Earnings Labs

Spire Inc. (SR)

Q2 2008 Earnings Call· Fri, Oct 24, 2008

$89.88

-1.09%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, everyone, and welcome to Standard Register’s third quarter conference call. Today’s conference call is being recorded. As a reminder, the presentation slides for today’s conference are available by accessing the Investor Center section of the Standard Register website at www.standardregister.com/investorcenter. I will know turn the conference over to Bob Cestelli, Vice President of Investor Relations.

Bob Cestelli

President

Good morning and welcome to our third quarter earnings conference call. Joining me this morning are Joe Morgan, Acting Chief Executive Officer and Craig Brown, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin please let me remind you that this conference call contains forward-looking statements including language concerning future projections. These projections should be considered in conjunction with the Safe Harbor Statement contained in our earnings news release as well as the Safe Harbor Statement that can be found by accessing the Home Page of the Investor Center on the company’s website. Joe has a few opening comments regarding the quarter, followed by a review of some key issues for the company. This will then be followed by Craig’s review of our financials, then we will address any questions. Now let me turn the call over to Joe.

Joe Morgan

Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Bob. I’ll be commenting on a few things during my time on the call. First, the third quarter results, second, a few highlights, third major focus areas for the coming periods, then an outlook. First let’s talk about the third quarter. Revenue was down primarily due to the sluggish economy, however, our gross margin as a percentage of revenue was solid and the SG&A was lower than prior period, both of which are an indication of the cost controlling efforts that we put in place. Our operating profit was down slightly due to the controls as I mentioned we put in place and are putting us in a position for the earnings that we.... The balance sheet continues to be strong. Our net cash flow is positive on a year-to-date basis. Craig will share more of that in the financials. We are focused on a few things which gives me some encouragement going forward. We’re very focused on being proactive with our customers, focusing on retention, and a I mentioned, in the gross margin and SG&A results, we’re very focused on aggressive cost management. As we look in the marketplace, our healthcare market which is our largest market is slightly down, which is positive given the environment we’re in. Our manufacturing market is up in the high single digits which is encouraging as we’re seeing some of the business that we’ve reported in the past now come through. Our financial market was down as is true for many companies in this time. We have been monitoring the M&A activity. At this point it’s had minimal impact on our company and there are as many positives as negatives at this point in terms of impacted on our business, so at the moment we’re very encouraged but we will be…

Craig Brown

Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Joe. Good morning, everybody. I have a few comments on the P&L. We’ll walk through the quarter then I’ll give the year-to-date and we’ll talk about cash flow and debt and take any questions you may have. Revenue in the quarter was $189 million, down $19 million from last year’s $208 million, down about 9.3%. The results of our attribution analysis appearing this quarter to last year indicates that about two-third of that decrease or about $13 million relates to economic climate we’re in today. The balance of the change reflects the natural decline in some of our more traditional product lines offset by increases in new business that we’ve achieved. If we look at the segments, document management was $101.8 million in the quarter, that’s off nearly $15 million from last year, down 12.8%. That was the sharpest decline among our segments and reflected both the economy and the technology impact. Labels, $25.5 million was relatively flat with last year’s, result almost the same, just down a tick. Document systems was up 3.7%, $5 million. Our print on demand services business, $55.8 million in the quarter, was off 6.6%. [Path forward] was $1 million down from last year’s $1.4 million. At the gross margin level, we had $66.3 million which was 35.1% of revenue and that was down $4 million from last year’s $70.6 million, however, the percentage gross margin improved from last year’s 33.9% to 35.1%, so that’s a 1.2 percentage point improvement, so on a $19 million decrease our gross margin was down just $4 million, and that reflects the cost savings initiative that we began last year in July and continued last year and into this year, so costs have helped keep our earnings up in the face of declining revenue. If we look at…

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Charlie Strauzer with CJS Securities.

Charles Strauzer

Analyst · CJS Securities

Craig, just pick me up on the pension again. I see that the market’s kind of in a lot of turmoil. If the markets continue to weaken, talk about the exposure in the pension to equities. I think you moved them a while back but just remind us again of the status of the current pension investments.

Craig Brown

Chief Financial Officer

Obviously the market has reduced the value of the pension assets and so we looked at our pension assets sort of mid-October most recently and we have tried to project our assets and liabilities forward going to the end of the year. The outlook at this point is that if the market were to say pretty much where it was in mid-October and estimating continuing panic payments, we’ve made all our contributions for this year. We would estimate that our unfunded position would not be substantially different than it was at the beginning of the year and that’s because primarily a couple things. One is that our liabilities have come down significantly from the beginning of the year as we froze the plan and that changed significantly the liability and we’ve also made a lot of pension payments this year and funded the plan as well, and so as we look at our contributions, which is what is the most critical thing for us, we’ve been funding the plan at about $20 million per year. We’ve completed our funding as I said for ’08. As we look at today’s valuation we expect that our funding in ’09 might be a bit higher but not substantially different than it has been. We have not determined yet what our ’09 funding will be and we probably won’t make that decision until the end of the year when we see how the market shakes out. We also have some decisions to make, actuarial assumptions, around the yield curve and other things that relate to how much that funding will be, but under the Pension Protection Act we fully expect to have our required contribution and we expect that funding will be not dramatically different than where we have been.

Charles Strauzer

Analyst · CJS Securities

So we just kind of continue the same course of action you’ve been taking for the last couple years now.

Craig Brown

Chief Financial Officer

Yes, that obviously is subject to what happens the rest of the year and it’s hard to predict what that’s going to be but taken the most recent data and projecting things forward, we do not see the cause of the smoothing effect of basically seven years to catch up any deficit. We do not see a significant huge burden on the company in that regard.

Charles Strauzer

Analyst · CJS Securities

Just on the cost front, obviously the economy has gotten noticeably tougher in the last few weeks of this month. What other additional steps can you take kind of going forward to right size costs to match revenues if revenues continue to decline at the same levels?

Joe Morgan

Chief Executive Officer

The thing that we need to do is we need to really at this point focus on the strategy work that we’ve been doing and make sure that the cost and the sizing is in synch with that activity, so we’ve done a lot of work with regard to policies and we’re now evaluating everything as you can imagine and we need to do that very purposefully, so over the course of the next few months, few weeks, we’ll be pretty much turning over every rock and making sure that we know where we can make adjustments without losing the ability to have the client relationship and as I said take advantage of the opportunities around increasing coverage in key areas.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from David [Woodiak] with [Healy] Asset Management. David [Woodiak]: The restructuring charges, was that all a bookkeeping entry or was there some cash involved there, and related to that, could you summarize for us over the next year or so what cash needs you see outside of operating expenses, in other words, capital expenditures, pensions, things like that?

Craig Brown

Chief Financial Officer

We couldn’t hear you very well so we’ve got our volume turned up as much as it will go, so if you could get closer to the mic and please repeat the question. David [Woodiak]: Restructuring charges, how much of that was cash, how much was just the bookkeeping entry, and also, going forward over the next year, what meaningful uses of cash do you have outside of operating expenses?

Craig Brown

Chief Financial Officer

I actually don’t have a precise answer. I can tell you generally and we’ll get back to you on the specifics of the accrual versus the cash, but the cash outlay for restructuring during the... Let me see if I can put it together for you. I think the cash outlay for the quarter will be less than the accrual, and we do expect a little bit more restructuring to come from the restructuring that we just announced and put in the P&L, so we’ll see a little bit more on the order of $1 million or $2 million, fairly modest in that regard. Was that your question about restructuring? David [Woodiak]: How much of what was taken in the third quarter, how much was cash, and how much was just bookkeeping entry? Just roughly.

Craig Brown

Chief Financial Officer

I’ll give you a rough idea here. Restructuring spending in the third quarter was $0.5 million. David [Woodiak]: Cash?

Craig Brown

Chief Financial Officer

In cash. The accrual was, I think I recall, 2.7, so there will be some more so obviously the balance of that will come out as cash going forward here. A good portion of that accrual is rent on facilities that are going to be vacated so that rent goes out through 2009 and through 2010 so at this point we would continue to pay the cash to the Landlord for that rent as we go forward unless we can negotiate a better deal with them and so there is not a significant amount of cash coming out of there real quickly. David [Woodiak]: For the coming year or so, roughly how much will there be in non-operating expense cash outlays like capital expenditures and contributions to pension and so on?

Craig Brown

Chief Financial Officer

We have not given guidance in our CapEx to this point and so in the absence of that, I think you could conclude that our attitude about capital has been to be very frugal in this time to make sure that the CapEx spending that we’re undertaking is in relation to items which are going to have a good strong payback for us and so if you look at the record of our capital spending you’ll see that it has been a little bit lower this year than it has in the past and I think that we will continue to take that perspective going forward. We do have some capital spending plans but we don’t expect a significant change from the recent rate that you’ve seen. David [Woodiak]: I guess just to finish up, is it fair to say that at this point in time you don’t see any needs for cash out of the ordinary over the next year or so?

Craig Brown

Chief Financial Officer

Based on everything that we have announced to date, that is correct.

Operator

Operator

I’m going to turn the call back over to Bob Cestelli for closing remarks.

Bob Cestelli

President

That concludes our call for today. We’d like to thank you for your participation and we look forward to reviewing our fourth quarter and full year 2008 results in February.

Operator

Operator

This concludes your conference call for today. You may now disconnect.