Jason Berg
Analyst · Zacks Investment Research. Please go ahead
Thanks, Joe. Yesterday we reported fourth quarter earnings of $0.04 a share compared to $0.56 per share for the same period of fiscal 2018. I’m going to go through a few of the adjustments here to get us back to more of an apples to apples comparison. So for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2018, we have recorded an additional net tax benefit of $16.5 million related to our insurance companies recognizing the Tax Reform Act. If you exclude this item from the previous year, we had adjusted losses of $0.28 per share. Again, that’s compared to earnings of $0.04 a share this year. For the full-year of fiscal 2019, we reported net earnings of $18.93 a share compared to $40.36 per share for all of fiscal 2018. 2018 results included two large significant likely nonrecurring events. One was the sale of part of our Chelsea New York location. We recorded a net gain -- a gain net of taxes of $7.34 a share. The other event was the Tax Reform Act and for the full-year the net benefit to us was $18.16 per share. So we think a useful supplemental measurement is to look at our earnings excluding these items, which results in adjusted earnings per share for the previous year of $14.86. Again, that’s compared to this year's result of $18.93. And we’ve a reconciliation of these amounts included in our press release as well. Moving on to the business. Equipment rental revenues increased just about 7% over $34 million for the quarter, and we finished the full-year with a $174 million increase, again, close to 7%. During the quarter and for the full-year, our in-town and one-way revenues both increased, as did the number of trucks, trailers and towing devices in our rental fleet. We also saw an increase as Joe mentioned on account of our independent dealers and company operated locations. During the end of the third quarter and into the fourth quarter we experienced increased corporate account activity or what many of you might refer to as last mile delivery business, which accounted for a portion of the fourth quarter improvement. It is possible that we will see some trailing repair costs associated with these rentals here in the next quarter or two. U-Move revenue growth has continued into the first half of the upcoming quarter. Capital expenditures on new rental trucks and trailers were $1,163 million for fiscal 2019, that’s up from a $1,007 million last year. Proceeds from the sales of retired equipment also increased from $491 million to $603 million as we made progress normalizing our resale schedule, recovering from the effects of the OEM recalls the previous year. Our initial projection for rental CapEx in fiscal 2020 contemplates an increase in box truck spending. We are estimating the growth spend of about $1.3 billion. We are also projecting improvement in proceeds from the sales of equipment, which combining the growth spend in the sales, we are expecting net fleet CapEx somewhere around $700 million. Storage revenues were up just under $12 million or 14% for the quarter. And for the year we finished up $43 million, close to 13%. A portion of the revenue gain -- large portion of the revenue gain came from growth in occupied rooms. If you look at our occupied room count at March 31 compared to the previous year at the same day, we had an increase of 35,400 occupied rooms. That spread from the previous year has continued to widen now into April and May. If you are to go back a year and look at that statistic, we were up 23,000 rooms last year at this time. We are also continuing to see an improvement in our underlying revenue square foot from increasing rates on most of our in-place locations. I wanted to give you a little bit more information regarding our reported occupancy figures. Our reported occupancy or average occupancy throughout all of fiscal 2019 was just under 69%. I’ve been providing some additional color on the occupancy for facilities open three years or more. So for those locations that were open at least three years as of this time last year, their average occupancy here over the last year increased about 130 basis points to just under 86%. Our real estate related CapEx for fiscal 2019 was $1,003 million. That’s up from $607 million last year at this time. During all of fiscal 2019, we added just over 5.3 million net rentable square feet to the portfolio with about a 1.5 million of that coming online in the fourth quarter. Operating earnings in moving and storage segment for the quarter increased by $24 million to $13 million. And for the year, I’m going to exclude the real estate gain from last year, for the year increased $52 million to $569 million. I want to go through a couple of the expense highlights here for the quarter. The largest improvement for the fourth quarter of this year -- for the fourth quarter was reduction in personnel costs. During the fourth quarter of last year, we paid $20 million bonus related to income tax reform. This did not recur in fiscal 2019. If you exclude the variances from bonus compensation, personnel cost as a percent of total revenue were still in line with the fourth quarter of last year and for the full-year. For the quarter, our total fleet repair costs were up about $3 million and for the year up $46 million. While we feel we're continuing to make progress on this front, nearly all the improvement for the quarter came from a reduction in volume of units being prepped for sale. We are continuing to work on lowering the cost incurred per truck. Depreciation and lease expense associated with the rental fleet increased $2 million for the quarter and we were up $13 million for the year. We’ve continued to invest in the fleet, which resulted in the average fleet size over the course of all of last year being up close to 3% and if you look just point-to-point end of the year versus end of the year, we are close to 3.5%. Gains on the sale of rental equipment were flat for the quarter and up over $15 million for the year. A few additional operating expenses that we saw increases in during the quarter included shipping and fuel costs associated with the delivery of our U-Boxes, legal and professional fees and property taxes and utility costs. One -- also of note, during the fourth quarter, our insurance subsidiary Oxford terminated a reinsurance agreement on a block of life insurance policies. The accounting for this termination and the transfer of the reserves in the underlying assets back to the other party led to some odd looking premium and benefit results for the quarter. But at the end of the day, this resulted in a small gap gain for Oxford for the quarter. During the fourth quarter of fiscal 2019, we declared $0.50 per share cash dividend, that was paid in April. That brings the total amount of cash dividends declared for fiscal $2019 to $2 a share. And finally at March 31 of this year, cash and availability from existing loan facilities totaled $725 million on our moving and storage segment. With that, I would like to hand the call back to Nancy to begin the question-and-answer portion of call. Thank you.