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Unisys Corporation (UIS)

Q3 2013 Earnings Call· Tue, Oct 22, 2013

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, and welcome to the Unisys Third Quarter 2013 Results Conference Call. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Mr. Neils Christensen, Vice President, Investor Relations at Unisys Corporation. Please go ahead, sir.

Niels Christensen

Management

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Earlier today, Unisys released its third quarter 2013 financial results. With us this afternoon to discuss our results are Ed Coleman, our CEO; and Janet Haugen our CFO. Before we begin, I want to cover a few housekeeping details. First, today's conference call and the Q&A session are being webcast via the Unisys investor website. Second, you can find the earnings press release and the presentation slides that we will be using this afternoon to guide our discussion on our investor website. Third, today's presentation, which is complementary to the earnings press release, include some non-GAAP financial measures. These have been provided in an effort to give investors additional information. The non-GAAP measures have been reconciled to the related GAAP measures and we provided reconciliation charts at the end of the presentation. Finally, I'd like to remind you all that all forward-looking statements made during this conference call are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. These factors are discussed more fully in the earnings release and in the company's SEC filings. Copies of these SEC reports are available from the SEC and from the Unisys investor website. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Ed.

J. Edward Coleman

Management

Thanks, Neils. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to discuss our third quarter 2013 financial results. Please turn to Slide 4 to begin our discussion. Despite margin improvement in our services business during the third quarter, we were unable to offset significantly lower technology revenue. As a result, while profitable on a pretax basis, we had a net loss in the quarter. As we've previously said, our technology revenue can vary significantly from quarter to quarter, depending on the timing of deal closures, which is why this business is best measured on an annual rather than a quarterly basis. We look for a strong fourth quarter in our technology business and have already closed a number of key deals. We remain focused on achieving our goal of maintaining stable technology revenue for the full year of 2013 compared with 2012 levels. In our services business, revenue was down 4% in the quarter, mostly driven by weakness in the public sector market in our Asia Pacific region. However, we saw improvement in our services operating profit margins in the quarter, as we focused on higher margin services and worked to lower our cost of service delivery. We were also encouraged by improvement in our services orders, our second consecutive quarter of year-over-year services order growth. As we look ahead to 2014 and beyond, we're excited about our growth opportunities in the solution areas where we are investing. Slide 5 shows these investment areas. In our technology business, we're investing in software and server products to take advantage of our engineering strengths and intellectual property to help organizations address mission-critical computing challenges. Earlier this month, we announced 2 exciting new technology offerings: Stealth for mobile, which is the newest member of our growing family of Stealth cybersecurity products; and…

Janet Brutschea Haugen

Management

Thanks, Ed, and hello, everyone. Let me start with our overall third quarter 2013 financial results. Please turn to Slide 9. At the top line, we reported revenue of $792 million in the quarter, which was down 10% year-over-year. Currency had a 1 percentage point negative impact on our revenue in the quarter. Following a strong second quarter, our technology revenue declined 44% year-over-year in the third quarter, principally due to lower ClearPath sales. We remain focused on achieving our goal of flat technology revenue for the full year. We closed a number of technology deals early in the fourth quarter and are working many fourth quarter technology opportunities. Services revenue declined 4% year-over-year, down 2% on a constant currency basis. Based on today's rates, we anticipate currency will have a minimal impact on revenue comparisons in the fourth quarter of 2013 when compared to the fourth quarter of 2012. As a result of the lower year-over-year technology revenue, our gross profit margin declined from 24.9% in the third quarter of 2012 to 21.7% in the third quarter of 2013. Operating expenses fell by 6% year-over-year in the third quarter of 2013. Our operating expense reductions in the quarter more than offset the incremental investments we continue to make in our growth initiatives, including Stealth, Forward!, application managed services and ITSM. Interest expense decreased by more than 2/3 from $7.8 million in the third quarter of 2012 to $2.4 million in the third quarter of 2013, reflecting the impact of our debt reduction and the refinancing in the third quarter of 2012. Other income expense for the third quarter of 2013 was $1.9 million of other income. This compares to $25.8 million of other expense in the year ago quarter, which was primarily related to debt reduction charges of $23.1…

J. Edward Coleman

Management

Great. Thank you, Janet. Operator, we'd like to open the call up to questions, if we may.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And we'll go to Bill Smith with William Smith & Company.

William S. Smith - Wm Smith Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Ed, could you guys comment on Forward! in the fourth quarter, when you might be in the market or are you in the market now with Forward!, and what kind of follow-through you think you'll see there?

J. Edward Coleman

Management

Bill, we announced that the first week of October at the Gartner symposium, formally announced that we have shipped a handful of data systems at this point to those initial customers and we're not doing -- the first real customer ship program begins at the first week of December of this year. So I would expect limited impact from Forward! in the fourth quarter, from a revenue and profit standpoint.

William S. Smith - Wm Smith Securities, Inc.

Analyst

And on the marketing side, is that a direct sale or could that also be part of the VAR channel?

J. Edward Coleman

Management

Yes, we anticipate that it will be part of the VAR channel, but certainly a direct sale, but we expect this will also go through indirect channels as well.

William S. Smith - Wm Smith Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Great. And could you comment on Stealth, what you saw in the third quarter after you announced the Amazon relationship in June, what you've seen and what kind of a response you've gotten there with Stealth?

J. Edward Coleman

Management

I think I feel good about the response we're getting from Stealth. I think it's still early days. We have a number of early implementations and first sales in a number of different accounts, but we are ramping that up. We're excited about the channel acceptance of it and they're ramping up to support and sell it. But again, it's early days and we'll continue to keep driving it on.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] We'll now go to Glenn Mattson with Sidoti & Company. Glenn Mattson - Sidoti & Company, LLC: So it's nice to see the service business get a little bit better. I want to be clear though on the technology side. You keep talking about, I guess, projecting something stable year-over-year, so that would imply a kind of enormous ramp into Q4. And you did say you closed some deals, so is much of the weakness in technology a timing issue, is that basically what you're trying to say?

J. Edward Coleman

Management

Yes, I think, Glenn, we've been saying for probably 3 years now, our goal has been to keep the technology business flat. And we've kept it flat -- actually grown it the last 3 years. And one of the things that we keep reiterating is the fact that it's a very difficult business to forecast on a quarter-by-quarter basis based on the timing of when customers elect to take on either increases in capacity or renew their existing software implementation. So quarter by quarter, it can be a challenging business to forecast, which is why we always say you ought to look at it on a full year basis. Glenn Mattson - Sidoti & Company, LLC: Okay. But even thinking about that, though, with -- even assuming down year-over-year, marginally down or something, you still have to do almost like 50% of your enterprise class server and software sales in Q4 just to get to a number like that. And then that would even be year-over-year like something north of 30%, off of what's a strong Q4 '12. So but what you're saying is you think that kind of -- those kind of results are still achievable?

J. Edward Coleman

Management

Yes, we see the capability of getting there and that remains our goal, to do just that. Glenn Mattson - Sidoti & Company, LLC: Okay. That's great. And then -- so the weakness in Australia and New Zealand, can you explain -- it was public sector weakness, could you explain -- give a little more detail as to why we saw that?

Janet Brutschea Haugen

Management

Yes, Glenn. There were some changing governmental -- in the governments within Australia that caused some projects to be put on hold, reevaluated. And that caused impact on us in the quarter. Not anything that we think is something that is a systemic problem in that business. It more has to do with the timing of activity and, in particular, project-based work there. Glenn Mattson - Sidoti & Company, LLC: Okay. Sounds good. And then I guess the last thing I would've asked is that you also talked about -- when you talked about Stealth and Forward!, that there could possibly be more of a shift in technology into a growth mode. That's, obviously, the encouraging news. So I guess, will we look to maybe next quarter to get maybe a longer-term kind of layout of where we think technology segment can go over the next couple of years?

J. Edward Coleman

Management

I think that's right. That's right.

Operator

Operator

And there are no other questions at this time. I'd like to turn the call back over to Ed -- Mr. Ed Coleman.

J. Edward Coleman

Management

So, great. Just to reiterate what I said earlier and Janet said, as well, we, again, are pleased with the improvement in services business in the third quarter, but recognize that we have a big quarter coming up in the fourth quarter in order to hit our goals around the technology business and achieve the results that we're looking for. So we look forward to reporting back to you after the fourth quarter and appreciate you joining this call. Thank you very much.