Ira Birns
Analyst · Bank of America. Please go ahead
Thank you, Michael, and good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Before I get into the company's results for the second quarter, I would like to reiterate our thanks to our 5,000 loyal employees worldwide who dedicated countless hours to our business during a quarter, which has posed some unique challenges for the world and, of course, our company. The resilience of our company and commitment to best-in-class service has differentiated us as a solid counter-party with a sustainable business model for decades, and this has only been further accentuated over the past few months. While the timing of returning to any sense of normalcy remains unclear, we remain focused on our long-term strategy, which encompasses strategic growth in our core businesses and a continual focus on cost and balance sheet management to deliver greater value for our shareholders and other stakeholders, while, of course, looking after the health and safety of all of our employees worldwide. And now I will provide you with our financial update. As usual, please note that the following figures exclude the impact of pretax non-operational items in the second quarter, which have been highlighted in our earnings release. The non-operational expenses in the second quarter principally consisted of an $18.6 million asset impairment relating to our decision to rationalize our global office footprint in light of the new world we are living in. Some of our office locations will simply transition to a more permanent remote work environment and some will be relocated to smaller, more flexible and cost-effective locations. Non-operational expenses also included costs related to certain other organizational changes as well as acquisition and divestiture-related expenses. To assist you, as always in reconciling results published in our earnings release, a breakdown of the non-operational items can be found on our website, and they're also on the last slide of today's webcast. So now let me get into some second quarter highlights. Adjusted second quarter net income and earnings per share were $8 million and $0.13 per share. Adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter was $57 million. And lastly, we generated $236 million of cash flow from operations, which enabled us to continue to maintain more than $1 billion in total available liquidity, a critically important metric during this time period. Consolidated revenue for the second quarter was $3.2 billion. The significant year-over-year decline was driven principally by the dramatic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our segment volumes as well as significantly lower average fuel prices during the quarter due to the unprecedented impact of the pandemic on global demand. Our aviation segment volume was 690 million gallons in the second quarter, representing a sequential decline slightly less than the 65% decline forecasted on last quarter's call. Although we experienced relatively strong volumes related to cargo activity in certain business and general aviation customers, commercial passenger activity remained at levels below 25% of normal activity, and that was the principal driver of the volume decline in the second quarter. Volume in our marine segment for the second quarter was 4 million metric tons, down approximately 18% sequentially, driven principally by the negative impact of the pandemic, our core reselling activity, including sales to cruise lines, experienced most of the volume decline. We are hopeful that second quarter volumes were the low point as we are beginning to see some increased activity in certain segments of the marine market. Our land segment volume was 1.2 billion gallons or gallon equivalents during the second quarter. That's a 50% decrease sequentially. While volume declines in our land segment were not as significant as the aviation and marine segments, we did experience volume declines in our retail, commercial and industrial and connect businesses. Consolidated gross profit for the second quarter was $214 million. That's a decrease of 20% compared to the second quarter of 2019. Our aviation segment contributed $92 million of gross profit in the second quarter. That's down 35% year-over-year and basically flat sequentially, but significantly above the expectation shared on last quarter's call. Despite the significant decline in traditional passenger activity during the quarter as well as a decline in government-related activity as a result of the ongoing drawdown of troops in Afghanistan, we did benefit from some situation-specific, non-traditional activity arising from the pandemic, such as repatriation flights and the repositioning of aircraft. We also benefited from historic inventory volatility experienced during the quarter, whereas many of you know, crude oil prices started out at $20, then technically dropped to negative 40 and ultimately ended the quarter at just under $40. The resulting return to a contango market following the somewhat prolonged backwardated market environment, served to contribute positively to our second quarter aviation results as well. While we are slowly beginning to see an increase in volume during the early part of the third quarter in many parts of the world, we expect aviation gross profit in the third quarter to be generally flat sequentially due to reduced price volatility as compared to the second quarter as well as an expected further decline in activity in Afghanistan. Obviously, with the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic globally, performance in the latter part of the year remains difficult to forecast at this stage. The marine segment generated second quarter gross profit of $37 million, representing a slight increase year-over-year and generally in line with the guidance we provided on last quarter's call. As we look ahead to the third quarter, we expect a modest sequential increase in marine gross profit, driven principally by seasonality and the modest volume growth in our core business mentioned earlier. Our land segment delivered gross profit of $85 million in the second quarter, down 8% year-over-year. Land results were actually better-than-expected at the start of the quarter as gas and diesel activity began rebounding midway through the quarter and the strength of our UK operations in the first quarter of this year actually continued into the early part of the second quarter. However, many customer segments, such as the busing sector, for example, continue to be constrained until related markets reopen. Looking ahead to the third quarter, we expect land gross profit to decline sequentially due principally to traditional seasonal weakness in the UK. Our core operating expenses, which exclude our bad debt expense, were $154 million in the second quarter, down more than $20 million sequentially and just below the guidance provided on last quarter's call. As mentioned last quarter, we made immediate cost-related decisions as the pandemic began impacting our business activity. These measures included a global hiring freeze and other organizational changes, the postponement or elimination of all non-essential projects and a reduction in discretionary spending. With the broader learnings stemming from our ability to effectively operate many functions within our business with a remote workforce, we explored the opportunity to rationalize our global office footprint, as mentioned earlier, which we expect will result in additional annualized cost reductions of close to $10 million, while ensuring a healthy and agile work environment for our employees as we look towards 2021 and beyond. Based on the actions taken to date and our continued efforts to identify additional cost-saving opportunities, we expect core operating expenses to be in the range of $149 million to $154 million in the third quarter, representing another sequential decline in operating expenses. Last quarter, we mentioned the likelihood that bad debt expense would increase over the balance of the year, considering the strain COVID-19 has placed on the global transportation industry and many of our customers around the world. As a result, our bad debt expense increased to $25 million in the second quarter, principally due to the establishment of reserves related to a few notable bankruptcies in the commercial aviation market. While our consolidated receivables portfolio was down from $2.9 billion at year-end to $1.4 billion in June and aviation's receivable portfolio is down from $1 billion to just over $400 million over the same time period, risk levels clearly remain elevated. However, our underwriting team has done a fantastic job managing through this crisis and the challenging market conditions we've experienced since March. Despite the historic market conditions experienced in the second quarter, we still delivered $35 million of adjusted income from operations. I think that's another testament to the work of our team and they're laser-focused on supporting our customers through these unprecedented times while also carefully managing costs throughout the quarter. In the second quarter, non-operating expenses, which is principally interest expense, was $14.9 million, which is down 15% year-over-year, primarily driven by a decrease in borrowing rates. While we have been making progress in reducing our tax rate over the past several quarters, due to the pandemic's negative impact on our profitability, most notably in the United States, as well as discrete tax items recorded during the quarter, we had an unusually high tax rate this quarter. At this point, considering the current environment, it is difficult to forecast our effective tax rate for the second half of the year, but it is now more likely that our rate will be over 30% over the next two quarters. Our team did a fantastic job managing working capital during the second quarter, resulting in $236 million of operating cash flow. While prices were extremely volatile during the quarter, lower prices combined with significant volume declines contributed to a reduction in working capital that resulted in substantial cash flow generation. Our net debt position declined by more than $200 million sequentially to $450 million in the second quarter, again due to our strong operating cash flow. This resulted in a further decline in our net debt-to-EBITDA ratio to 1.2 times, and our total available liquidity remained at more than $1 billion consistent with or actually somewhat above our liquidity position at the beginning of the second quarter. Obviously, looking forward, our available liquidity is dependent in great part upon our future performance and cash flows. The strength of our balance sheet is a result of a phenomenal remote team effort involving our commercial business, our underwriting and collection teams and many other members of our organization. Finally, today's announcement of the sale of our multi-service payment solutions business represents a significant step in our strategy to sharpen our portfolio of businesses. Exiting this line of business will enable us to continue to simplify our business and focus our attention on driving growth and greater digitization in our core businesses, accelerating our ability to drive greater operating efficiencies and returns. While the proceeds from the sale, which is expected to close within 90 days, will initially be utilized to repay outstanding debt, it also will provide us with additional capital to strategically invest in our core businesses. In closing, like most businesses worldwide, our business has clearly been impacted by the global pandemic. Our employees, our customers, our suppliers and even our shareholders have all been impacted. Despite the continuing need to run our business remotely, our global team pulled together to deliver reasonably good second quarter results, given current circumstances. While we have no direct control over the timing of a return to any sense of normalcy, we remain focused on our core priorities of keeping our employees safe, serving our customers with excellence, driving growth in our core businesses and continuing to improve our operating efficiencies, all of which should contribute positively to shareholder returns. Thank you, and please be safe. I would now like to turn the call back over to our operator for Q&A.