Ted Owen
Analyst · KeyBanc Capital. Your line is now open
Thanks, Greg. As I've reported to you in each of our calls this year, calendar 2016 has been and continues to be a difficult year for our business and for our customers. Our clients continue to be strongly biased toward deferrals or scope reductions, wherever and whenever practically safe, regulation compliant and within applicable industry operating standards. As I have reported in our last two calls, we continue to track projects that have been deferred or canceled in 2016. A listing that now total $60 million that have either moved from the original start date, that's about $45 million or have been canceled all together, and that's about $15 million. 70% of the deferred have been moved to 2017 or later with only about 20% of those projects still expected to occur in 2016. That leaves about 10% of the projects whose timing is uncertain. That’s exactly the condition we reported in May and again in August, and that drove our decision to discontinue earnings guidance for 2016. In addition to in-market headwinds as Greg reported our business is also subject to significant seasonality with a summer and winter months being our weakest months during the year. And as we both have indicated in our press release and in the Greg’s commentary, the months of July and August were significantly weaker than any months we’ve experienced so far this year. For those two months, our revenues were actually down on a pro-forma basis by 18% year-over-year, where the month of August being down by 23%. In fact, for the two months, the first two months of the quarter July and August, we were actually sitting on a loss of $0.25 per share. The good news is that the month of September represented our best month in over a year in terms of revenue and incremental profitability and actually got us back to nearly a breakeven adjusted EPS for the quarter. While one month does not necessarily tell a story or indicate a trend, I do want to spend a moment focusing on September, because I think it's indicative of the results we should expect as end market conditions improve. On relatively flat, month-over-month revenues we achieved a gross margin of 31% for the month of September, which was two points better than pro-forma results for a year ago. Our total SG&A cost in the month adjusted of 21% revenues was two percentage points better that pro-forma September 2015. Our month of September adjusted EBIT percentage of 10% was four points better than pro-forma September 2015 and our adjusted EBITDA percent for the month of 13.4% was 3.5 points better than pro-forma EBITDA for September 2015. The even better news about the follow recovery is that the strong activity levels that we saw in September have extended through October. While we haven't closed the books, on the month yet, I can report that year-over-year activity levels have continued on the trajectory of September signs have continuing - that continue to point to end market recovery. We have set all along that the soft market environment of 2016 is temporary. Customer project and maintenance deferrals can only last for a relatively short period of time and we expect our markets to begin improving in 2017. The corollary to softer than expected market conditions into 2016 is that more pent up demand has shifted into and is developing for 2017 and 2018. In fact, we're beginning to see signs from both larger, major integrated operator and smaller more downstream focus operators of improving end markets based on our fall activity levels and on our customer's commentary about their 2017 and beyond plan. We're also making excellent progress toward achieving the merger related synergies we’ve targeted in the Qualspec acquisition and Furmanite merger. As you know, we've estimated total merger related cost synergies to be about $25 million and at this point in time, we have already specifically identified 22 million of that target estimate. These synergy driven savings will be realized over the course of the next year. Additionally, we've identified margin expansion opportunities for the combine team Furmanite well beyond the cost synergies identify. These performance improvement opportunities relating to service and product mix standardization, specialty service pricing, technology applications and enablement and business process reengineering will take longer to consistently capture. The lead time maybe longer but these performances improvement opportunities are within our direct control and influence to effect. And we've already begun opportunistically realizing these benefits. The point is no one will be better positions and team to capitalize and improving market conditions in 2017 and 2018. If you recall my commentary from our last call, I said that by the end of 2017, even with modest growth targets, we believe our total business should be achieving 9% EBIT margins and 13% EBITDA margins. For calendar 2018, that would represent an adjusted EBIT of about 130 million and an adjusted EBITDA target of nearly 200 million on revenues of about 1.5 billion. Our soft overall results for the third quarter have not changed our view of that at all. In fact, our September results and our October activity levels are firmed I believe in those targets. So what would have to be true to move us in a normalized market toward these goals? Simply achieving the same margins for full year that we've achieved in the month of September, that’s our goal and we are confident we can do that with normalized end market environment and attention to execution and resource balancing and the realization of merger related and performance improvement initiatives we have underway. As Greg reported, we are also well-underway with a rollout of our advanced ERP implementation with our first wave of locations up and running, just this week. I want to pause here and congratulate our entire ERP project team, a team that we call Project Next. There are more than 100 of our team colleagues who been dedicated to this effort; Project Team, Pilot Branches, Wave One Branches and Functional Support Personnel. These guys and gals have been diligently working long hours over an extended period of time to make this happen. And I just want to just pause for a second and say thanks to all of you for a job well done. Now back to my prepared remarks. Integrating Furmanite and Qualspec to take full advantage of our respected streams and expanded service capability and market access is hard work. We’re consolidating customer contracts. We’re moving people and equipment across all three legacy organizations. We’re combining physical locations among many other things. This is not just managing three distinct businesses. It's fully integrating Qualspec and Furmanite into our legacy businesses. And while we're doing it, we are focusing on building upon the Team culture of safety and quality awareness and service excellence that has been such an important part of our success for many years. The deeper we have engaged in the integration processes for both the Qualspec and Furmanite, the more confident I have become about the associated value creation. I've spoken during each of our past three calls about the five key elements that we believe constitute our value - our current value proposition, and the foundation by which we are extending the magnitude and sustainability of our competitive distinction. In summary, these competitive advantages are, first, industrial services market leadership, offering a balanced portfolio of inspection in specialty mechanical services. Second, the ability to provide standardized services all the way up to customize fully integrated solutions to our customers. Third, having a highly trained and experienced workforce of now more than 8000 employees delivering safe reliable service. Fourth, the practical use of technology. As an example, we're developing a fully digitalized - digitized process from data capture to data analysis to field level work order generation and reporting of actions taken; a tool already gaining customer acceptance. And finally, regional resources and responses. That's leveraging the availability of our resources and equipment at over 220 locations in 22 countries. 2016 has indeed been a difficult year, tough end markets, heavy lifts involving two major business integrations and the implementation of a robust ERP platform to support our growth for the foreseeable future. As we say internally, 2016 is the year to get it done. 2017 is the year to turn the corner and 2018 is the year to fully realize the economic potential of being the premier global industrial service company. We're well on our way. And with that, let me open it up to questions.