Stephane Bello
Analyst · TD Securities. Your line is open
Thank you, Jim and good morning or good afternoon, to you all. Before, I begin discussing our first quarter results. I would like to cover two housekeeping items. First, as Frank mentioned when discussing our performance against the prior year. I will be comparing year-on-year results excluding IP & Science, which is now classified as a discontinued operation. These will hold true for all metrics except free cash flow, which includes IP & Science and is not restated as has always been our practice. Second as Jim mentioned, currency had a smaller impact on the results than last year. However and always, I will talk to revenue growth before currency. So onto our results. On a constant currency basis, our first quarter revenues were up 1%. Our financial business was down 1%, while our legal and Tax and Accounting business grew 4% in aggregate during the quarter. Adjusted EBITDA was up 2%, with the margin of 80 basis points to 26.8%. Currency had a 70 basis points favorable impact on the margin. Operating profit was up 8% in the first quarter, with the margin at 17.8%, up 150 basis points, and currency had also 70 basis points favorable impact on the margin. So the pre-currency improvements of 10 basis points at the EBITDA level and 80 basis points at the operating margin level reflected genuine improvement in the underlying performance of the business, as there were no material severance charges taken either in the first quarter last year or this year. Now let me provide you with some additional color on the performance of our individual businesses, starting with legal. Demand for legal services in the US market as measured by Peer Monitor showed a modest improvement in the first three months of the year. As Jim said, it's too early to call this a trend, but it is a positive start of the year nonetheless. During the first quarter, legal grew 2%, an encouraging performance given the difficult year-on-year comparison this segment faced, as legal grew 3% in the prior year period. Transaction revenues for the quarter, which represents 12% of the total, were down 1%, whereas they were up 13% last year. And subscription revenues which accounted for about 74% of the total, were up 3%. The continued strong performance of our subscription revenue base during the quarter is a good indicator of the underlying strength of the business. Turning to profitability metrics, the EBITDA margin was up 160 basis points to 36.3%, while the operating profit margin increased 240 basis points to 29%. Currency, at 120 basis points favorable impact on gross margins. This improvement in margin during the quarter was in part explained by a stronger performance in our US Print business, which was due to timing and I'll come back to this, in a moment. Now here's a more detailed look at the performance from a revenue perspective of the three main sub-segments in our legal business. US online information which was 42% of the total, was up 2% consistent with the performance reporting the previous two quarters. In fact, this marks the fifth consecutive quarter of positive growth for this segment. High on net sales and retention rates were the key contributing factors. US Print revenues were down 3% during the quarter. Now this better than usual performance was timing related and we still expect the full year performance for US Print to be comparable to the 6% reduction, we experienced in 2015. And finally of Solutions Businesses made up 44% of revenues in the first quarter. And revenue growth for the quarter, came in at 3% against a very challenging prior year comparison of 10% growth, which was the high watermark for 2015. The weaker growth performance in Q1 was attributable to the reduction in transaction revenue growth I mentioned earlier, so we continue to expect mid single-digit growth for the Solution Businesses for the full year. Now turning to our Tax and Accounting business. Revenues in the first quarter grew 8%, recurring revenues which were about 82% of the total, grew 11%. From a profit standpoint, EBITDA was 10% lower than the prior year period. With the margin down 450 basis points and excluding currency, the margin was down 580 basis points. Operating profit was down 15%, with the margin down 500 basis points and 620 basis points before currency. Now the key drivers of the contraction in margins are two-fold. First; the first quarter of 2015 included the benefit of several small one-time items, which made it the highest margin quarter of the year, apart from Q4 obviously which is where we report higher revenues due to seasonality and we did not see, these one-time benefit repeat themselves in 2016. Second, we incurred some severance cost and also made some growth investments during the quarter. As discussed earlier, these severance cost were not material enough to call them out of the consolidated level, but they did temporarily impact the margins of our Tax and Accounting business. As we said in the past, small items can have a disproportionate impact on the quality margin performance of this business. And therefore, it is more appropriate to look at the margin performance of Tax and Accounting over the full year. And on the full year basis, we still expect Tax and Accounting to deliver a solid margin performance, while at the same time making the strategic investments required to maintain its revenue growth momentum, beyond 2016. As you can see on this slide, our Professional and Corporate segments, which represents almost three quarters of the business continued a strong performance, delivering growth of 5% and 17% respectively in the first quarter. Knowledge Solutions revenue grew 1%, while Tax and Accounting small segment, the Government business, so revenue declined by 7%. As we have stated before, revenues for the Government business are less predictable in nature and are more prone to fluctuate quarter-by-quarter. Now turning to a Financial and Risk business. First quarter revenues were down 3% on a reported basis, versus down 6% in the first quarter last year. This currency once again having [ph] an impact. Before currency revenues were down 1% compared to the prior year period. As we have pointed out on prior calls, there are currently two temporary factors that have a dampening impact on F&R's reported growth rate. The first is a decreasing recovery revenues, which negatively impacted F&R's revenue growth by 140 basis points in the first quarter. This was expected, as some of our partners moved to a direct billing arrangement with our customers. And also impacting revenues in Q1 with the ongoing commercial pricing adjustments on our remaining legacy foreign exchange products. Now excluding recoveries in these pricing adjustments. F&R's revenues, would have increased by about 2%, building upon similar performance in the previous two quarters. The foreign exchange commercial pricing adjustments are expected to be completed in the second half of 2016. Turning to the first quarter profitability metrics. EBITDA was up 9% and the reported EBITDA margin for the quarter was up 320 basis points. Excluding currency, the margin was up 260 basis points reflecting the benefit associated with last year's platform closures. As we mentioned during the fourth quarter earnings call, we expect our financial business to show continuing year-on-year improvement in its underlying EBITDA margin this year and this was clearly the case in the first quarter. Operating profit was up 22%, with the reported margin increasing 400 basis points and increasing a solid 380 basis points, before currency. Looking at the Financial and Risk revenue in a bit more detail. You can see that recovering revenues, which were 77% of the total in the first quarter were up 1%, which can be attributed to the annual price increase and to the positive impact of net sales throughout 2015. This is encouraging, as this is the portion of F&R's revenue base that is impacted by the pricing adjustments taking place in our legacy foreign exchange desktops. Now as a reminder, the majority of these pricing adjustments have now been made. Meaning, that the impact on growth is smaller than what we have observed in 2015. Turning to recoveries, these pass-through revenues made up about 9% of the total and they were down 13% in Q1. As we explained on the fourth quarter call, we expect these reductions to have a noticeable impact on revenue growth throughout 2016, but then we'll have no impact on EBITDA or operating profit. Transaction revenues, which is 14% of the total, were down 1% in the first quarter. While volumes in the quarter rebounded somewhat, on what we saw in the fourth quarter. They were not strong enough to put us in positive growth territory versus the prior year period. Now let me update you on our free cash flow and earnings per share performance. And I'll start with free cash flow performance for the first quarter, which we're presenting with and without the contribution of IP & Science. Starting from the bottom of the slide. Free cash flow for Q1 was $223 million compared to negative $65 million in the prior year. The key drivers of this strong performance were working capital improvements, the timing of CapEx and higher EBITDA. Overall, Q1 free cash flow came in quite strong, as we typically are in a negative free cash flow position in the first quarter. Now the IP & Science contribution to free cash flow was $111 million fourth quarter, a $4 million over prior year. As you can see, IP & Science generates a great deal of its free cash flow in the first quarter. So we will expect this divestiture to have a modest impact on free cash flow this year, with the real impact of the sale on our free cash flow performance happening primarily in 2017. To excluding IP & Science the free cash flow generated by our continuing operations was $112 million, an improvement of almost $300 million over the prior year period. Turning to our earnings per share performance, first quarter adjusted EPS increased $0.09 to $0.40 per share, which represents a 23% increase compared to the prior year. $0.03 of this improvement was driven by a stronger underlying profit performance, another $0.02 was due to having a lower share count compared to the prior year period. And by the way, during the first quarter we did buyback 11.7 million shares at a cost of $432 million. And as you can see, the remainder of the improvement was contributed by other factors that are highlighted on this slide. Currency only had $0.01 favorable impact during the quarter, which was a welcomed change from what we experienced throughout 2015. So to wrap up, I would say that we're off to steady start this year. And based on the first quarter results, we're reaffirming our outlook for the full year. With that, let me turn it back over to Frank to take some questions.