Earnings Labs

ScanSource, Inc. (SCSC)

Q4 2013 Earnings Call· Thu, Aug 22, 2013

$40.61

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Welcome to the ScanSource Quarterly and Year End Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed in listen-only mode until the question-and-answer session. Today’s call is being recorded. If anyone has any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I would now like to turn the call over to Mary Gentry, Treasurer and Director of Investor Relations. Ma’am, you may begin.

Mary M. Gentry

Management

Thank you and welcome to ScanSource’s earnings conference call for the quarter and year ended June 30, 2013. With me today are Charlie Mathis, our CFO; and Mike Baur, our CEO. We will review operating results for the quarter and then take your questions. A slide presentation of the Company’s our comments and webcast is posted in the Investor Relations section of our website. Certain statements made on this call will be forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from such statements. These risks and uncertainties include but are not limited to, those factors identified in the release and in ScanSource’s SEC filings. Any forward-looking statements represents our views only as of today and should not be relied upon as representing our views as of any subsequent date. ScanSource undertakes no duty to update any forward-looking statements to actual results or changes in expectations. We will be discussing both GAAP and non-GAAP results during our call and have provided reconciliation between these amounts in our press release, which can be found at our website and has also been filed with our Form 10-K – with our Form 8-K. Mike Baur will now begin our discussion with an overview of the quarterly results.

Mike Baur

Management

Thanks, Mary and thank you for joining us today. For the fourth quarter 2013, we reported net sales of $713 million, which was below our expected range. We had a diluted EPS loss of $0.48 including impairment charges for our ERP project and for goodwill in Brazil and Europe Communications, which we will discuss later in this call. Excluding these non-cash impairment charges, our adjusted diluted EPS totaled $0.71 per share, higher than our expected range. Charlie will go into more detail on the numbers in a minute. The overall story for our weaker revenue versus our expectation was a lack of big deals in our Barcode & POS business and weaker than planned sales from our Catalyst business. We had lower big deals due to delays in purchasing decisions from end-users and larger projects being broken into smaller ones. In Catalyst, we had good sequential growth from the March quarter. However, our expectations for stronger growth from our Avaya Enterprise business fell short. While our overall sales missed our plan, we had record sales quarters for ScanSource Communications in North America, our Security business unit and our Barcode & POS business in Mexico, and it was our second best sales quarter in Brazil as measured in local currency since our April 2011 acquisition of CDC Brasil. As we discussed last quarter, our vendor incentive programs are very dependent on revenue growth. With the weaker demand for our products, we have experienced vendor program targets that are difficult to reach. We anticipate these targets continuing to stay above our ability to maximize our incentives, because we have always managed our business to ROIC targets and knowing that our gross margins are under pressure from the lack of consistent vendor programs, we’ve begun pulling the other levers available to us that…

Charles Mathis

Management

Thanks, Mike and good afternoon everyone. As you’ve heard Mike talk about the changes in the organization structure, let me add that I will be discussing the financials related to these organization changes through our two new reporting segments, Barcode & Security, and Communications & Services rather than the geographic segments previously used. The information can also be found in our press release in the accompanying slide presentation starting on Slide 8 as well as in the Annual 10-K, which we will file next week. Barcode & Security combines our most mature business unit, POS & Barcode with the fastest growing unit security. Also you can see from the slides that Communications & Services has consistently delivered higher operating margins and understand why we can continue our investment in Europe, changed our organization structure in order to expand Communications business in other geographies, so as it can perform very well if executed effectively. Also I will be covering a lot of the financial information for the quarter and full year related to these new segments and again this information can be found starting on Slide 8 through 11 in the presentation. We generated worldwide sales of $713 million in the fourth quarter 2013, a decrease of 6% from the prior year and an increase of 4% over the March quarter. For the full year, worldwide sales declined 4.6% to $2.9 billion in fiscal year 2013 from $3 billion in fiscal year 2012. In the fourth quarter 2013, sales for our Barcode & Security segment were $445 million or 2% decrease from the prior year quarter. Year-over-year Worldwide Barcode & Security sales were basically flat and increased 1.4% excluding the impact of foreign exchange. Turning to our new Communications & Services segment, sales decreased 11% from the prior year quarter to…

Mike Baur

Management

Thanks Charlie. I’ll start with our Worldwide Barcode & Security segment summarized on Slide 13 which represents 62% of overall sales for the quarter. Worldwide Barcode & Security sales of $445 million increased 2% sequentially and decreased 2% year-over-year. Net sales for our POS & Barcode business units in North America and Europe declined year-over-year principally from lower big deals but the number and the average size of big deals decreased as end users rolled out projects more slowly and vendors took some larger deals direct. In addition, we saw softness in the mobility market as end users delayed purchasing decisions given heightened uncertainty, surrounding macroeconomic conditions, new operating systems and the availability of new devices. Our POS & Barcode units also faced more aggressive competitive landscape, including pricing and credit terms. Despite this in North America, the number of active consumers increased and we had good year-over-year growth with our small and mid-size vendors. Recently added two new vendors [Code] and J2, Brazil outperformed the market this quarter with double-digit year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter sales growth in local currency despite an uncertain economic climate. This quarter was the second highest since the acquisition of CDC in 2011. Brazil continues to be profitable with good gross margins even with lower growth rates than previously forecasted. Our management team has done a very good job of managing operating expenses to our current run rate of business. We remain positive on our business there and expect to continue to get strong support of our value-added model from the market. Our results in Latin America vary country-by-country during the quarter. In Mexico, we had a record sales quarter, we benefited from a stronger economy and good vendor support, struggles related to the economic and political climate in Venezuela continue, including the scarcity of U.S.…

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Dominic Ruccella with Northcoast Research. Your line is open. Dominic Ruccella – Northcoast Research Partners LLC: Hi, guys. I’m sitting on the call for Keith Housum. Thank you for your time. Just to start this off here I heard you mentioned Mr. Baur that inventory levels have been low. We’re just wondering what you guys see in that area going forward and what any type of impact you can expect on the business?

Mike Baur

Management

Yeah. Hi, Dominic, it was our plan to have inventory levels to match the programs and the margins that we’re seeing from certain vendors and so we felt like we could reduce our inventory levels, but not affect our fill-rates to our customers and we believe we came through June quarter successfully doing that. We started this effort back in the March quarter and we do these inventory planning programs cooperatively with our vendors, so that we don’t surprise their team, we don’t want to upset their supply chain. So we believe that it was a good business decision for us. And frankly our vendors at this stage understand this. So our goal would be to keep inventory levels at similar levels as they are now, but we are prepared to increase them based on sales opportunities. Dominic Ruccella – Northcoast Research Partners LLC: Perfect. Thank you very much. And then the next question in terms of the macro overall environment and how it affects your business, you guys see that improving at all going forward? Is there anything in particular you guys have noticed that would point to any signs where we can expect that to be over the next quarter?

Mike Baur

Management

Well, I think relative to that, our stance right now is our run rate business, which is our small to medium type customers and transactions, not the big deals. So the regular run rate business continues to be steady and strong, it’s the lack of large opportunities that’s really causing us some concern and that really haven’t materialized this year like we thought. So when we talk to our key vendors either those customers that I indicated earlier are not buying right now. They’re on the fence, so they’re holding or they’re taking those large deals and they’re splitting them up into smaller transactions. In some cases, because ScanSource is the leader in most of our markets, we have the largest amount of big deals, compared to our other distributor competitors. So the reduction in large big deals probably has hurt us more. But we believe in the normal run rate business, we’re still maintaining strong market share. Dominic Ruccella – Northcoast Research Partners LLC: Okay, great. Thank you very much. And then just a last question while we are here, we noticed the cash [flows] [ph] have been growing pretty consistently. Do you guys have any specific plans for that cash or is that just been through the normal course of business?

Charles Mathis

Management

Yeah, this is Charlie here. I’ll take that. Dominic Ruccella – Northcoast Research Partners LLC: Sure.

Charles Mathis

Management

The cash balances have grown through the year and we continue to look for ways to deploy the cash to profitability grow the business. The Company has historically made acquisitions over the last 20 years and so we’ll continue to look for those opportunities and use of the cash to profitably grow the business. Dominic Ruccella – Northcoast Research Partners LLC: Okay, all right. With that will take care of it for me. Thank you very much.

Mike Baur

Management

Thanks, Dominic. Take care.

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) And at this time, I’m showing no further questions.

Mike Baur

Management

Okay, thanks Kim. Thank you for joining us today. Our next conference call to discuss our September 30 quarterly earnings is expected to be on October 24, 2013.