Operator
Operator
Welcome to the Q4 and Full Year 2015 Stanley Black & Decker Earnings Conference Call. My name is Stephanie, and I'll be your operator for today's call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to the Vice President of Investor and Government Relations, Greg Waybright. Mr. Waybright, you may begin. Greg Waybright - Vice President-Investor & Government Relations: Thank you, Stephanie. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us for Stanley Black & Decker's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2015 Conference Call. On the call in addition to myself is John Lundgren, our Chairman and CEO; Jim Loree, our President and COO and Don Allan our Senior Vice President and CFO. Our earnings release which was issued earlier this morning and the supplemental presentation which we will refer to during the call are available on the IR section of our website as well as on our iPhone and iPad apps. A replay of this morning's call will also be available beginning at 2 p.m. today. The replay number and the access code are in our press release. This morning John, Jim, and Don will review our fourth quarter and full year 2015 results and our 2016 outlook followed by a Q&A session. Consistent with prior calls we are going to be sticking with just one question per caller. And as we normally do, we will be making some forward-looking statements during the call. Such statements are based on assumptions of future events that may not prove to be accurate, and as such, they involve risk and uncertainty. It's therefore possible that actual results may materially differ from any forward-looking statements that we might make today and we direct you to the cautionary statements in the 8-K that we filed with our press release and in the most recent 1934 Act filing. I'll now turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, John Lundgren. John F. Lundgren - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Thanks, Greg, and good morning, everybody. Today we're going to spend just a few minutes reviewing a solid operational fourth quarter that wrapped up a really strong year before we discuss this year's guidance, and then of course take your questions. First for the year, organic growth was up 6% with Tools & Storage leading the way, up 8%. Security was flat while Industrial delivered 2%. Operating margin expanded 90 basis points to 14.2% which is a post-merger record for the company. EPS of $5.92 was a 10% improvement versus 2014. Jim's going to provide a lot more detail particularly on the margins and growth by segment when he gets into the segment reviews. Free cash flow came in at $871 million on strong working capital turns of 9.2 times. And in line with our previous commitments, we executed over $1 billion of share repurchase actions in 2015, wrapping up a really strong year in which we overcame numerous challenges not the least of which was foreign currency. Guidance for 2016 is being established with an EPS range of $6 to $6.20 a share or a midpoint EPS growth of approximately 3% versus 2015. Don's going to take you through this in more detail later in the call. Moving to the right on the chart for the quarter, revenue expanded 1% organically with total growth down 5% as the top line impact of foreign currency was negative 6% for the quarter. There was a fiscal calendar phenomenon in the fourth quarter that did have a modest negative impact on organic growth that Don's going to address more in detail when he walks through the quarter, but I think it's an important point. Operating margin rate for the quarter was 14.2% which was in 100 basis point improvement ahead of the fourth quarter 2014. Our margins increased due to continued sharp focus on price realization and some commodity deflation delivering operating leverage despite $50 million from foreign currency pressure in the quarter. EPS with $1.78 was up 30% versus fourth quarter 2014 as the solid operational performance combined with lower tax, share count, and some restructuring less than the prior quarter offset the foreign exchange. Turning to slide five and an overview of the sources of growth for the quarter. As previously mentioned, organic growth remained positive due to the continued strength of Tools & Storage, particularly in the U.S. and the European residential and nonresidential construction markets, and the Stanley Engineered Fastening automotive business, which offset pressure in the Industrial channel, lower emerging market volumes and customer specific volume declines within the Stanley Engineered Fastening electronics business. This growth was offset by foreign exchange headwinds of 6% in the quarter, resulting in total revenue down 5% as previously mentioned. Looking at it geographically, Europe led the way, up 3%, as share gains continued in the region and nearly every market contributed positive growth. The U.S. generated 1% organic growth while solid Construction POS performance has left customer inventories in good shape as we enter 2016. Emerging markets in the rest of the world began to show signs of macro pressure to the top line, contracting 2% and 3% respectively. There was, as always, significant variation among the countries, but China, Russia, and Venezuela showed the largest year-on-year declines. And quickly for the year, organic growth was 6%, 5% volume, 1% price. This growth was offset by 7% currency, netting down to a 1% decline in total revenue, as shown in the box on the left of the chart. We were pleased that geographically the organic growth was shared around the world, spread fairly evenly of course with the U.S. leading the way at plus 8%, Europe plus 4%, emerging markets plus 3%, and the rest of the world plus 3%. Let me turn it over to Jim to get into some more operating detail on our three segments. James M. Loree - President & Chief Operating Officer: Okay. Thanks, John. I'll start with Tools & Storage, which wrapped up a banner year with solid fourth quarter performance despite difficult comps, mixed end markets, and a relentless dollar strengthening. Tools benefited from strong execution momentum in all areas: new products, supply chain, and commercial excellence. As for markets, continued strength in U.S. Construction, DIY, and Consumer was a help. However, emerging market and overall Industrial conditions were more than challenging. European tool end markets continued to be flat to slightly positive, and continuing U.S. dollar strengthening, especially against Latin American currencies, presented familiar but increasingly large headwinds for both revenues and operating margin. Organic growth for the segment was 3% in the quarter, with all regions once again contributing. Europe led the way up 6% followed by North America and emerging markets contributing 3% and 1% respectively. Although revenues were down 3% due to a 6 point currency impact, operating margin was up 1% with a 60 basis point year-over-year improvement in the rate. Execution of price, productivity, and cost control initiatives, along with a little help from lower commodity prices, enabled us to more than offset the onslaught from currency pressure. And across the global product lines, Power Tools posted 5% organic growth with contributions from Professional Power Tools up 7%, Consumer Power Tools up 3%, and Accessories up 2%. Our Hand Tools & Storage business was down 2% as strength within Construction Tools and our Mac mobile distribution business was offset by significantly lower sales within the Industrial channels. Innovation continues to generate solid growth across the business with ongoing contributions from DC brushless power tools as well as new product rollouts such as the DEWALT 20-volt and DEWALT 40-volt Outdoor, Stanley FatMax power tools in Europe, and DEWALT Pneumatics. Within North America retail POS performance was again strong in the quarter, wrapping up a record year which saw positive POS in 50 of 52 weeks, growth across every SBU and as impressively across all major brands – Black & Decker, DEWALT, Stanley, and BOSTITCH. Importantly, retail inventories remain at healthy and appropriate levels consistent with prior year. And in addition, the team continues to drive out-performance in Mac Tools, which closed the quarter with growth in high single digits, delivering its sixth consecutive year and 24th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth. And finally, we continued to enjoy robust growth in e-commerce, this time highlighted by success with our rebranded and very innovative Black & Decker consumer products. Europe continues to perform at multiples above the underlying market, posting 6% organic growth in the quarter for a full year total of 7%. This region has shown remarkably consistent share gains in a relatively flat market, delivering approximately 7% organic growth across much of the past three years. Importantly, the growth in Europe continues to be wide-spread across nearly all regions as consistent share gains validate the success of our innovation and commercial excellence initiatives. The emerging market team once again overcame significant market headwinds generating 1% organic growth in the quarter, with contributions from Argentina, Mexico, and Turkey more than offsetting continued pressures in Russia, China, Brazil, and other parts of South America. And meanwhile the timely global release of the Stanley power tools line for emerging markets continues to gain traction in the large and growing mid-price point segment helping to offset regional economic and geopolitical market turbulence. The fourth quarter caps off an exceptional year by our Tools & Storage team, 8% organic growth for the year against a 6% 2014 comp with an operating margin rate up 110 basis points, executing on all fronts, taking share, improving profitability in the face of a volatile backdrop. And at the same time, the team very methodically and successfully positioned the business for more growth ahead. In that regard, we see continued robust growth for Tools in 2016. Our innovation pipeline is stronger than any time since the merger, and our supply chain and commercial teams are operating at very high fitness levels with the SFS 2.0 firmly embedded in our operating culture. These are exciting times for Tools & Storage and we expect the performance level to continue to be very high as we go forward. Turning to Security, progress continued across our Security business with Europe advancing on all fronts and North America showing steady progress in its transformation efforts. Within Europe, the business was up 3% organically, the fifth consecutive quarter in positive territory. Commercial wins were widespread across most countries as we recognized benefits from investments in our regional sales organizations. Profitability continued to improve sequentially and versus prior year with a fourth quarter operating margin rate approaching 10%. Solid order intake and a healthy backlog both up double digits year-over-year combined with stable attrition rates within our targeted range leave us well positioned to continue forward momentum into 2016. While organic revenues were down within North America due principally to a large installation in last year's fourth quarter, the team posted sequential margin expansion due to improved field productivity within the commercial electronics security business as the benefits from the Stanley standard operational improvement initiative began to take hold. Strong orders, a healthy backlog and a growing RMR portfolio position this business well as we head into 2016. Emerging markets were again a modest drag on Security growth and profitability as weak market conditions in China continued. But overall for this segment, profitability was up 100 basis points year-over-year and 90 basis points sequentially, a solid indicator that our transformation efforts are taking hold within the organization. Turning to Industrial. Industrial saw a 1% organic decline in the quarter as lower volumes in Engineered Fastenings, Electronics and Industrial businesses more than offset strong global automotive revenue and organic growth in our oil and gas business. Operating profit was up 5% with a 210 basis point improvement in the margin rate as productivity gains and cost controls were able to counteract lower volume. Engineered Fastening's 3% organic decline was attributable to weakening within the Industrial channel and lower sales volume in the electronics space as our largest consumer electronics customer unexpectedly reduced production levels on their recently launched smartphone. This more than offset another quarter in which our automotive revenues outpaced light vehicle production. The business was able to anticipate some of the Industrial market's softness and thus benefited from proactive cost actions taken within the quarter. Infrastructure delivered positive organic growth of 2% as oil and gas grew 17% organically, propelled by increased project activity in the North America onshore market more than offsetting declines in hydraulics, which continues to be impacted by depressed scrap steel prices. All in all, an impressive operational performance was registered by the Industrial teams, expanding profitability and margin rates in the face of a choppy and mostly inhospitable end market environment with the exception of auto production. In summary, for the total company, the fourth quarter represented a solid performance wrapping up a tremendous year which included organic growth of 6%, record operating margins, and record EPS. This performance highlights our team's agility, passion to perform, and ability to be proactive and responsive to market condition, balancing investments for growth and taking out costs when necessary, strengths that will serve us well as we head into 2016. As we consider the 2016 outlook, which Don will share with you in a few minutes, our ability to generate outsized organic growth albeit at a slower pace than in the preceding two years will be enabled by the investments we have made and are making in SFS 2.0, which is our transformational business operating system. In early 2015, we launched the next generation of SFS, creating a more powerful mechanism to enable sustained above-market organic growth and margin expansion with high asset efficiency. The expanded SFS 2.0 is transforming the company by focusing our activities in five key areas: digital excellence, breakthrough innovation, commercial excellence, functional transformation, and core SFS. I would encourage serious long-term investors to develop a deep understanding of SFS 2.0 in that this is not an investor relations marketing jargon but rather a carefully constructed and executed framework that enables our organization to extract maximum value out of our world class franchises. We do this through capital efficient organic growth and continuous margin expansion. You have already seen the manifestation of commercial excellence in the organic growth and margin expansion in Tools & Storage and other parts of the company. In 2016, you will see a growing impact from breakthrough innovation, digital, as well as the other elements of the initiative which is now in its second year and gaining momentum. I would also say that we are once again open for business when it comes to inorganic growth. We look forward to supplementing our organic growth with a disciplined approach to M&A that we have deployed during almost 100 hundred acquisitions over the past 15 years, a period of time when we more than quadrupled our revenues and market cap and outperformed the S&P 500's total shareholder return by five times. With that, I'll turn it over to Don Allan. Donald Allan - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Thank you, Jim. Let's begin with our fourth quarter and full year free cash flow performance. Free cash flow in the fourth quarter totaled $697 million, up almost $50 million from the prior year, resulting in $871 million of free cash flow for the full year. This full-year result is approximately $50 million to $75 million lower than we anticipated going into the quarter and is the result of lower than expected fourth quarter volumes in Tools & Storage and Engineered Fastening, which in turn, resulted in lower working capital liquidation. Nonetheless, working capital turns finished the year at 9.2 times, flat to the prior year, but at a level that many industrials would envy. Overall, our cash flow performance remains strong, a 96% conversion rate for the full year and our leveraged metrics are in line with our year-end expectations. One additional comment on free cash flow as it relates to the other line. As you can see, we experienced approximately $120 million variance versus the prior year in the fourth quarter. This variance was planned and is due primarily to discontinued operation activity in the fourth quarter of 2014 combined with the timing of certain derivative settlements and tax payments. So, let's turn to page 11. I would like to provide you with an updated outlook on our 2016 foreign exchange headwind. Certainly, it won't be news to anyone that the U.S. dollar has continued to appreciate against the vast majority of currencies around the world. This strong dollar has resulted in approximately a 50% increase against the Brazilian real since the beginning of 2015. Also, the British pound, and the Australian dollar are at levels we have not seen since the 2008 credit crisis, and the Canadian dollar has not been this weak versus the U.S. dollar for well over a decade. And last but certainly not least, the Argentinean peso, which essentially has been on a constant decline since the government's default back in 2001, accelerated its correction with a 30% cliff devaluation in December, resulting in another meaningful headwind for us in 2016. The effect of all these moves is that we are facing another significant foreign exchange headwind in 2016 which, at current spot rates, results in a year-over-year impact to operating margin between $170 million and $190 million. This impact is a combination of transactional and translational. However, approximately two-thirds of the 2016 headwind will be transactional, pressuring our margins, while approximately one-third will be translational. The transactional amount is substantially higher than prior year, as we feel the impact of the 2015 derivative hedges expiring in 2016, and this is approximately $60 million of our total currency headwinds. This 2016 currency impact is on top of over $300 million in currency headwinds we faced over the past two years, where our teams focused on significant operational actions which more than offset these pressures in 2014 and 2015. However, given the magnitude of these continued headwinds, we will not be able to completely offset currency in 2016 with price and cost actions. That being said, we will offset approximately 50% of this $170 million to $190 million headwind within 2016. And as we have previously discussed, over the long-term, we will continue to identify opportunities to localize production to help mitigate currency as well as improve the efficiency of our global supply chain. So, let's transition to our 2016 outlook on the next page. As John mentioned, we are guiding to an EPS range of $6 to $6.20 or a midpoint EPS growth of approximately 3%. Let's walk through some of the key drivers in our guide. First, we expect organic growth to approximate 3%, which will contribute $0.45 to $0.50 EPS for the year. As Jim discussed, SFS 2.0 will help fuel this growth in 2016 and beyond. We expect our Tools & Storage business to continue to take market share in most regions. Our innovation pipeline is robust and we believe this business can leverage that to grow in the low to mid-single digits in the face of challenging global macroeconomic environment. We expect progress to continue within the Security platform resulting in low single-digit growth, and we also expect Industrial to have low single-digit growth as the Engineered Fastening and Automotive business will continue to demonstrate strong growth, while the remainder of the segment faces pressures across several end markets including oil and gas, scrap steel, general industrial, and electronic. One additional point related to organic growth before I move on to the next topic. It's worth noting that when normalizing for a 53-week activity, which was included in the 2014's fourth quarter, which is a fiscal calendar phenomena that occurs every seven years. If you adjust for that, the total company's organic growth would have actually been 1.5 to 2 points higher or approximately 3% in the fourth quarter of 2015. This is notable when you consider the fact of 1% organic growth and us guiding to 3% organic growth in 2016. We believe, this, along with the strength of certain markets we operate in, namely U.S. construction, along with global automotive production, combined with our focus in SFS 2.0 gives us confidence in our ability to achieve 3% organic growth outlook for 2016. Continuing to the next EPS driver, you will see another $0.45 to $0.50 of earnings improvement from additional cost and productivity initiatives. We have a solid amount of carryover commodity deflation materializing in 2016 and the business teams have worked hard to identify additional cost reduction opportunities which on top of our normal productivity gains will result in a solid contribution to the bottom line. Also, we see an additional increase to EPS of approximately $0.13 from a lower share base due to the carryover benefit of our 2015 share actions as well as opportunistic buybacks particularly if we continue to see depressed share prices. Working against all of these strong operational actions will be the previously-mentioned foreign exchange headwind which results in approximately $0.85 to $0.95 of EPS pressure year-over-year. Because of the severity of this transactional currency headwind and its impact on margins, we expect the company-wide operating margin in 2016 to be relatively flat year-over-year. To put this in perspective, we estimate that the FX headwinds net of benefits we are receiving from lower commodity costs as well as pricing activities will cause us to lose 60 basis points to 75 basis points of margin rate improvement in 2016. Our three-year financial vision presented at the May 2015 Investor Meeting contemplated a 50 basis points to 75 basis points of margin improvement each year, which assumes a stable foreign exchange environment. So, we believe we're continuing to perform in line with that objective, albeit with our improvements offsetting FX rather than resulting in OM rate expansion that we like to see. A few other items to mention related to guidance are: we expect our restructuring charges and tax rate to be relatively flat to the prior year, and then finally, as we look to the first quarter, we expect our first quarter EPS percentage of the full year EPS to be approximately 18.5%, which is very close to the prior two years' average. Moving to the segment outlook on the right side of the page, I've already touched on most of the drivers behind our organic growth so I'll spend a minute on margin rate expectations. We expect Tools & Storage margin to be relatively flat year-over-year and that is primarily the result of the FX dynamic I described earlier netting against the really impressive operating leverage this business continues to achieve. We expect Security margins to continue to improve modestly versus prior year reflecting benefits from further progress in field productivity, our commercial investments, and the realignment of the cost structure of the business to help drive profitable future growth; another good step forward, as anticipated. Industrial margins are expected to be relatively flat, as productivity gains in cost takeouts particularly within the Engineered Fastening business are expected to offset top line pressure I previously discussed related to key portions of this segment. Before moving on to the summary of this morning's call, I would like to discuss the potential for a recessionary environment and make a few comments on what actions we would take if, and I emphasize if, we are faced with deteriorating economic conditions. At this stage, we believe a U.S. recession is low probability in 2016. However, we have established contingency plans to ensure we are adequately prepared. If we were faced with this type of an environment consistent with our behavior in past similar circumstances, we would execute mitigation plans and they would take the form of head count reductions, investment delays, and further discretionary spending reductions. Specifically, if the environment resulted in us experiencing a flat organic revenue performance versus our current view of 3% growth, we would take cost actions to hold EPS relatively close to our guidance range. Clearly, if a more severe environment were to occur, which appears unlikely at this stage, we would focus on protecting our earnings base as much as possible, similar to the approach we took in 2009. Now, moving on to the summary page. We are very pleased with the business' performance in 2015. We witnessed strong operational execution to overcome a host of external challenges including $220 million of foreign exchange headwinds, which delivered ultimately organic growth of 6% at the top end of our targeted range; a record operating margin rate of 14.2%, which was up 90 basis points versus the prior year; and of course, double-digit EPS growth. We are also encouraged with the progress in our Security business, particularly Security Europe, which really made meaningful improvements on all fronts. As we look to 2016, we are focused on positioning the company to manage through another year of turbulent markets and severe foreign exchange headwinds. As such, we remain committed to our core objectives: maintaining our focus on organic growth through both continued innovation and commercial excellence; ensuring progress within the Security segment to maintain the momentum we saw in 2015; of course, executing on additional cost and pricing actions to help partially offset our FX headwinds; and also being prepared to take further actions as conditions warrant; as always, maintaining our perpetual focus on working capital management and improving that as we move forward; and importantly, leveraging the pillars of SFS 2.0; and to continue driving momentum in 2016 and beyond. That concludes the presentation portion of the call. Now, we move to Q&A. Greg Waybright - Vice President-Investor & Government Relations: Don, thanks. Stephanie, we can now open the call to Q&A please.