Earnings Labs

Stanley Black & Decker, Inc. (SWK)

Q4 2007 Earnings Call· Tue, Jan 29, 2008

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning. My name is Matthew and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to The Stanley Works Fourth Quarter earnings Release Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]. I would now like to introduce Gerry Gould, VP of Investor Relations. I will turn the call over to him at this time. Thank you. Mr. Gould, you may begin your conference.

Gerry Gould

Analyst

Okay. Thank you, Matthew. Good morning, everybody. On the call this morning with me are John Lundgren, our Chairman and CEO; and Jim Loree, our Executive VP and CFO. We have two press releases out in that I refer to the 4Q update and initial ’08 guidance we issued on January 7, and then the fourth quarter results and ’08 guidance we issued this morning, both on our website. Also our PowerPoint presentation is on the website. We will refer to these charts as we go along. We have got PDF version out there about 20 minutes ago. John and Tim will review the results and then we will have a Q&A period following. The either call last about an hour. There will be replay available beginning at 1 PM today through the end of the day Saturday which is February 2. The replay number is 800-642-1687. You did need a code for the replay which is 30996508, and after it will remain on our site. You can call me with questions at 860-827-3833. And we just have two quick announcements, the first regarding Reg G. We issue an update our earnings guidance on an annual basis in our press release. At the beginning of the quarter, and we cannot comment upon and thereafter. If it changes materially, we would issue a press release and conduct a call. And secondly, certain statements contained in this discussion by the various Stanley participants are forward-looking statements. They are based on assumptions on future events that may not prove to be accurate; as such they involve risks and uncertainty. And actual results may differ materially from those expected or implied. So, we direct you to the cautionary statements in Form 8-K, which we filed with today's release and then our recent 34 Act filings. With that, I would like to turn the call over to John Lundgren.

John F. Lundgren

Analyst

Thanks, Gerry. Good morning everybody. What I am going to do is touch on some of the 2007 full year as well as fourth quarter highlights. Then turn it over to Jim Loree. Jim is going to go through some of our progress on cash flow, provide a little more detail, drill a littler deeper into the segments, and talk about some of our recent repurchase activity as well as 2008 guidance. The 2007, in general, and the fourth quarter, in particular, I think provides us some pretty good evidence on the merits of our ongoing portfolio diversification As you know that started arguably five years ago, certainly started to gain traction about four years ago, and it continues to reduce our volatility that enabled us to achieve sales earnings as well as cash flow growth due in part to a higher European and industrial and security content in the obvious lower dependence on the construction and DIY markets, which we have heard for the last six months are fairly weak in North America. Looking quickly, revenues $4.5 billion, up 12%, 26% increase in operating margin and Jim’s going to get into the drivers at that. 15% EPS growth, 25% growth in EBITDA, we are quite pleased with our cash flow, both from an operating cash flow perspective as well as free cash flow. All of these numbers on this page are in the release and in the appended financial statements. But to say the least we were far from disappointed, in fact we are quite pleased with these results in light of the market conditions, particularly North America where we compete throughout 2007. Looking at the fourth quarter financial results, good solid revenue growth and I am going to provide more details on it in the next slide. But…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Peter Lisnic with Robert W. Baird.

John F. Lundgren

Analyst

Pete?

Peter Lisnic

Analyst

Can you hear me?

John F. Lundgren

Analyst

Yes Pete we hear you now.

Peter Lisnic

Analyst

Ok sorry. Jim I was intrigued I guess by your comments on Facom with the growth slowing, looks like you have kind of a mid to high single-digit for the past couple of quarters and then down to two. Can you give us a sense as to what your expectations for the European economy might look like for ’08. The slowing growth of Facom is something that we ought to be incrementally concerned about or just kind of what’s your thought there?

James M. Loree

Analyst

I think the Facom growth was not a… earlier in the year was not a direct result of any economic boom over in Europe. Clearly there was one point higher of GDP growth than we typically had been experiencing in Europe over the last X number of years and Facom and GDP would be expected to track fairly closely. So, I think, the growth was more a function of the Facom folks joining a company that was willing to fund new product introductions and was a real tool company and there was some revenue synergies that we talked about that we didn’t anticipate in our financial forecast for Facom when we bought the company. And all those things were positive but the comps are getting tougher and yes I think the likelihood of the economy maintaining that slightly higher than historical GDP growth in the context of a US slowdown is not very high. And so we have tempered our growth outlook on a prospective basis for Facom. We are looking at probably something closer to flat to up a point or so for Facom as we go forward.

Peter Lisnic

Analyst

Okay great. Thanks on that one and then the follow-up question I guess. The working capital obviously was quite strong in the fourth quarter. I’m just wondering how sustainable is this working capital improvement through the fulfillment system and another way of asking the question might be you have a longer term target or there is something there that would encourage us to say, this is sustainable, this is where Stanley is going in terms of working cap?

John F. Lundgren

Analyst

Yes Pete, I am going to start and Jim will take it. We’d like to think it’s sustainable and we are not going to put a specific longer term target up there other than to say, the Stanley Fulfillment System is all about continuous improvement. We’ve been working, I don’t want to say quietly behind the scenes but working very hard, focusing each and every one of our business unit leaders on, among other things working capital efficiency and working capital improvement and as you are probably aware a meaningful piece of every P&L owner’s compensation is based on measurable improvement in working capital turns on an annual basis. At the corporate level we are measuring on cash flow and the business unit level it is on working capital turns. So, simply said it will be continuous improvement. We have been working on it a while, I think the fourth quarter we really began to gain some traction and saw the first tangible results of that. Jim you might want to add something.

James M. Loree

Analyst

Yes. I think that’s… its very consistent with what I would say as well. The only thing I would add is that inventories were the star of the show in the fourth quarter and will continue to put upward pressure on the working capital turns through our process improvements in from a Stanley Fulfillment System. What we would like to see in ’08 and beyond is a continuation of the inventory improvements… continuation of the payables improvements which have been now in place for about two years and then the beginning of some improvements in receivables as well and that would be something that we are working on very diligently and I believe that there is some opportunity there, receivables are $800 million, North of $800 million and clearly there is some process improvement opportunities there. Perhaps not as much as in inventories because they are dictated by terms and terms have to be negotiated in their economic tradeoffs that one makes but there is a lot of waste in receivables in any company that doesn’t have fully standardized processes and a process focus and Stanley’s history with all of acquisitions and everything and it certainly left some opportunities on the table so I think we will se a broader based working capital improvement as we go through ‘08 but we certainly won’t let up on inventories or payables.

Peter Lisnic

Analyst

Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Richard Radbourne Atlantic Equities.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Hello.

John F. Lundgren

Analyst

Hi Richard.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Yes. This is actually Joe Herick with Gutermine[ph] Research. A couple of questions. You guys talked about continuous improvements a while ago

John F. Lundgren

Analyst

What firm?

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Hello.

John F. Lundgren

Analyst

What firm are you with?

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Joe Herick with Gutermine [ph] Research. You guys talked earlier about continuous improvement initiatives. Regarding your operational initiative what are you guys doing regarding lean manufacturing, TPN to Six Sigma and how do you expect them to affect the bottom line?

John F. Lundgren

Analyst

The end your question was how to what about the bottom line?

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

How are you expecting looking at Lean manufacturing, Six Sigma within your operational plans and how do you expect them to--?

John F. Lundgren

Analyst

Listen, we’ve reviewed that at great length on previous calls. Lean, Six Sigma et cetera are tools, they are not processes within themselves that are going to contribute to improved working capital efficiency as well as margin accretion and we will take that offline to the extent we need to but we have got 19 people in the queue and don’t want to spend any more time on that on this particular call.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Ken Zener with Merrill Lynch.

John F. Lundgren

Analyst · Merrill Lynch.

Hi Ken. Good morning.

Kenneth Zener

Analyst · Merrill Lynch.

If you can update us on the status of Bostitch given that it’s such a large business and I know the margins, You guys had expected them to go up roughly100 basis points sequentially in ’07 and into ’08. Can you tell us where we were or refresh us at the beginning of ’06, end of ’07 and what your expectations are?

John F. Lundgren

Analyst · Merrill Lynch.

Yes. Basically I can’t, as we have said on several occasions. Bostitch was in terms of margin and performance, the business was shrinking due to a combination of market and us consciously shedding unprofitable business, up to 5% even arguably approaching 10% of revenues although some of that will get back. They will load mid single digit operating margins at the end… by the end of ‘06. What we said we would like to do is March from about four to 12 in the course of eight quarters, on average 100 basis points a quarter, I mean the state quarter spends a 100 basis points getting us to 12. What we also said is that we wouldn’t be perfectly linear. We can’t say by the end of the year without providing more detail than we intend to for all of ’07. They made a nice sequential improvement. Fourth quarter was a bit of a setback. That been said there were three things…two things going on that are really difficult to isolate. As you know we had a about$ 4 million… $3.7 million charge that hit above our P&L. That’s easy to isolate, unfavorable product liability litigation but it did show up in the Bostitch numbers. We had the preliminary implications of the anti-dumping legislation that in some cases increased costs, but the flip side of that gave the opportunity to improve prices. No telling where that will settle out in the short-term. But it was too upsetting factors for Bostitch. And then third. The business is 75% North American… in North American at least half of that residential construction related and that’s a tough business. So they got a lot of market headwind. Long answer to a simple question. We're happy with where we are in manufacturing restructuring. We have our Besco pneumatic that we purchased. We've very successfully closed our Chihuahua plant. Ramping up in Langfang we have world-class production on three continents. North America, Poland and China and we're still cautiously optimistic about the future of that business. But there are tremendous marketplace uncertainties that are tempering our optimism.

James M. Loree

Analyst · Merrill Lynch.

Yes. And I remind you there’s one additional clarification on the guidance I wanted to make relative to the anti-dumping decision that was made by the department of commerce. And that is that the inflation and the price information that I actually gave you, excludes the anti-dumping impact because it’s been, it has been happening in real time, happened last week, late last week, in terms of the decision and we haven’t had an opportunity to fully wet it although we believe that it’s going to be essentially a neutral to a slightly positive, very slightly positive for us for the year from a financial perspective. So, we're not excluding it because it’s a negative or anything like that. We're simply excluding it because we don’t have accurate numbers for the price inflation impact related to it and you can imagine it at a 30, 29 point something, 29.6% I think it is percent. Tariff and many of our nails that we import from China as well as all the other nails that are imported from China ranging anywhere from, in the low teens of percentage up to 110% and so our competitors are going to experience, in many cases the same type of impact if not worse and from a strategic perspective it really, I think, is a positive for us. A very big positive for the Bostitch business because it’s… this business has really had to compete in a very, very unfair environment over the last couple of years as the Chinese startups have been dumping these nails into our country and certainly the punitive tariffs that were put in place, especially the ones that are North of 30% are really going to change and they are going to level the playing field, we hope and on top of that we have the most diverse manufacturing base of nail manufacturing of all our competitors. With manufacturing in Eastern Europe, North America and China and we have the flexibility to move production around from place to place as the economics of producing the… cost economics of producing change so we actually hail the advent of this anti dumping issue. I think it is going to be kind of a real positive for the business on a go forward basis.

James M. Loree

Analyst · Merrill Lynch.

Give a follow up Kim?

Stephen Kim

Analyst · Merrill Lynch.

I do I appreciate the expansion of that as well Jim. The consumer margins, just to focus on this, I think that’s where a lot of people do have this concern though, obviously your other 60 plus % of businesses are operating very well. The consumer business, you talked about the 190 basis points margin drop earlier related to U.S. mix and absence of price recovery. Can you talk about the mix A and B, why we see better pricing outside the US relative to the U.S.? Thank you very much.

James M. Loree

Analyst · Merrill Lynch.

Well, first of all we need to make sure that everyone the $68 million going to $63 million is a $5 million decrease in profit rate, of which 60% of which, is related to non recurring items. The legal matters, and I don’t know if that was entirely clear when I said it but make sure that we understand that. And so if we added the three back to the $63 million we’d be at $66 million divided by 459, am just doing math in real time here, We would be at 14.3 instead of 13.7 so we’d be a 130 basis points decline so that’s a piece of it. The mix issue itself, in the quarter it’s simply one of… we were doing some refreshing of some product lines in both ZAG and our consumer storage business, and it just so happens those are our lowest margin businesses in construction DIY, and unfortunately you know that’s just what happened. That would be a big piece of the remainder of the negative there, and we don’t see an inherent profitability issue in this segment, on a go forward basis especially with Bostitch recovering and with construction in DIY being so strong outside the country. Now there is pricing power outside the U.S. is actually a bit higher than it is in the U.S. although not dramatically higher and that results from the fact that we are planning in many fragmented markets… much more fragmented markets from a customer prospective outside of the U.S. whether it’s in Latin America, or Europe or Australia, whatever. That said there’s some very large customers that wield a very significant amount of power. There’s been a lot of talk about China inflation and so forth as well in our business and other businesses that were affected by China inflation and there’s a lot of people getting exercised about inflation from China and how that might negatively impact these types of businesses, in particular these segments and in fact we look and again it’s China inflation is more of a positive than a negative for us because the single largest competitive for Stanley Works is not another branded tool company, it’s private label in the aggregate. Private label in the aggregate buys 80% to a 100% of their product from China, and with prices going up the retailers are facing pricing… unprecedented price increases and pressure from China and that just simply is a positive for us, because on a comparable basis it means that we are more competitive with our non-China manufacturing and that we are on a level playing field from a China perspective.

Stephen Kim

Analyst · Merrill Lynch.

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Jim Lucas with Janney.

James Lucas

Analyst · Janney.

Two questions on the acquisition integration side please. First, could you bring us up to date, you talked a little bit about Facom’s end markets, but in terms of the overall European industrial strategy, both from a manufacturing standpoint as well as going to market of combining the Facom and Stanley brand? Can you just give us a quick update there and secondarily with regards to the convergence business… you had alluded to it in the opening remarks in terms of as the strategy there evolves but in terms of the older lower margin business that you have been purposely changing the portfolio from. How far long are we on that and just overall how do you feel about how that convergence strategy is coming together?

John F. Lundgren

Analyst · Janney.

Yeah Jim, it’s John. I will take them both and Jim will add on if need be. First of all, in Europe in the integration, I think there’s two important integrations going on if you will, backroom and front room, the strength our customer facing. From the backroom perspective, if it doesn’t face the customer and end user, we are trying to do within one place, one way, we are making… at they were making great progress there including a seamless transition in leadership on the Facom side of the business. But, importantly we have no intention to combine the Stanley and Facom brands other than in emerging markets where we don’t have the structure and the scale to have if you will, a dedicated sales force. So, in markets where we are spread a little thin, you do have one individual reporting jointly to the Facom and Stanley side, but in general and you know this well, Facom Is an iconic brand for professional automotive repair and industrial tools. Stanley brand in Europe is overwhelmingly construction and DIY, and we intend to keep them that way. So, we are quite pleased with the integration in terms of cost synergies, the organizations are working better, very well together, better than in fact we had hoped for and all we can say on that one is now we are 24 months into it, so far so good and the two businesses are working well together. The other point that Jim made on Facom is I think an important one up to the first caller to Pete Lisnic’s question. The improvement in Facom revenues is a combination of great new product vitality which has always been the case but less attrition or cannibalization from the existing business and I think that is the strength of the combination. Real quickly to touch on conversion and security, Jim suggested we probably have two more quarters before some of… I will say the bad legacy business, primarily installation driven at low margins is going to filter through the system. In terms of the two organizations, again we are as pleased as we could be at this point with how well they are working together. I think everyone understands on the Stanley side, it was a little bit difficult to say, wait a minute we have just bought… excuse me… we have just bought HSM. We are doing a reverse integration but the margins speak for themselves, the business processes speak for themselves, the percent of recurring revenue speaks for themselves and I think by now they are starting to… they really are starting to behave as one team. We have got the majority of the office consolidation behind us, leadership is aligned and we are… on both those fronts we are certainly not complacent but we are on or ahead of schedule in terms of the integration and looking for some margin improvement on the legacy Stanley side going forward.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. Your next question comes from the line of Eric Bosshard with Cleveland Research.

Eric Bosshard

Analyst · Cleveland Research.

Two questions for you. First of all, the mechanical side you commented of the improved growth out of assets, it sounds like almost 10% excluding the hardware. What’s driving that and what’s the sustainability of that?

John F. Lundgren

Analyst · Cleveland Research.

Well, there’s a number of factors driving it. And I would say they are more related to execution and… than anything else. And the first is, and I guess I mentioned last quarter, there is a real intangible benefit to having split the mechanical and the electronic businesses. I think in reality they are quite different businesses and the issues that one has to deal with in transforming an electronic business model are very distracting to someone who is trying to go out there to do business, that is trying to go out and gain share in the electronic, I mean in the mechanical business. That said, I think over the last few years we have assembled a very broad based product line that covers virtually all of the important elements of a full fledged mechanical product line. Why is this important? Because in the past we were losing bids in mechanical and losing business occasionally, when competition had products in certain areas, an example of the exit devices in closers and so forth and another example which we have yet to plug but we hope to someday, that will be hollow metal doors where they would underbid one element and overbid another element of the proposal to win the business where we couldn’t compete in the areas where we didn’t have the business. That’s virtually behind us, we have one remaining hole now which is hollow metal doors, as I mentioned. Another benefit to the mechanical business has been the tremendous strength of the Access technologies business, the automatic door business and that particular business basically put together a value proposition to the customer which is predicated on national footprint with 24x7 service and a service contract type of mentality where it is a service based business and they pull through a lot of mechanical product. Justin’s actually been talking about this for years and gradually and methodically putting together that service value proposition and that certainly paying off in spades, so and then the final thing is we have added specifiers. We have added specifiers in the mechanical business deal best Access Legacy business, if you will and the combination of all those factors have contributed to good solid building momentum in that particular business. To understand those re-structural factors is the reasonable the thing that you can see sustained better growth like we saw in the fourth quarter.

John F. Lundgren

Analyst · Cleveland Research.

Well, I think the thing we have to be realistic about in mechanical is we are going to encounter some market headwinds and I don’t think they are going to be dramatic like they are in the residential side but take that small piece of security, it’s probably 30% of security roughly that is commercial construction related business. When you have a… I think we all expect to see some pull back in commercial construction, I don’t know how much, various people expect that in our case we expect to see some pullback but not o go negative like we saw in residential construction and I think that is, that is probably weigh down the Mechanical Access performance a bit lower than it has in the last couple of quarters, but that said that strong momentum that we have in the fundamentals there is going to help us continue to have a very good ’08, we would think even though we expect to see some market slowdown, all of that which has been built into the overall guidance for the Company.

Eric Bosshard

Analyst · Cleveland Research.

And then a follow up, I think Bostitch, things are changing pretty rapidly right now in regards to the cost side of the equation but can you talk about the expectation of getting to this 12% margins over eight quarters is… should we be thinking about a different schedule at this point or do you do anything different to ensure that you do stay on schedule?

John F. Lundgren

Analyst · Cleveland Research.

Yes. That’s really fair Eric. There’s enough uncertainty in the marketplace. Let me just say we are not thinking about it any differently. We think and the reason being… we think we have as much to gain as we do to lose with the pricing follow on to the anti-dumping legislation but it is going to take us three to six months to see for Denise [ph] to entertain to see where that settles out in the marketplace. In terms of everything we can do internally we think we have done it, it’s on track, it’s really good to see it. We are producing tools in both Taiwan and China. That’s very, very encouraging so one answer to that simple question is we are not backing off that and if something sculls in the marketplace or executionally that would allow us to do that we would be the first to raise our hands, but we are still looking at our… we are hoping and targeting a double digit run rate exiting 2008 for that business in terms of operating margin.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Sam Darkatsh with Raymond James

Sam Darkatsh

Analyst · Raymond James

Good morning, gentlemen. How are you?

John F. Lundgren

Analyst · Raymond James

Hey Sam.

James M. Loree

Analyst · Raymond James

Hey Sam.

Sam Darkatsh

Analyst · Raymond James

Couple of real quick questions here. Chimera’s structuring actions in ’08. What are your expectations there?

John F. Lundgren

Analyst · Raymond James

At the moment what we are looking at is something that is going to be, I think fairly similar to ’07, so that would be something in the mid teens. If the recession gets deeper, we could do more but if we do more, it will be, it should be relatively neutral to earnings because the benefits from those re-structuring would be reflected at least partially in the current year, ’08 P&L.

Sam Darkatsh

Analyst · Raymond James

Got you. Second question, I think I heard you say share count assumption for ’08 would be 82 million shares, but right now with the action that we are taking earlier this month, it is actually under 80. Option creep is that much or I am confused as to why you wouldn’t just assume 80 or 81 share count.

James M. Loree

Analyst · Raymond James

Well, when the stock goes back up to 64, we will lose a couple of million shares or add a couple of million shares of the outstanding… that’s the game plan here is to execute, be rewarded by higher stock price and then we will go from there, so it is a bit of a tongue and cheek response but the Company is undervalued right now. Our expectation is the price will go up. That will create share creep and the last thing we want to do is have that impact our ability to deliver the earnings so that’s the reason for the guidance being constructed that way.

Sam Darkatsh

Analyst · Raymond James

I’ll be sure to put that on my mind. A last quick question John, this is for you. Because you go through Europe, looking at it broadly from 30,000 foot on a consumer industrial combined basis where you’re seeing changes in growth rates on a country by country basis. I mean, if France is were your biggest exposure is but are you starting to see things weaken or are there… is it looking to be pretty steady and stable at this point?

John F. Lundgren

Analyst · Raymond James

No. l… we’re… Jim, this is John. Jim and I are obviously in daily contact with all the key regional leaders, even country by country you’re absolutely right. France and the UK provide the overwhelming majority of our business, we’ve seen no softening on the industrial or consumer side at this stage. Germany is booming which is an opportunity for us, we don’t have a lot of business in Germany, but it’s… growth from a low base and I can’t under emphasize the extent to which the opportunity to grow and I’ll call them emerging former central European markets. It’s filling in a lot of holes. Remember we’ve got good production in Poland, we’ve got teams on the ground there and that’s still in a lot of the… what we call it former Western European gap or potential softness. So, we’re cautiously optimistic on the European outlook and maybe for the first time in my career, Europe for a variety of reasons, this is going to follow the U.S. one way or another, at least you’ve read as much about that as we have. So, simple answer to this question is we are all over in terms of staying current. We’re not building much of a slump into our assumption.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Nicole Delabase [ph] with Deutsche Bank.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

I’m asking questions on behalf of Nigel Coe today. How are you?

John F. Lundgren

Analyst

Good Nicole.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Quick question for you on FatMax. Where are you guys on the roll out both in the U.S. and international.

John F. Lundgren

Analyst

FatMax is… I don’t want to say yesterday’s news. But, that at this stage is one step behind what we call FatMax’s Xtreme in the U.S. and XL in Europe and simply said, Nicole, where we’ve said we’ve been and we will continue. We are two thirds of the way through a previously announced sequential roll out. That’s roughly two waves of new product introductions per year in the spring and fall which is the best selling seasons for relatively low priced consumer hand tools. And we have had tremendous success in terms of the shipments of those products, in two areas the POFs for the retail takeaway for the XL and for the extreme is up mid single to low double digit rates with less FatMax cannibalization than we’ve seen in the past. So, looking forward what you can expect is until we say something differently, or get further ahead of ourselves in terms of announcements. Another two ways in 2008, the only difference being we’ll do it simultaneously in the U.S. and Europe, historically we’ve trailed in Europe, but we think we have our supply chain to the point now where we can do them simultaneously, and we are looking for another $20 million, $30 million of growth from those new product introductions and the question will be, can we keep the cannibalization of the base FatMax line as well as it’s been so, the overwhelming majority of that becomes incremental.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Rehaut with JP Morgan.

Michael Rehaut

Analyst · JP Morgan.

Hi, thanks good morning.

John F. Lundgren

Analyst · JP Morgan.

Morning Mike.

Michael Rehaut

Analyst · JP Morgan.

First question, just on CDIY. Can you just break out what was the rest of the world excluding FX?

John F. Lundgren

Analyst · JP Morgan.

Yes. 5% less than… you want the quarter or the year?

Michael Rehaut

Analyst · JP Morgan.

Quarter please.

John F. Lundgren

Analyst · JP Morgan.

19%.

Michael Rehaut

Analyst · JP Morgan.

So that was, okay that was excluding the benefits. And also what was the benefit on the margin line from currency?

John F. Lundgren

Analyst · JP Morgan.

Probably 100 basis points, but I don’t have it at the top of my head, we actually… we think it would be a pro rata percentage, but I don’t have that number out of the top of my head. Jim might be able to give you better estimate.

James M. Loree

Analyst · JP Morgan.

The 19% is half currency and half organic growth just to clarify.

Michael Rehaut

Analyst · JP Morgan.

Okay.

James M. Loree

Analyst · JP Morgan.

And I missed the second part of your question because I was busy researching…

Michael Rehaut

Analyst · JP Morgan.

No actually I think that was my fault. I think you did say previously, it was a one to two million currency benefit.

James M. Loree

Analyst · JP Morgan.

Right.

Michael Rehaut

Analyst · JP Morgan.

The second question just on ’08. You had mentioned that you are expecting a kind of a decent backdrop. It’s a little bit in contrast to some economists that are looking for a little bit of a slow down and in the housing markets in the extent that certainly, you are a lot less exposed to the housing markets but particularly driven by housing market down 5% on average in terms of completions across a lot of G-7 type nation. So, is your outlook or your game plan in Europe, mostly end-market tied or do you also have kind of new product share gain initiatives that would bolster your confidence of Europe?

John F. Lundgren

Analyst · JP Morgan.

Well based on performance in the U.S. it down turned to 20% set us down 5%. We operate the same business model in Europe. On the CDIY side is that you said to… It’s in response to Nicole’s question. We've got two more waves of excel coming in Europe. They’ve been extraordinarily successful. So, we think the fact that our new product vitality on the consumer side. That’s what’s allowing us to gain share in a down market because of very high percentage thus far. 60 to 80 of its been incremental. Not a lot of cannibalization from the base business and Jim made a very important point earlier. Why we were far from bullish, Mike, but while we're cautiously optimistic. Despite the weakness of the dollar. The strengthening of the… of our if you will the Chinese currency relative to the dollar, relative to Europe. It’s going to have a big impact. Private Label’s a big piece in Europe. Whether it’s generic or Private Label with an European home center. The cost of those products are going to go up dramatically. We're the market… we're number one or two in the market in every product category where we compete and with a lot of experience and a variety of branded products, in situations like this the market leader is quite often the one who gains as SKU’s are rationalized et cetera. We have this, I think, a chance to gain as much as we have to lose. That’s what provides, if you will a floor to our believe that despite some market headwind we think we can, we can grow a little bit and maintain our margins even in the European market.

Michael Rehaut

Analyst · JP Morgan.

And just one last question. You kind of highlighted your ability to recover some of the cost inflation this year pretty effectively at least on the industrial side. A little bit more competitive on the CDIY side. I was wondering if you could give us your outlook for ’08 and that as well what’s big then--?

John F. Lundgren

Analyst · JP Morgan.

Sure.

Michael Rehaut

Analyst · JP Morgan.

And in terms of incremental raw material cost inflation and if you're… given that, it would likely to be up. Have you already started to be concerned in certain pricing initiatives in your different businesses?

John F. Lundgren

Analyst · JP Morgan.

The answer is yes. Jeff touched on it. I’m going to turn it over to him. But we're looking at slightly more raw materials inflation and about the same percentage of recovery in the same place. But I think, Jeff can give you a little more granularity on that. I think, it’s important that you have it looking out at our guidance. Because we’ll update it if it changes.

Michael Rehaut

Analyst · JP Morgan.

Yes. I mean the numbers.

James M. Loree

Analyst · JP Morgan.

Those are the numbers and of the 75 or so that I mentioned when we did the guidance page.

John F. Lundgren

Analyst · JP Morgan.

About 50 or so is actually materials. A lot of those materials are sourced from China so we're having the currency impact. We're having the EDRR impact. We're having the wage inflation impact. And we have pretty good visibility too. We have a centralized sourcing operation, which has very good, which has written contracts with these big suppliers et cetera and we kind of know where we are. We have a lot of our contracts have been finalized for ’08 and no, we have some freight inflations and wage inflation and some energy inflation on top of that and that accounts for the 75.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Seth Weber with Banc of America.

Seth Weber

Analyst · Banc of America.

Hey, good morning.

John F. Lundgren

Analyst · Banc of America.

Good morning, Seth.

Seth Weber

Analyst · Banc of America.

Back on the security business, on the last call you guys talked about, I think, adding somewhere between or targeting 3 to 6 new cities for the HSM business and that kind of contributing to pretty robust organic growth rates. Is that still the case and can you talk about whether the competitive… the pricing environment in that business has changed here with the economic outlook?

John F. Lundgren

Analyst · Banc of America.

Yes and no. We still continue… we are targeting between 3 and 6 or roughly one a quarter cities to add, as we get confident we can have the scale to run a profitable operation. The no, is that is not the primary contributor to the HSM growth. I’d say with 70 field offices these are going to be much, much smaller offices. The primary contributor to our growth is continuing to execute the reverse integration that Jim described in quite a bit of detail and continue the trend to increase the percentage of recurring revenue i.e. the service piece of the business that comes along with the installation. Executing the of say the HSM model where its unlikely if not inconceivable, that we would do an installation without the monitoring and/or service contract that came with it. That’s what’s the driver of the organic growth.

Seth Weber

Analyst · Banc of America.

Okay. And any change to the pricing environment in that business and can you also just, going back to the Home Depot situation, should we expect another quarterly differential in this quarter and when will that kind of stop?

John F. Lundgren

Analyst · Banc of America.

Lets take them one at a time. The Home Depot situation which relates to the hardware business is in mechanical and that is roughly a $40 million impact in total and a $30 million impact in ’08 and it will anniversary after the third quarter is complete so the fourth quarter will have completely anniversaried that issue. And you can expect it to be, hardware is a vending machine business so in theory so, it’s pretty evenly spread throughout the first three quarters. And you want do the other part of the question Eric? And just repeat the other part of your question.

James M. Loree

Analyst · Banc of America.

The second part. Oh, Seth won't be able to.

Eric Bosshard

Analyst · Banc of America.

OK.

James M. Loree

Analyst · Banc of America.

I think, it was the pricing, I’m sorry, it was the pricing environment on the…

Eric Bosshard

Analyst · Banc of America.

On HSI?

John F. Lundgren

Analyst · Banc of America.

And quite frankly no is the simple answer. It’s a service business, it’s a very small part of an operator’s cost and the cost of failure is so high compared to the cost of doing it right. And I think by maintaining the current reputation we have as the premier service provider in the industry it’s obviously a competitive business but we do not see tremendous competitive pricing pressure particularly on the service side of that business.

Operator

Operator

You’re last question comes from Robert Wertheimer with Morgan Stanley.

Robert Wertheimer

Analyst

I’ll try to be brief. On CDIY just wanted to ask about margins by geography stripping out Bostitch. Is there any material in other words are margins higher or lower overseas versus the US?

James M. Loree

Analyst

No. In lots of businesses they are but in ours margins are quite similar and we anticipate seeing the same going forward. The team works hard to keep it that way. We manage it as a global business from a product development and a pricing prospective so that in itself is part of the reason but the simple answer to your question is no. They’re very consistent.

Robert Wertheimer

Analyst

Thank you very much. And the second question, I’m just curious whether the economic uncertainty has an impact on your acquisition strategy? You have a lot of cash to deploy, especially I guess you’re taking a slightly more positive view on Europe. And does that uncertainty reduce or change your appetite for acquisitions? New ones.

John F. Lundgren

Analyst

Go ahead Gerry.

Gerry Gould

Analyst

Yes, well we look at this both tactically and strategically. And strategically there’s no difference whatsoever. Our strategy remains as we presented it on March 8, and supplemented it in discussions and various conference calls afterwards. From a tactical prospective there’s always a trade off that one has to make in our positions when looking at buying oneself versus spending the next $100 million to buy an acquisition. And as I said we’re trading at 7.6 times EBITDA and that’s a fairly compelling evaluation on a historical basis, on an intrinsic basis, on almost any basis you can derive. So, we’re not saying that we’re out of the acquisition hunt because we’re not, but yet when we look at the shares trading and the levels they have been trading it’s really difficult to get really excited about spending nine or ten times EBITDA doing all the work to take out the cost and everything to get it so that your buying it at basically seven to eight times EBITDA when you can buy yourself at really, with buying exactly, knowing exactly what your buying. So we’ll see. This year we could, we may not do any major acquisitions. We may focus purely on share buybacks, but, if a really compelling acquisition were to come around and we contracted the two, it looked like it was a smart move and it was strategically consistent then we would definitely go in that direction. So we’re keeping our options open, we’re staying flexible and we’ll see where we go.

Operator

Operator

There are no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to John for any closing remarks.

John F. Lundgren

Analyst

Thanks Matthew. Two things. Just very briefly. We read over but we wanted to get virtually everybody in the queue. One point I just wanted to make. Numerous companies on calls earlier this, last weekend earlier this week, have had imposters calling in and I’ve abruptly dismissed the second caller which was not Richard Radbourne from Atlantic Securities. We know Richard well, he follows the company. And we simply removed his line because he signed on for someone he wasn’t. So, for anybody who thought that somebody was dismissed rather abruptly he was and in the future if they like to sign on as to who they are we’ll get then in the queue and if we don’t get to it during the Q&A Jerry is available always as he is. So, I just wanted to make that clarification. Second just a couple milestones before I close. Jim talked about the terrific performance of our industrial group. In general the Engineered Solutions in particular. We had our first shipments of our System 100 RFID enabled industrial storage unit. Really, really strategic, important product. And we're very exited about it in terms of our entrance into the healthcare segment. From the hydraulic side, good market strength, the business continues to grow. This business is almost twice as big as it was three or four years ago. And after a lot of joint development effort, our assembly technology’s business has received its first orders from Toyota Motors. And as you know a lot of those decisions are initially made in Japan before they cascade to the US. So we’re real pleased with some of those, I will say, small but strategically important milestones within our industrial storage business. Thanks for your interest on a call that we extended just so we could try to address everyone’s concerns. And we’ll talk to you next quarter.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. This concludes today’s Stanley Works conference call. You may now disconnect.