were deemed a triggering event for testing our Latin American goodwill for impairments and resulted in a $23 million non-cash goodwill impairment charge. Our hope is that a restructuring plan will improve the financial outlook for our operations in Argentina. With the final results, we’ll be largely dependant on our labor unions and their willingness to work with us on a viable and sustainable business plan to consolidate operations there. Moving to Slide 5, the increase in free cash flow was also in line with our expectations. We define free cash flow as net cash provided by operating activities including pension contribution, less purchases of property plant and equipment. Free Cash Flow was $22 million in the quarter, an increase of $35 million over 2014, primarily to working capital improvements and the receipt of the $10 million acquisition termination fee from Courier Corporation, which was excluded from our adjusted EBITDA as a non-recurring gain. On Slide 6, you will see that we ended the first quarter with just under $1.5 billion of debt and capital leases, an increase of $31 million from December…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Jamie Clement of Macquarie. Go ahead.

James Clement

Analyst

Good morning gentlemen.

Joel Quadracci

Analyst

Hey Jamie, and first things first, I think we recognize there may have been some challenges with the slides as we are going through this. I’ll just remind everybody that the slides were posted last night and should be accessible through our website and the investors’ side. So, with that, Jamie, how are you?

James Clement

Analyst

Well, I am doing very well. Thank you very much. Joel, I was wondering, can you give us some insight maybe kind of some trends you are seeing in some of your big product categories, magazines, catalogues inserts, that sort of things?

Joel Quadracci

Analyst

Yes, in fact, we just had last week, we hosted quite a few C Suites level people, marketing people from all our customers we call CAM Quad. So, the first half of the week was focused on what’s going on in marketing, really multi channel-wise and then the second half of the week was our postal conference, because I usually like to give an update on postal as well. So, all very fresh topics. We’ve seen in the magazine side, it was a slow quarter for ad pages. I think in general in advertising, it was pretty slow along with what we are all discovering is a fairly sluggish underlying economy. And when I look at like catalogues seem to holding up pretty well. I think if you look in your mailbox there is quite a few coming through and we are seeing that with our customers.

James Clement

Analyst

Seems like that’s a continuation of second half 2014 trends, sounds like.

Joel Quadracci

Analyst

Yes, I think that, the consumer spending and it certainly works and remember when you come out of a sort of a cutback period in the catalogue world, it takes a while to build up the rentable names again or fresh names to go to, so, sometimes there is a little bit of a ramp up for cataloguers to be able to get back in the swing of things. The ones – the nice surprise or maybe not surprise if you believed in print all these years, is sort of the book story. We’ve seen that the printed book volume was really up about 3% for the industry, which I think continues to tell the story that the transfer to digital is real, but it’s not ever ending and it’s really about media mix and I’d say that the big trend that I am seeing as represented by the robust conversations we had last week with a lot of our clients, most of the time, we are not focusing on print in this conversation, we are focusing on how do you get more out of your ad spend and what seems to happening and I’ve always talked about media confusion, but I think people are recognizing, we’ve also been sort of in a crisis of measurements and so if you look at adage and all the different industry letters, you are going to see a lot of talk about measurement, right now. In fact, it was – I was very pleased to see Sir Martin Sorrell who is the Chairman of WPP the biggest ad agency in the world a couple of weeks ago make a pretty serious statement, because he has been very aggressively moving their agencies to push people to take advantage of online digital. And I think…

James Clement

Analyst

I appreciate the color. Dave, if I could turn to you, one number that I was intrigued by in the earnings release was, if you look at kind of a gross margin sort of number, net sales minus cost of sales, this is actually the first quarter where you all have had a year-over-year improvement in that number since I believe the third quarter of 2011 where there was a lot of world color noise and the number is kind of bouncing around a lot. So, I was – I don’t want to read too much into a single quarter’s number and particularly not a Q1 number, but, can you talk a little bit about maybe some reasons behind that increase?

Dave Honan

Analyst

Yes, Jamie, and as you known from our comments and our prepared comments, one of our key strategy that’s continue to drive productivity through the business. We are a big advocate in the shop floor and in the admin area and lean enterprise and how you take cost out of the system and still maintain quality and effective delivery for your customer. So this is – a lot of that is a continuation of that continuous productivity and cost takeout and doing things more effectively. There was also in the quarter, a change that came through because that we conformed vacation policies, most recently from some acquired companies and that did benefit that line by almost $4 million, But it’s a combination of continued cost takeout plus that that reserve adjustment that did come through that cost of sales line that makes up the entire movement of that number.

James Clement

Analyst

Okay, very good. I’ll get back in queue. Thank you.

Dave Honan

Analyst

Thanks Jamie.

Joel Quadracci

Analyst

Thanks Jamie. Operator, next question.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from [Indiscernible] of Sidoti & Company. Please go ahead.

Joel Quadracci

Analyst

Good morning.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Good morning. How is everyone doing?

Joel Quadracci

Analyst

We are good.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

First question, you mentioned the Copac Global Packaging acquisition, can you provide more information, especially what I am interested is in their innovative packaging and supply chain solutions. How does that benefit you? What benefit do you see?

Joel Quadracci

Analyst

Yes, I mean, so this is not a huge acquisition, but a very important one, because, as we’ve embarked in packaging, we started out with Proteus which was a good family company with a great platform, really good people, a good talent and innovation of design. As we became acquirers, we also like to be a place that people want to place their good assets when they are ready for a change and Copac has built a nice business over time. They are also in the Dominican Republic servicing some of those product lines down there for some of the star people and things like that. But, it works very well with what we’ve done with Proteus, similar product lines, it’s a way to expand our efforts and continue to build our base as well as build our talent base, as we become more formidable on packaging, we want to make sure just as we’ve done in the other acquisitions that we always look for good people, good talent, which means, you are bringing things like innovation. One of the things we bring to all this is, we are very good at supply chain. We are very good at pulling out synergy costs when you look at the combination of it, no matter sort of what you are playing in. But again, this is a continuation of our strategy to do the right acquisitions and not necessarily worry about and it doesn’t have to be big or small, it just got to be the right one.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Okay, one more question. Can you provide any updates regarding QuadMed?

Joel Quadracci

Analyst

Yes, QuadMed continues to do what it does and I think one of the most important things QuadMed does for us as a corporation is, it takes key control of our own costs as a printing company and as we’ve said over time, we’ve been significantly lowering costs than all other industry for our employees and I think that’s becoming really important as in places we are trying to hire, I think that benefits are going to be a big deal. On the outside business side, they continue to grow their pipeline. We’ve got several big implementations going on right now with some large industrial companies and the exciting things is that, Su our President there has really brought in some great talent to kind of round out her team. So we can continue to scale up. Again, this is an insignificant part of our business from a side standpoint. But the innovation that they bring to us with other companies and ours continues to be a big way we also reduced our cost as a printing company.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Okay, thank you very much. That’s all for me.

Joel Quadracci

Analyst

Operator, any other questions?

Operator

Operator

No, this concludes the question-and-answer session at this time and I would like to turn the conference back over to Joel for any closing remarks.

Joel Quadracci

Analyst

I know you know, this is the first quarter, we got three more to go. We’ll see you soon. But again, I think we are very pleased with our continued strong free cash flow, this is a quarter where it was positive versus negative, but our focus on driving the platform as well as building our offering to our clients is going to continue on as we said and we’ll be updating you as it happens. So, with that, we will see next quarter.

Operator

Operator

The conference is now concluded. Thank you all for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.