Earnings Labs

STERIS plc (STE)

Q4 2015 Earnings Call· Thu, May 7, 2015

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Welcome to the STERIS Fiscal 2015 Fourth Quarter Conference Call. All lines will remain in listen-only until the question-and-answer session. At that time, instructions will be given should you wish to participate. At the request of STERIS, today's call will be recorded for instant replay. I'd like to now introduce today's host, Julie Winter, Director, Investor Relations. Ma'am, you may begin. Julie Winter - Director-Investor Relations & Head-Media Relations: Thank you, Yomi, and good morning, everyone. It's my pleasure to welcome you to STERIS' Fiscal 2015 Fourth Quarter and Full Year Conference Call. Thank you for taking the time to join us this morning. As usual, participating in the call are Walt Rosebrough, our President and CEO, and Mike Tokich, our Senior Vice President and CFO. Now, just a few words of caution before we begin. This webcast contains time-sensitive information that is accurate only as of today. Any redistribution, retransmission or rebroadcast of this call without the express written consent of STERIS is strictly prohibited. I would also like to remind you that this discussion may contain forward-looking statements relating to the company, its performance or its industry that are intended to qualify for protection under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. No assurance can be given as to any future financial results. Actual results could differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. The company does not undertake to update or revise these forward-looking statements, even if events make it clear that any projected results, expressed or implied, in this or other company statements will not be realized. Investors are further cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. These statements involve risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the company's control. Additional information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ…

Operator

Operator

Our first question comes from Larry Keusch with Raymond James. You may begin. Lawrence S. Keusch - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Thank you. Good morning everyone. Walter M. Rosebrough - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Good morning, Larry. Lawrence S. Keusch - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Morning. I'm wondering, Walt, if you could come back to some of the comments regarding backlog? And I know that you've been very consistent in your articulating the ability to reduce those lead times. So could you help us think about, as we move forward now, are you at a point where you believe that you've done what you can to get those lead times down and this sort of is a base for backlog or how should we be thinking about that broadly? Walter M. Rosebrough - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Larry, there are two factors that affect backlog. One is, indeed, lead times, and so that is real clear and we've talked about that, we've been talking about that for a while. And the second, is what type of orders the customers are putting in. And so I'm going to separate my conversation into those two. The first, to answer your direct question is in certain of our products, we are probably closing in on what you would expect, but we have other products where we think we can make additional improvements. So I would say, we are not yet at the point of the end of the line, if you will, on our ability to reduce lead times. So it's a mix, and we will, I think continue to see our total ability to ship more quickly improve over the coming years. And it's a function really of a couple of things. First is the way…

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Mr. Chris Cooley with Stephens. You may begin.

Chris Cooley - Stephens, Inc.

Analyst · Stephens. You may begin.

Thank you and I appreciate you taking the questions here this morning. Let me follow up on Larry's lead question and I had one other. Walt, could you maybe just give us a little bit more color about the end market that you're seeing here in the States? Certainly appreciate how the backlog is changing and lead times are changing, but can you just talk to us about just maybe sentiment from your end market customers a little bit here in the U.S. is maybe that will help us better frame up kind of the capital, consumable breakout for fiscal 2016 for my modeling purposes. Then I have just one quick follow up. Walter M. Rosebrough - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Sure. And your points were well asked in terms of, I'll call it the consumable versus the capital side. So let me talk about consumable ongoing revenue type sources and then maybe on the capital side. First of all, the early part of this calendar year, the weather just created all kinds of havoc in the system, so January in a lot of places was pretty tough for hospitals and surgery centers and people that do our kind of work, and endoscopy centers. And so we clearly saw – and we see that – they saw in terms of cancellation of procedures and movement and then a lot of the hospitals got filled up with flu patients and so although they had a lot of patients in beds, they may have not had been doing as many procedures as they would have otherwise. So we kind of saw some of that early on in the year, weather dominated the eastern half of the country. And then the supply chain gets filled up because they're expecting more and…

Chris Cooley - Stephens, Inc.

Analyst · Stephens. You may begin.

That's a great answer. Really do appreciate that. And just my quick follow-up either for yourself or for Mike, or both. When you think about the guidance and certainly understand kind of the transition that we're in right now with the Synergy merger pending. But when we look at just the core STERIS topline guidance for fiscal 2016, not to be glass is half empty, but help us think a little bit of why that number isn't higher as you alluded to in your prepared remarks, you have a strong new product cadence on the capital side. Does seem to appear that some of these in-market trends are at least neutral to favorable. Help us maybe understand a little bit more about why that topline aspect of the P&L guide isn't just a little bit more robust? And I'll get back in queue. Thanks so much. Walter M. Rosebrough - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Sure, Chris. I think we've said for a pretty long time that we expect the market in general to be growing in the low-to-mid single-digits, 4%, 5%. And we would expect organically to grow a little faster than that 5%, 6%, 6%, 7%, pick a number. And so I think our forecast is reflective of that. This is essentially organic growth. And so I think our forecast is reflective of that. Also the headwind of the international revenue next year is going to be in the $25 million range, so that clearly is not helping out. And so if you add that back in, you get another point or so. And the next thing you know it looks like fairly robust growth. And so I think it is good solid growth estimate. If currency takes a different twist, it would change that revenue profile. But I think that's pretty much it.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Matt Mishan with KeyBanc. Your line is now open.

Matt Mishan - KeyBanc Capital Markets, Inc.

Analyst · KeyBanc. Your line is now open.

Hey, Walt, Mike, Julie. Thank you, guys, for taking my questions and good morning. Walter M. Rosebrough - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Morning, Matt. Michael J. Tokich - Chief Financial Officer, Treasurer & Senior VP: Morning.

Matt Mishan - KeyBanc Capital Markets, Inc.

Analyst · KeyBanc. Your line is now open.

And just to follow up on Chris' question on the guidance. So currency looks as if it's about 100 basis points to 150 basis points. What about on the acquisition front, I'm just trying to get a sense of what you guys look at, is that 5% to 6% constant currency and organic, just trying to get a sense for what that is? I believe there's a little bit of IMS in there. Were there any other small bolt-on acquisitions in the quarter as well – or throughout the course of the year? Walter M. Rosebrough - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, I mean that 5% to 6% growth is including the effect of currency. So it would have been up another point or two, I don't know the exact number. But up another point or two if it were in a constant currency range. And then that's one of the things that people forget. That's just the way accountants look at it mathematically. But when your cost go up 20%, that constant currency stuff is on the business you actually get. When your costs go up 20% versus a currency, you lose business too. So it's actually a stronger headwind than when you do the accounting – than the accounting shows, because there's business you just don't get. And some of that is because you lose to local companies and some of that is because the customers wait until they can afford to spend the money, so put that piece out there. In terms of acquisitions, there's a few weeks, four to five weeks, I think of IMS. So that's a small amount, probably half-a-point or something like that. And there's a dribble, maybe, of tiny, tiny deals. But they're deals mainly in the IMS area and they're deals we consider them organic because they're small enough it's literally the same as if we went out and bought three trucks and hired 10 people. They are that size a deal. So whether we go out and hire 10 people and buy three trucks, or we do an asset buy of a very small company, to us looks like the same thing, so we consider that organic. And it would be trivial in your numbers.

Matt Mishan - KeyBanc Capital Markets, Inc.

Analyst · KeyBanc. Your line is now open.

Okay. Perfect. And then last quarter you talked about smoothing out your Healthcare capital equipment sales. How successful were you with that and what do you think the impact of some of that smoothing was on the quarter? Walter M. Rosebrough - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Well, last year we didn't do a very good job of that and that's why – we did a better job the previous year. But we have a ways to go there and it would be far better if our capital equipment sales were a function purely of customer demand, not a function of our plan years. And that's an objective that many, many companies are working on, as are we, and we're going to try to get better at it because it's better for our factories to run in a more even mode. Now what we have done, we can handle some of that with inventory. So we build inventory over the course of the third quarter and into the early fourth and we ship some. But still, we'd be better for it. We are going to be working on that again this year. That's why you see the profitability splits that you see are more front end weighted than last year and – than the year before, but they are not as front end weighted – they are not as even as I would like. If you're a growing business, you expect the first half to be smaller than the second half. Ours is a little too heavy on the second half, and it's largely that capital, year-end capital shipments.

Matt Mishan - KeyBanc Capital Markets, Inc.

Analyst · KeyBanc. Your line is now open.

Okay. And then just last one for me and then I'll jump back in queue. I think you mentioned that the costs for disposal of cobalt-60 were going to be increasing this year. Is that a regulatory cost that's going up or is that something that's coming from Nordion? And has there been any update on potentially being able to dual source cobalt? Walter M. Rosebrough - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: That's actually a function, not of our Nordion cobalt where we have long-term contracts, but from our other supplier. And as a result, since we at this point cannot be assured that we will be purchasing from them, we have to take care of the disposal, since as I mentioned in my discussion before, the disposal if you will was part of the purchase price in our thinking. As long as we bought the next load, they disposed of the last one. Since we are no longer can be assured that they will be here to do that, then we need to set up a reserve. Because we can get it disposed either by them or by Nordion or someone else. And so that's the cause for that reserve. How that ends up, I think we're being appropriately conservative in doing that. How that all ends up, if we're a little bit luckier we will be able to take care of that. But it's not at all the Nordion issue. It is the other supplier.

Matt Mishan - KeyBanc Capital Markets, Inc.

Analyst · KeyBanc. Your line is now open.

Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Dave Turkaly with JMP Securities. You may begin.

David L. Turkaly - JMP Securities LLC

Analyst · JMP Securities. You may begin.

Thanks. I think you mentioned that FX was positive to EPS in fiscal 2015 by $10 million. I was wondering do you have an estimate of what that will be to EPS in fiscal 2016. Walter M. Rosebrough - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Orders of magnitude, about the same. And again, I have to reiterate that's the way it looks when you do all the math, but the additional business we would have received around the world, we would have made money on it. It just doesn't show up in the calculations. So if you look at the straight math on the business that we will achieve, or we expect to achieve, it would be about $10 million.

David L. Turkaly - JMP Securities LLC

Analyst · JMP Securities. You may begin.

And I know that your standalone guidance might not be the most important thing here, but kind of at the midpoint it looks like 8% earnings growth. I know you guys historically look for double digit, given that you have that FX kind of tailwind. I guess what do you think could help you either get to that 10% for the year or what is new this year outside of no deals in the guidance that kind of would keep you a little more subdued? Walter M. Rosebrough - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. In the middle of our guidance, as you say, is right around the 8% range. And that would be our kind of normal long-term expectation, because we do expect a portion of that double digit growth to come from acquisitions, and so at a high level that's kind of what we've said, mid-single-digits in revenue growth, get a point or two out of profitability improvement on that expanding revenue and then you've got to get a point or two out of acquisitions – out of business development. So at a high level, it's pretty much all on our long-term expectations. As you might expect, we don't like to hit the bottom of our range and we don't like to hit the middle of our range. We like to hit the top of our range. We get paid a lot more if we hit the top of our range, so we like to get there. And if we are unable to do deals in this timeframe, we'll be pushing hard to get up to the top of the range, but I think the range is a reasonable estimate of what our future looks like. I think it is consistent with our long-term expectations.

David L. Turkaly - JMP Securities LLC

Analyst · JMP Securities. You may begin.

Great. Could you remind us too of the interest rate on the $1.25 billion, if that's set? Michael J. Tokich - Chief Financial Officer, Treasurer & Senior VP: Yes, Dave, we have entered into agreement with about 14 banks for the new credit facility and that variable rate is about 1.5% on the $1.25 billion.

David L. Turkaly - JMP Securities LLC

Analyst · JMP Securities. You may begin.

Great, and last one for me, and I may get shot down here. But you highlighted two scenarios in your M&A transaction, the filing. I was just curious if you could even say did you contemplate currency at all in terms of synergies? The estimates, the range you have there in terms of their future outlook? Walter M. Rosebrough - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: We contemplated currency as it was at that time.

David L. Turkaly - JMP Securities LLC

Analyst · JMP Securities. You may begin.

You couldn't tell us what those rates were could you? Would you be able to? Walter M. Rosebrough - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: I believe that's disclosed in the S-4.

David L. Turkaly - JMP Securities LLC

Analyst · JMP Securities. You may begin.

Okay. Walter M. Rosebrough - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: And I believe it's $1.61. Michael J. Tokich - Chief Financial Officer, Treasurer & Senior VP: $1.61 to be exact is the rates that we used in our analysis.

David L. Turkaly - JMP Securities LLC

Analyst · JMP Securities. You may begin.

Perfect. Thank you so much. Michael J. Tokich - Chief Financial Officer, Treasurer & Senior VP: You're welcome. Walter M. Rosebrough - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: You bet.

Operator

Operator

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

Erin E. Wilson - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst · Bank of America. Your line is now open.

Hi. Good morning. Hello, everybody. You mentioned earlier incremental invested capital associated with Isomedix. Can you elaborate on that? Is that just related to cobalt disposal or is there a facility expansion? And would that bump the CapEx spend? Would that change with the closing of the Synergy deal? Walter M. Rosebrough - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: I'm going to answer – I guess there's three questions in there. First question is that CapEx, there is routine CapEx for cobalt spending and that is not out of the ordinary in our plan. The bump-up is all associated with expansion of facilities. And so it is truly an expansion of facilities. Now when you expand facilities, if you're expanding gamma facilities, you know there's some cobalt buy, so you have to mix all that together. But in general, that is an expansion of facilities, not an expansion of cobalt. We have expanded our cobalt – our gamma facilities over the past year or two, so there is more routine buy because of those expansions. But the significant over-spending relative to the last year or two is expansion of facilities. Yes, I've now forgotten the second half of the question, Erin. I'm sorry.

Erin E. Wilson - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst · Bank of America. Your line is now open.

I guess would that bump to the CapEx change if you close the Synergy deal? Walter M. Rosebrough - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yes. Clearly, what we will spend in those facilities is completely independent of the Synergy deal. They are virtually non-existent in North America. So what we are spending in North America is independent of that. But we would expect CapEx to rise if we do the Synergy deal because they have the same issues that we do. They have routine spending in gamma and then they are expanding outside the United States on a routine basis. So it would be similar and I think it's easy to go back and look at their – we haven't forecast that per se, but if you go back and look at their CapEx and look at the S-4, I think you would find relevant information there. Michael J. Tokich - Chief Financial Officer, Treasurer & Senior VP: And, Erin, just one point of clarification. The disposal cost of the depleted cobalt does not go into capital expenditures. It's actually a period expense. So that will be recognized through cost of goods sold as an expense.

Erin E. Wilson - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst · Bank of America. Your line is now open.

Okay. Great. That's really helpful. And what's driving the faster improvement in IMS margins? Is it just quicker consolidation of what's left on integration front, and how would this business fit into the broader global platform next year? Walter M. Rosebrough - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yes, Erin. I would say there are two factors. And I'm going to separate the financial result from the operational piece a little bit. That is a big piece of the financial result, as we've discussed before, was we – that is the various companies of IMS – were outsourcing to other people things that they didn't do well. Most of these companies were either very good at surgical instrument repair or very good at scope repair, rarely both. And so what happened is the guys that were good at instrument repair tended to sub out their scope repair and vice versa. The beauty is we bought a couple companies that were good at one and a couple companies good at other, so we in-sourced their outsourcing to each other. And that happened, we expected it to be pretty quick, it happened really quick. And so there was enough capacity in the labs and we were able to beef up the labs. We really got that impact very fast. And then the second piece is the more difficult, long-term work, which is overlapping territories and do we have enough people? Again, as a service business, you need to have geographic density, if you will, to be at an optimum level of profitability. And again, all these companies were regional light (46:29) companies, and so they were all trying to expand outside their regions when we put them together. Places one was expanding, the other already was and so we got much better regional density. That has taken longer. And then the whole back office, IT and getting all the regions aligned. Sometimes we had three people where we needed two when we put them together; sometimes we had two people where we needed three. Getting them all in the right geographies, that has taken longer, and we're effectively through that as we speak, actually. We're kind of finishing that up now. But the financial result is less impactful than this outsourcing. So we were able to get there quicker than we thought and we're hitting the targets that we expected. And so we think we're in good shape. Now this coming year we actually will continue to improve, but we'll also begin some more investing for growth in the business. So we're not expecting a significant differential this year because we do expect to continue to grow that business. We expect to be a high-single digit, low-double digit grower and we'll have to invest to do that.

Erin E. Wilson - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst · Bank of America. Your line is now open.

Okay, great. Thanks so much.

Operator

Operator

Our next question is from Jason Rodgers with Great Lakes Review. Your line is now open.

Jason A. Rodgers - Great Lakes Review

Analyst

Good morning. Julie Winter - Director-Investor Relations & Head-Media Relations: Good morning.

Jason A. Rodgers - Great Lakes Review

Analyst

Just looking at the Healthcare segment, the operating income talked in the release about an increase in R&D expense. What was that percentage increase on a year-over-year basis and how should we look at that going forward? Michael J. Tokich - Chief Financial Officer, Treasurer & Senior VP: Yes, Jason, what we typically look at, and I don't have that percentage right off the top of my head, but what we anticipate is about 3% of revenue being spent on R&D and I don't think that changes in 2016 and beyond at this point in time.

Jason A. Rodgers - Great Lakes Review

Analyst

Okay. And just looking at the numbers here, on the... Walter M. Rosebrough - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: But it is growing faster than revenue, so if it was 2.8%, it's now 3.1%. It's that kind of effect because, again, it's relatively small numbers, but it is growing faster. My recollection is it's growing in the mid- to high-single digits.

Jason A. Rodgers - Great Lakes Review

Analyst

All right. That's helpful. The foreign revenues in the quarter, what was the performance year-over-year on a constant currency basis? Michael J. Tokich - Chief Financial Officer, Treasurer & Senior VP: For the quarter, if I look at where we grew internationally, North America we saw about 14% top line growth, but the rest of the world we saw negative growth, Europe about 16%, APAC about 8% and then, as Walt mentioned earlier, we continue to struggle a little bit in Latin America. That was down about 30% for the quarter.

Jason A. Rodgers - Great Lakes Review

Analyst

All right. And then in reference to the savings you expect in fiscal 2016 from in-sourcing and restructuring? I think you had said previously $4 million to $6 million on the in-sourcing and $5 million on the restructuring. Is that still about the same? Walter M. Rosebrough - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yes. We're exactly right on target there.

Jason A. Rodgers - Great Lakes Review

Analyst

All right. And finally, the Healthcare segment, would you happen to have an organic figure for the quarter? Michael J. Tokich - Chief Financial Officer, Treasurer & Senior VP: Organically, Healthcare was down mid-single digits or low-single digits, sorry, low-single digits organic. And it was really driven by the capital being down 7%.

Jason A. Rodgers - Great Lakes Review

Analyst

Thanks very much. Walter M. Rosebrough - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: You're welcome.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Mitra Ramgopal with Sidoti. Your line is now open. Mitra Ramgopal - Sidoti & Co. LLC: Yes, hi. Good morning. Walt, you did mention that you expect a number of new products to come on stream this year, and sounded particularly excited about the Endoscopy line. I was just wondering if you expect these new products from a competitive standpoint to be fairly meaningful or is it more rounding out the existing offering? Walter M. Rosebrough - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: U.S. Endoscopy, the way they work is trying to find new problems that haven't been solved and develop niche products for those new problems or maybe old problems with new solutions. And so most of the product that they have is a very targeted product, so it's not so much I'll call it a market share play. There is a problem out there and we can fix it, and if we do that, we can make some money doing so. So I would characterize their product portfolio that way. Having said that, there are groups of procedures that to the extent you have four or five or six products focused toward the care and cleaning of the device, and four or five or six products toward finding and retrieving polyps, for example, or finding and retrieving other things. And so they do cluster them that way and they are filling out those clusters. So to the extent that's what – I don't think of it as much as a head-to-head competition on any particular products, generally. It's generally more of a how can we fill out a portfolio of things for a certain set of procedures, and they are doing a very nice job of doing that. Mitra Ramgopal - Sidoti &…

Operator

Operator

You have a follow-up question from Ms. Erin Wilson with Bank of America. You may begin.

Erin E. Wilson - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst

Great. Thanks. Just going back to U.S. Endoscopy, for 2016, what's incorporated into your guidance there and I know you don't break it out, but just anecdotally has anything changed in the trajectory at all there? Walter M. Rosebrough - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Erin, anecdotally, we had a five-year plan for U.S. Endoscopy and they have been hitting or beating that plan year after year. If they hit what we have incorporated into our guidance, they will have hit their five-year plan in four years.

Erin E. Wilson - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst

Okay, great. And this is maybe a broader one, but how does the recent superbug outbreak in California influence you at all? Walter M. Rosebrough - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Well, there's a number of superbugs, but I think you're talking about the scope bug in California that's gotten a lot of press.

Erin E. Wilson - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst

Right. Walter M. Rosebrough - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: It's not 100% clear how that's going to affect all of us. First of all it is a very, very tiny piece of the work we do. This is specific to a particular bug and a particular set of scopes called duodenoscopes, some people call them duodenoscopes and so if you look at our piece of that action, it is teeny tiny. Or look at that in total in terms of any kind of broad percentage, it's tiny. It is in our business teeny tiny. Now if you're one of those patients, it's not tiny. It's (55:43) important. And we are working with the scope manufacturers. We're clearly in discussion with the various societies that help determine how we do this, and we clearly would be working with the agency to the extent that they are doing anything. So, we will be involved in this and we think we are a contributor. I will say that none of these reported issues have been on our devices. So at this point in time, we've not seen any direct impact. I think that it's a more indirect impact of how we will look at doing a better job with those devices as a collective group in the future.

Erin E. Wilson - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst

Okay, great. Thanks so much.

Operator

Operator

I'm showing no other questions at this time. I'll turn the call back for closing remarks. Julie Winter - Director-Investor Relations & Head-Media Relations: Great. Everybody, this concludes our call. Thanks again for joining us and we'll talk to you next quarter.