Earnings Labs

Sabre Corporation (SABR)

Q2 2015 Earnings Call· Tue, Aug 4, 2015

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning and welcome to the Sabre Second Quarter 2015 Earnings Conference Call. Please note that today's call is being recorded and is also being broadcast live over the Internet on the Sabre corporate website. This broadcast is the property of Sabre. Any redistribution, retransmission or rebroadcast of this call in any form without the express written consent of the company is strictly prohibited. I would now like to turn the call over to the Senior Vice President of Investor Relations, Mr. Barry Sievert. Go ahead, sir.

Barry Sievert - Senior Vice President of Investor Relations

Management

Thank you, Shardae, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us for our second-quarter earnings conference call. This morning, we issued an earnings release, which is available at our website at investors.sabre.com. A slide presentation, which accompanies today's prepared remarks, is also available during this call on the Sabre website. A replay of today's call along with the slide presentation will be available on our website beginning this afternoon. Following today's call, we invite investors with additional questions to follow up with Investor Relations. Throughout today's call, we will be presenting certain non-GAAP financial measures, which have been adjusted to exclude expenses and other gains or losses related to restructurings, litigation and tax matters and certain other items. The most directly comparable GAAP measures and reconciliations are available in our earnings release and other documents posted on our website at investors.sabre.com. We would like to advise you that our comments contain forward-looking statements. These statements include, among others, disclosures of our guidance including revenue, adjusted EBITDA, net income, cash flow, CapEx and earnings guidance; our expected segment results, the implementation and effects of recent agreements, products or acquisitions, our expectations of industry trends and various other forward-looking statements regarding our business. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from the statements made on today's conference call. Information concerning the risks and uncertainties that could affect our financial results is contained in our SEC filings, including our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2014. Participating with me on today's call are Tom Klein, our President and Chief Executive Officer; Rick Simonson, our Chief Financial Officer; and Chris Nester, our Treasurer and Senior Vice President of Finance. Tom will start us off with a review of our strategic and commercial performance. Rick will…

Operator

Operator

Yes, sir. And our first question comes from the line of Ashish Sabadra of Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.

Bryan C. Keane - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst · Deutsche Bank. Your line is open

Hi, guys, it's Bryan Keane in for Ashish. Congrats on the great results. I just want to ask on GDS bookings are obviously very strong, up in North America and EMEA. I guess, in particular, there in North America, what drove that strength in bookings, and were there share gains from AMS and Travelport, and Europe as well? Thomas Klein - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, Bryan, let me take a stab at that. Look, we said coming into the year that we thought we would see capacity growth in the U.S. market, in particular, outstrip what we've seen in the trailing really three years or four years. Some of that came to fruition. So I think we've seen good capacity growth in the U.S. Bookings seem to have recovered. There are certainly some segments in the market that are dampened. There is a lot of talk about the energy sector, in general, being down. The financial sector is still a little bit soft. But, in general, corporate bookings are moving back in the right direction. And we think the leisure bookings have really picked up with increased capacity. So the U.S. market is performing a little better than we expected, but we did expect to see that lift. We've been talking about it for a couple of quarters now, and we're really happy to see it show up. We hinted at it in the first quarter. Really, once we got past January, we started to see a good trajectory with sequential growth month over month in the early part of the year and things have kind of stabilized at a good year-over-year number in the North American market. In Europe, as we've said, we've just seen – we've been taking share for a couple of years now.…

Bryan C. Keane - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst · Deutsche Bank. Your line is open

It looks like great momentum. The LATAM contract, can we know when that starts to ramp-up? Thomas Klein - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: They haven't announced when they are going to do that cut-over, but I suspect that we will be in 2017. And as you probably are aware, this is – there's five separate airlines in the LATAM group. The primary win here is moving the biggest airline, TAM in Brazil, over to the SabreSonic platform, which the other airlines are currently on. So, TAM by itself is bigger than the Latin American carriers that LATAM has. So, we expect it sometime in 2017, but until they are ready to communicate a time line and a date, and that's probably all I'll say about it.

Bryan C. Keane - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst · Deutsche Bank. Your line is open

Okay, just last question for me. There was some obvious noise in the marketplace about Lufthansa surcharging for some flights booked through GDS. Just like to get your thoughts on potential implications for the market. Thanks so much. Thomas Klein - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. Bryan, thanks. It's okay. I said not too long ago at an investor forum that I thought that this would turn out to be a great proof point for the stability of the global distribution business and for Sabre's business. I think it's a – I'd start out by saying it feels like a bad strategy for everyone, and I think it's a bad strategy for Lufthansa. They book nearly two-thirds of their tickets through the GDS today. The surcharge will be added if the cost of the ticket will make them uncompetitive versus their core competitors set, and this is an airline that, I believe, if they are not at the top of the list or in the top two or three airlines as far as the value that they extract from the global distribution system channel. They have a complex network. They have a United Nations of passengers on their airplanes, they get point-of-sale from all over the world, and those are all things that are facilitated by third parties, like travel agents, who use the GDS. So I think, for Lufthansa, it's a difficult strategy to make yourself uncompetitive. From a travel agency perspective and from a corporate travel buyer perspective, it creates additional IT costs and back office costs, reduces efficiencies for agencies and for corporations. And if you're a buyer of travel, the notion of a supplier telling you how you have to buy and increasing your cost to purchase isn't consistent with the trend in corporates…

Bryan C. Keane - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst · Deutsche Bank. Your line is open

Okay, great. I'll pass the line. Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of John King of Bank of America. Your line is open.

John P. King - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst · John King of Bank of America. Your line is open

Okay. Good morning, guys. Thanks for taking the questions and congrats on the results. Just first of all, on the market share side in the GDS business, obviously, a good pickup in Europe. And it looks like U.S. as well was pretty strong in Q2. How sustainable is that for the second half? Maybe you can just help us what you are assuming there in terms of market share gains versus industry growth for the GDS in the second half of the year. Second one was on the backlog of deployments that you have in the solutions business, if you can just talk about the update there of those things tracking to plan in terms of the timeline and as we think about the 2016 forecast, how those deployments are looking. And then the third one was just if I could ask on the 2017 free cash flow guidance, is there any reason – were there any temptation at all for you to revisit that in light of the Abacus deal? I think you struck that before Abacus, so perhaps any comments around the 2017 free cash flow guidance and how you are feeling about that. Thank you. Thomas Klein - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thanks, John. So let me start with sustainability of share gains. We have a long-term trend of being able to move market share to Sabre around the world, whether it'd be by partnering with kind of the strongest of the strong, so talked about premium shares with companies like Expedia, American Express, Carlson Wagonlit, BCD, all companies that have the majority of their business on Sabre. So kind of growing with the biggest players has been a good stimulator of share. We also have 80 of the top 100 corporate travel purchasers from…

John P. King - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst · John King of Bank of America. Your line is open

Got it. Thank you, guys. Thomas Klein - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Gregg Moskowitz of Cowen & Co. Your line is open. Gregg S. Moskowitz - Cowen & Co. LLC: Okay. Thank you very much and good morning, guys. Congratulations as well on a really strong quarter. Just a follow-up on Abacus with it obviously being now officially under Sabre with 100% ownership, just wondering if you can give us some additional insight into how you plan to ramp-up direct sales and account management going forward? Thomas Klein - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Well, sure. I mean, first of all, it's early days, right? So we're closed on July 1. As I mentioned, we have senior group folks on the ground there. And I think that the opportunity is really in a couple areas. One is, you had a joint venture that was very productive, has the leading share in Asia with 36% share, and has had good growth rates. But it had 12 partners and when you have a venture with 12 partners, decision-making isn't as quick as you might want it to be. We think we can improve the overall clock speed of how we make decisions, how we get things done for customers, and also remove the layers that are inherent in a joint venture structure between our product teams and our go-to-market, so that we're actually talking to customers on a direct basis, getting them the stuff that they need, delivering the innovation that they need in the market in a faster way. And then the last part of it is, we do feel strongly that we have the best sales capability in our industry. And when we run the direct sales organizations, we are very effective. We've been able to move share in our…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of David Togut of Evercore ISI. Your line is open.

Unknown Speaker

Analyst · David Togut of Evercore ISI. Your line is open

Good morning. It's Rayna Kumar (37:29) for David Togut. Could you please comment on the GDS booking fee in the quarter and what should we expect in terms of pricing over the next 12 months? Thank you. Richard A. Simonson - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yes. In terms of – this is Rick – in terms of our numbers in the quarter, again, we had great strong bookings growth. We grew faster than the market in every region. We grew overall share, our revenues up strongly, and then the flow-through was good. It was a little bit muted, but that is primarily a little bit of FX headwind and the comp that we had from last year that I called out, the $7 million. So, that's why – it's really not anything different that we're seeing in pricing dynamics, that's been pretty much similar.

Unknown Speaker

Analyst · David Togut of Evercore ISI. Your line is open

That's very helpful. Could you just update us on your capital allocation priorities? Are there any more opportunities to refi debt and what types of acquisitions are of most interest to you? Richard A. Simonson - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Sure. Our capital allocation remains the same, is operating our debt range and pay down debt first if we're in the higher range of that. Again, remember, we are operating around 3 times leverage is where we targeted. We said we can operate much higher than that. We've shown that, but we felt that this 3 times to 3.5 times is a range that handles both operational and M&A, and so let's look at that Abacus, we acquired that. And on a pro forma basis, as we're sitting here now, it puts us back up to about 3.3 times leverage. And we're drawing a very modest amount on our revolver with that. We said that we expect to pay that off largely by the end of the year, we'd be back down at the 3 times, 3.1 times, so that would be the first use. We have a dividend and we continue to pay that. And then the excess free cash flow above that is going to be used selectively for acquisition, primarily around in the hospitality space where we've done both acquisitions that are scope and scale feature. They tend to be in the tens of millions to hundred millions of dollars range. That's our primary focus now that we've done the large integration and acquisition of Abacus in Travel Network And then your question in terms of the refi opportunities that we've got 2016 bonds that are rather higher costs. We said before that previously we have paid down what we could to do that efficiently. We've got kind of a make-whole there. And what we'll be looking to do within that mix is then pay those down or refi those to work within the target debt ranges. And, of course, that will help us gain some efficiency in our overall debt cost, which we brought down significantly. So that's the next area where we'd look to focus and hit the markets at appropriate time.

Unknown Speaker

Analyst · David Togut of Evercore ISI. Your line is open

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Jim Schneider of Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. James Schneider - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Tom, I was wondering if you could maybe give us an update on the Airline Solutions pipeline. And in terms of new deals, you obviously have announced quite a few new deals in the first part of the year. And I am just kind of wondering how does that pipeline look over the next six months into the back half and any sense about whether you are getting close to any additional large deals you can talk about? Thomas Klein - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Sure, Jim. I think a couple of things. We've said, first of all, that there is a big opportunity that continues to be out there for the SabreSonic Suite, which are essentially the airline reservations and departure control area, where a number of airlines continue to have this as an in-source service, and then there is a number that are with competitors that frankly haven't been winning in the marketplace and maybe have underinvested in the solutions sets. So we see a pipeline out there of somewhere in the neighborhood of 650-million-or-so passengers boarded that don't sit on either the Sabre or Amadeus' current platform that we think will be out for bid and some cases already out for bid. And we are working that all the time, Jim. And I'd be hesitant to give you too much insight into where our salespeople are spending their time right now. That said, we have a broad portfolio of services. And I talked about 29 new products in the market, many of those are in the Airline Solutions business, a number…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jason Kupferberg of Jefferies. Your line is open.

Ryan A. Cary - Jefferies LLC

Analyst · Jason Kupferberg of Jefferies. Your line is open

Hi, guys, this is Ryan Cary calling in for Jason. Thanks for taking my question. First, we recently see some announcement regarding carriers expecting to increase the supply of seats going forward. Do you believe that this could be a trend that could continue and do you think it could prove to be a further tailwind to the GDS business? And maybe what kind of capacity growth do you have built in expectations over the next few years fitting into that longer term 4% to 6% Travel Network growth target? Thomas Klein - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. That's a great question, Ryan, and I'm not sure I'm going to satisfy you much here, because first, as said, we've seen better capacity growth in the U.S. than we've seen in the trailing three years or four years. There's no doubt that that's materialized. That said, the airlines most recently have been a little bit inconsistent about how they are messaging their capacity growth. So, what we do is really – most of your firms have airline analysts that model this stuff, we take the Boeing and the Airbus forecast and we kind of look across all of those different capacity numbers and take a best guess, but we don't do a bottoms-up capacity growth for the whole industry. We do have some insights into the customer set that we have using SabreSonic, for example, where we have a little more insight into their specific plans and how they build out capacity. But we're looking at probably the same numbers that you have access to across the industry, and that's generally what we use. But I would say that again, the airlines have been a little inconsistent on their various earnings calls about how they are communicating what's going to happen with capacity. Richard A. Simonson - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: But the basic shape of that allows us to play into and be able to execute to meet our expectations that we've share with you for growth. We don't need a big jump in airline capacity to execute into what we've talked about over the rest of 2015 here. So, it seems that that capacity is fine to neutral for us. Thomas Klein - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. Yeah, I'd say the one validation is, look, over the forward three years or so will be better than the trailing three years. So, look, we do have a tailwind there. I'm just not going to speculate on how is it going to grow a half a point or a point faster than what people are saying

Ryan A. Cary - Jefferies LLC

Analyst · Jason Kupferberg of Jefferies. Your line is open

Great. Thank you. And then just quickly on the Airline Solutions side of the business. It looks like on a year-over-year growth basis, there was a modest deceleration in passengers boarded in the second quarter, at least versus the first quarter. Is this primarily just related to the loss of the small client you called out in the first quarter? Richard A. Simonson - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yep. Thomas Klein - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, that's really I was going on there.

Ryan A. Cary - Jefferies LLC

Analyst · Jason Kupferberg of Jefferies. Your line is open

Okay, great. Thanks so much, guys. Thomas Klein - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Brian Essex of Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Brian L. Essex - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Hi, good morning, and thank you for taking the question. I was wondering to follow on Greg's comment or a question on the solutions, Airline and Hospitality Solutions margin. It looks like actually the incremental margins are quite high in terms of being over 60% incremental EBITDA margins over the past four quarters or so. And if we look at this on a go-forward basis, can you provide any color in terms of the contribution margins from solutions, airline, whether it's SabreSonic or Airline Solutions or Hospitality Solutions? And how we might think about your pipeline and go-live date as it relates to those contribution margins, how they might move those going forward? Richard A. Simonson - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yeah, Brian. Thanks. It's Rick. Can kind of re-walk what we talked about here is, again, as I talked about moving from segment level Airline and Hospitality EBITDA margin of 30% in 2013 to 36%, in the mid-30%s to the high 30%s into the 2017 period continues to be the case. And for kind of the reasons you pointed out, we don't view that as a cap if we continue as we expect to grow beyond that and realize benefits of scale, so that then the incremental contribution brings up your overall margin. And then in terms of between the two different segments, as we've communicated before, given our mix of revenue between Airline and Hospitality with Hospitality being in the low-hundreds-of-millions the last couple of years and Airline being in the $500 million, $600 million, the – and Hospitality Solutions segment revenue if it were reported…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our last question comes from the line of Abhey Lamba of Mizuho Securities. Your line is open.

Abhey R. Lamba - Mizuho Securities USA, Inc.

Analyst · Mizuho Securities. Your line is open

Yeah, thanks. Tom, thanks for your comments on the inconsistency in how airlines are communicating about capacity in the space. Thomas Klein - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Do you have any better insights for us?

Abhey R. Lamba - Mizuho Securities USA, Inc.

Analyst · Mizuho Securities. Your line is open

No, just – that was very helpful. But can you talk about the assumptions that are baked into your outlook for industry capacity over the next few quarters? And how should we think about the impact of slowdown in energy-related markets or the pockets that you also mentioned in your comments a little while ago? Richard A. Simonson - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yeah, Abhey, this is Rick. I think that the main takeaways again are, capacity growth is greater this year than it had been in the previous two or three years. And all else equal, that's a good thing for the GDS market; it's a good thing for Sabre. And we see then the capacity growth going forward over the next couple of years to be greater than it was the previous few years as well, so we can play into that well. It's very supportive. I think Tom's comment and mine was a little bit around earlier in the year the airlines were communicating greater capacity increase in the second half of the year than what they have recently. We never got over-carried away with that in the beginning of the year and never counted on it for what we need to execute in. So we've got plenty of room, we believe, in what the expectations are now in the shorter term.

Abhey R. Lamba - Mizuho Securities USA, Inc.

Analyst · Mizuho Securities. Your line is open

Thanks. And in Asia Pacific, how long will it take for you to start reporting share gains and how should we think about the situation in China on overall demand for travel in the region? Thomas Klein - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. Look, we'll talk about Asia Pac as we get further along here, but I think the – again, our view is that there are some places where we're just going to make the business better and we're going to do that quickly and share gains will come with that over time. As far as China goes, China is a regulated market. It's effectively a state-owned monopoly for both airline reservations as well as for travel agency distribution. There's some activity in China. We have a relatively large team on the ground in China. We had existing resources there. The Abacus acquisition probably doubled the size of our workforce in China. So we continue to work at a variety of opportunities. We do have, as an example, in our Hospitality Solutions business, and for most of the big brands, China is a top three place for new property growth, particularly in that select services segment. Wyndham will have 1,000 properties in China using our central reservation system. That will be a pretty big increase over what we have today, but we do have hundreds of properties across China. We signed a deal with a Chinese hotelier, the first one that became part of our customer portfolio, HL Hotels (55:28) in China last year, announced a few quarters ago. So we look – we feel good about our ability to get business where we're able to compete, but speculating on when the market will open is probably not a worthwhile folly. Richard A. Simonson - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: And with – this is Rick – Abacus overall, of course, we're in this for the infinite long-haul, but the great thing is we've been able to communicate is that in 2016 we have very strong contributions to both revenue, to EBITDA and to cash flow, and that helps our overall growth rates. And even though we still haven't gotten the full benefit of all the integration cost, synergies that we are going to have there, as I've articulated before, that's going through in 2016. So even with those things, we're going to have very positive additive profile from Abacus, and along that way, there will be the quick wins in certain markets that Tom has alluded to, but we're really building to make sure we build off the strong growth that Abacus was having earlier this year and look forward for the long haul and see the full benefits coming in financially in 2016 and 2017 as we've outlined before.

Abhey R. Lamba - Mizuho Securities USA, Inc.

Analyst · Mizuho Securities. Your line is open

Great. Thank you. Thomas Klein - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. At this time, we have no further questions in queue. I would like to turn the call back over to Tom Klein for closing remarks. Thomas Klein - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Well, thanks again for joining us for the call this morning. We're pleased with the strong second quarter results. We expect a very solid full-year results and increased momentum as we look to years ahead. So, again, as always, we appreciate your interest in Sabre and we look forward to speaking with you again soon either face-to-face or on our next call.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation in today's conference. This concludes the program. You may all disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.