Earnings Labs

Zebra Technologies Corporation (ZBRA)

Q4 2014 Earnings Call· Tue, Mar 17, 2015

$219.28

-0.78%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning and welcome to the Zebra Technologies Q4 2014 Earnings Release Conference Call. Joining us from Zebra Technologies are Anders Gustafsson, CEO; Dean Lindroth, Vice President of Finance; Joe Heel, Senior Vice President; Mike Terzich, Senior Vice President, Global Sales and Marketing; and Doug Fox, Vice President of Investor Relations. All lines will be in a listen-only mode until after today's presentation. Instructions will be given at that time in order to ask a question. At the request of Zebra Technologies, this conference call is being recorded. Should anyone have any objections, please disconnect at this time. And I would now like to introduce Mr. Doug Fox of Zebra Technologies. Sir, you may begin. Douglas A. Fox - Treasurer & Vice President-Investor Relations: Thank you. Good morning. Thank you for joining us today. Certain statements made on this call will relate to future events or circumstances and therefore will be forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as expect, believe and anticipate are a few examples of words identifying a forward-looking statement. Forward-looking information is subject to various risks and uncertainties, which could significantly affect expected results. Risk factors were noted in the news release we issued this morning and are also described in Zebra's latest 10-K, which is on file with the SEC. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to Anders Gustafsson for some opening remarks. Anders Gustafsson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thank you, Doug, and good morning, everyone. We are pleased to report strong fourth quarter sales topping off a defining and historic year for Zebra Technologies, and culminating with the closing of the acquisition of the Enterprise business of Motorola Solutions. We entered 2015 with positive momentum and the year is off to a…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our first question is from Jeff Kessler from Imperial Capital.

Jeffrey Ted Kessler - Imperial Capital LLC

Analyst

Thank you. With regard to the growth that you showed in the legacy Zebra business, do you think it would have been 11% or 10.6% without the addition of the new Enterprise business? In other words were organic sales in the original business boosted by the fact that you had acquired the Motorola Enterprise business? Anders Gustafsson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Right. It's obviously very difficult to dissect exactly what revenue streams came in as part or were incremental as part of the acquisition and what might have fallen out. But I'd say my sense is that we probably grew a little faster on the printer side, because of the acquisition. And I'll give you two examples of this, one, was from how Motorola had gone to market with several printer partners prior to the acquisition. I think after we announced that obviously, we became exclusive with each other. So, I think that drove some incremental revenue, I believe. And the second one, more longer-term, more strategic here, I would say, is that the relationships we have seen with our largest customers and channel partners has improved based on the acquisition. People see us now as much more of a strategic partner, who can provide insight and counsel on a much broader set of technologies than what we could do before.

Jeffrey Ted Kessler - Imperial Capital LLC

Analyst

Good, thank you. My follow-up question is, I'm particularly interested in your statement that, as you get your ecosystem built up amongst the various partner groups, and you've talked about the vertical markets as well as the horizontal markets that you're looking at, you are going to be moving toward greater managed services. Could you discuss how that could affect, number one, margins; but number two, how that could affect your customer stickiness and what you're going to do to try to get to that point, and what hurdles remain to you to build up this ecosystem and get these vertical and horizontal matrices together? Anders Gustafsson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. So first, I'd say services, we see as a great long-term opportunity for us. We believe we have a number of dimensions that we can pursue to grow that business further and there was a much smaller part of the historical Zebra business versus the Enterprise business. We see services as the entire business, but maybe particular services as one where we need to have an ecosystem of partners. We don't have all the solutions for every type of situation, so we need to have ISVs come together with us. We need to have other integrators come together with us and we're certainly working to make sure that our reseller partners can also participate in the growth of services. And specific to managed services, we see that as a great way of providing a new type of value-added service to our customers that's probably more sticky and would have a more long-term effect, more of as a service type of delivery.

Jeffrey Ted Kessler - Imperial Capital LLC

Analyst

And these would include – some of these managed services would include what specifically? Anders Gustafsson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Managed services would include us managing an account – management of the infrastructure. So, we would know the health of the fleet. We would be able to know how many devices are turned on. We can manage softer downloads, battery life, a number of things to basically allow the customer to be much more focused on their business and not have to be distracted with running devices.

Jeffrey Ted Kessler - Imperial Capital LLC

Analyst

Okay. Great. Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

And our next question is from Keith Housum from Northcoast Research.

Keith Michael Housum - Northcoast Research Partners LLC

Analyst

Good morning, guys. Thanks for the question. Hey, Doug, I want to make sure I heard you right. Did you say FX was going to be a $0.60 headwind for EPS in the first quarter? Douglas A. Fox - Treasurer & Vice President-Investor Relations: Yep. That would be excluding any hedge offset.

Keith Michael Housum - Northcoast Research Partners LLC

Analyst

$0.60, wow, okay, I guess it'd be higher than what we have expected. And then if I could just drill down on your guidance of the $870 million to $890 million, that's on a constant currency basis? Douglas A. Fox - Treasurer & Vice President-Investor Relations: No.

Keith Michael Housum - Northcoast Research Partners LLC

Analyst

No. No. Okay, so $870 million, $890 million. Anders Gustafsson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Well, I'm going to let Dean answer that.

Dean Lindroth - Vice President of Finance, Zebra Technologies

Analyst

Yeah. No, the $870 million to $890 million is on a nominal basis. Within that, we're seeing Enterprise business relatively flattish. And some single-digit growth in terms of the printer product business, but no, the $870 million to $890 million is on a constant currency – excuse me, on a nominal basis. Excuse me.

Keith Michael Housum - Northcoast Research Partners LLC

Analyst

Okay. And you guys...

Dean Lindroth - Vice President of Finance, Zebra Technologies

Analyst

On constant currency though you would take the growth rate that we mentioned of 1% to 3% up to about 6% to 8%.

Keith Michael Housum - Northcoast Research Partners LLC

Analyst

Got you. Okay, appreciate that. And then, as we look at your restructuring cost that you had in the quarter, do you expect those to, I guess maintain the same level for the first quarter? Or will those be coming down significantly? What's your thoughts in terms of your restructuring cost, I guess, for all of FY2015?

Dean Lindroth - Vice President of Finance, Zebra Technologies

Analyst

I think directionally we're going to see some continuing trends in regard to the restructuring cost, I think from an integration cost perspective we've probably peaked and we'll start to see that number come down. But I do think on the restructuring basis, there is some additional activities yet to complete and you'll see some additional expenses there, at least in Q1 and potentially in Q2.

Keith Michael Housum - Northcoast Research Partners LLC

Analyst

Okay. Thanks. And then I guess I'll jump in the queue after that. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Operator

Operator

Our next question is from Brian Drab from William Blair & Company. Brian P. Drab - William Blair & Co. LLC: Good morning, and congratulations on completing such a transformational year. Anders Gustafsson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thank you. Brian P. Drab - William Blair & Co. LLC: First question, I just wanted to clarify, I thought I heard – it's very early here so probably it's my mistake, but I thought I heard two different growth rates for the Enterprise business in the fourth quarter. I thought earlier in the call, you said that that business was up low single-digits on a constant currency basis, and Doug, I thought that you said that it was down slightly. Did I mishear that? Anders Gustafsson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. That was up slightly, couple of percent on a constant currency basis. It was flat in nominal terms, and it was up 14% sequentially. Brian P. Drab - William Blair & Co. LLC: Okay. Thanks for clarifying that. And so for the first quarter, you're forecasting very solid strong growth rate, 6% to 8% for the consolidated business. So can you give us any sense for the full-year expectations for growth, could you sustain that growth rate throughout the year? Anders Gustafsson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. As you know, we don't give annual guidance here, but we felt we certainly exited 2014 with good momentum. I think we feel we still have good momentum in the business. I'd say our customers and partners have been very supportive and leaning into this, I would say. We expect growth across the both organizations, as we think of it here now, so both Enterprise and the printing business. I'll say here we feel with the backdrop of kind of economic and FX uncertainty that the diversity of our business is really helping. We had great strength in North America, in Asia-Pac, so it's offset some by weakness in Latin America and EMEA, but we also see good strength in number of verticals, like T&L, postal, retail, healthcare, as examples. Brian P. Drab - William Blair & Co. LLC: Okay. And then just one more quick one, margins, EBITDA margins were 18.2% in the fourth quarter, we see that going to about 15% in the first quarter. Is that seasonality or can give us any sense for how to forecast that going forward?

Dean Lindroth - Vice President of Finance, Zebra Technologies

Analyst

Yeah. This is Dean. I think there's two things you want to consider. One is certainly the FX impact, has a dramatic impact on the margins that we're seeing in Q1. The other thing if you're looking sequentially from Q4, recall that Q4 is a stub period for Enterprise, although there was a disproportional amount of revenue in the quarter compared to say their operating expenses which are more linear, so you're going to get a little bit of a bump on EBITDA percentage at Q4 compared to what a more normalized quarter would look like in Q1. But having said that, I would say the predominant difference is the FX impact. Brian P. Drab - William Blair & Co. LLC: Okay. Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

And we have a question from Jeff Kessler from Imperial Capital.

Jeffrey Ted Kessler - Imperial Capital LLC

Analyst

Yes, I'm wondering if you could talk about the transformation that's going on in your technology between going over to imaging from laser. To what extent is the acquisition changing your view as to what is going to be used primarily as you're scanner based over the course of the next three years to four years? Anders Gustafsson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: I don't think the acquisition really changes our view of what technology to use for data capture. Laser has been the historical – so one dimensional laser technology has been the primary use for capturing barcodes and other things historically, but going forward we see that migrating to 2D imagers. So you can do 2D barcodes and you can have other kind of signature capture and other things like that. And we have made investments, substantial investments in our 2D portfolio and we have a very strong position, it's actually been growing quite nicely for the last two years.

Jeffrey Ted Kessler - Imperial Capital LLC

Analyst

And which markets are these going to primarily affect? Will we start seeing them first when we start going to trade shows and watching them, where are these images going to start showing up and in which markets? Anders Gustafsson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: They're already well out there.

Jeffrey Ted Kessler - Imperial Capital LLC

Analyst

Okay. Anders Gustafsson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: So, this is not something that's new products just being launched. So, you'll find them in retail, healthcare; you'll find them when you check into your airline. They're all over the place.

Jeffrey Ted Kessler - Imperial Capital LLC

Analyst

All right. Great. Thank you. Anders Gustafsson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah.

Operator

Operator

And we have a question from Jason Rodgers from Great Lakes Review.

Jason A. Rodgers - Great Lakes Review

Analyst

Hi. What's your estimate for CapEx for 2015?

Dean Lindroth - Vice President of Finance, Zebra Technologies

Analyst

CapEx, just as a reference point in 2014, for the printer business ran around 2.5% of revenue, like $30 million, $35 million. I think as we look forward for the combined company, and we're thinking sort of 2% to 3% in the percent of sales rate, but keep in mind that would exclude integration expenses, integration CapEx would be on top of it, but on a more ongoing normalized basis probably in the 2% to 3% of revenue range.

Jason A. Rodgers - Great Lakes Review

Analyst

Thank you. Anders Gustafsson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: I think we targeted about $50 million for CapEx for 2015.

Jason A. Rodgers - Great Lakes Review

Analyst

Thanks.

Operator

Operator

And our next question is from Keith Housum from Northcoast Research. Go ahead, Keith, with your question.

Keith Michael Housum - Northcoast Research Partners LLC

Analyst

Thanks, guys. I appreciate the follow-up. If I can just drill down a little bit more on the $0.60 EPS, is this more translational or transactional impact? I guess, as I look at my model, it's a little bit higher than I would have expected. So, I guess, I will just leave it that?

Dean Lindroth - Vice President of Finance, Zebra Technologies

Analyst

What we're looking at it is, if you take the fact that we're about 35% of our businesses in the EMEA region, and roughly 90% of that or so is euro or pound affected. And from Q1 a year ago to today versus probably about a $0.24 change in the euro rate. So, we're basically just flowing through net impact of revenue less some adjustment for the fact there are some local operating expenses. So, that's really the math that gets us there, the quarter-on-quarter rate change against about 38% regional revenue exposure, less some offsets with OpEx and then tax affected of course.

Keith Michael Housum - Northcoast Research Partners LLC

Analyst

Got you. So, do you guys expect gross margins then to be lower in the first quarter due to the FX then?

Dean Lindroth - Vice President of Finance, Zebra Technologies

Analyst

I'd say that's a predominant impact. Again, you have three months of Enterprise impact versus two in the fourth quarter, but FX will be the predominant impact.

Keith Michael Housum - Northcoast Research Partners LLC

Analyst

Okay. And then, is there any opportunity to raise prices over in some of these regions? Anders Gustafsson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. We're doing whatever we can to control our environment and FX is obviously one we can't, but we have an ability to control a bit more on the pricing side. So, we currently are, I guess, watching currencies very closely and we've looked at what other multinational companies have done, American multinational companies have done and other competitors and we are actively thinking about adjusting our list prices also.

Keith Michael Housum - Northcoast Research Partners LLC

Analyst

Okay. From a competitive standpoint, is there any significant foreign competitors that perhaps put you at a disadvantage if you do raise your prices? Anders Gustafsson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: I think we only have one competitor really of any size that is in Europe. And it's difficult to say exactly, how they're going to behave in this, but I'd say most of our cost of goods sold are dollar denominated irrespective of geographic location. So buying microprocessors and other semiconductor parts, they tend to be dollar denominated. So even if you might have a higher level of say European labor in there that's a fairly small part. So, I don't think that, I guess, our working assumption is that there shouldn't be a huge difference, but that remains to be seen, I guess, how they react and how they behave, so I can't really speak on behalf of them.

Keith Michael Housum - Northcoast Research Partners LLC

Analyst

Okay. Great. Thank you. I appreciate the follow-up.

Operator

Operator

Our next question is from Paul Coster from JPMorgan Securities.

Paul J. Chung - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst

Hi, this is Paul Chung on for Coster. Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to ask, what is your latest thinking on channel and cross-selling synergies, does the combined company require new sales skill set, any specific incentives to call out that are directing the sales force? Anders Gustafsson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: So I'll start and then I think we'll hand over to Joe to talk a bit about that also. First as we talked about the cross-selling opportunities within our channel programs and more generally I said, we do see great opportunities to cross-sell product. I give you couple of examples here just from customer examples that we've seen over the last few months. One is a healthcare example, and you might remember before we closed the acquisition, we said that we believe that healthcare was an area that Zebra had stronger presence, and we're able to obviously benefit the Enterprise business by bringing them in. We have one large healthcare provider in North America that had selected Zebra as their preferred printer partner, but also asked us to be basically their trusted advisor and advise on use of other technologies to improve patient safety and workflow, and we worked very closely with them and brought in basically the broader sales team that could talk about the entire portfolio. And that resulted in us being able to provide them with, I think it was 1,600 MC40s and well over 500 scanners. Another example is a company in Middle East that do lot of retail and things also, but they have large dealership, they deal with over a 1,000 cars a day in those dealerships, and they brought in our location solutions business to look at an active RFID solution for tracking those vehicles, while they were in the service facilities or new cars, used cars and services. We have deployed active RFID for other large dealerships in the Middle East like that. Now as we got into that discussion, we realized that actually the best solution for this customer was to have a passive RFID solution. So instead of location solutions selling their traditional active solution, they brought in the rest of the portfolio from the Enterprise business and Zebra printing the business for passive reading and passive encoding and software services from LS. So basically we were able to sell a much more targeted solution to that customer leveraging all the different pieces of the business. So, we see great opportunities for cross selling and leveraging the channel to do that. I think, maybe, now I'll ask Joe to see if Joe has any additional comments here?

Joachim Heel - Senior Vice President Sales, Zebra Technologies Corporation

Analyst

Sure. Well, thank you Anders. Among the priorities that we have given to the sales force, cross selling is the number one priority. It is obviously the low hanging fruit that we have as a joint company. And even in Q4, before we had integrated the sales forces, we had asked the sales forces to complete what we call the heat mapping exercise, which asked them to look at all of their customers to find out where we have a presence and where we do not. And as we currently speak, the sales force is going through those heat maps to sell to those, and we're seeing very good traction in terms of the ability to connect with those customers and suggest to them, that we can provide an end-to-end solution. But to your point about the skills that are required, I do see a second level of cross-selling that we can get to, which is when we not only complement the former Motorola Enterprise Solutions products with the Zebra printer products, but when we stitch them together into a solution, and that does require some additional skills that we are working to build in our sales force, that is the focus of some intensive training that is actually rolling out this next quarter in Q2 and then in Q3.

Paul J. Chung - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst

Thank you. And just one follow-up, can you talk about the pipeline of deals and how it has evolved with the combined company. We know that contracts can be lumpy, is there more of a pronounced effect with the combined business, and should we expect some resulting volatility there from quarter-to-quarter? Thanks. Anders Gustafsson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. I think I'll start and I'll handover to Joe, again. But I'd say first that we highlighted from the beginning when we started to talk about this acquisition that the Enterprise side is more prone to large deals and hence somewhat more lumpy than the traditional Zebra business, which is more run rate oriented. I think we've seen great progression in our pipelines that have been growing with a combination of large deals and more run rate deals. So far, I think we feel that there have been an appropriate focus and understanding of those larger more lumpy deals and where they will fall in the timing. And what we need to do in order to, I guess, control the timeline over them as much as possible. And Joe, do you want to follow on.

Joachim Heel - Senior Vice President Sales, Zebra Technologies Corporation

Analyst

Yeah. It is fair to say that the Zebra business has a higher run rate, and the Zebra business – the Motorola business had a higher project content. What we're trying to do is combine the best of both worlds. So, introduce a stronger run rate capability on the Motorola side, and we've seen some visibility to do that here in the first quarter. And then at the same time introduce Zebra to some of those bigger printing projects. Actually, as would have it, here in Mexico City right now, I'm working with a customer that has a very large mobile computing estate, and is looking to replace some competitive printers with ours in such a big deal. So, I think the best of both is actually the result of this cross selling effort that we're looking to achieve.

Paul J. Chung - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst

Excellent. Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

We have another question from Jason Rodgers from Great Lakes Review.

Jason A. Rodgers - Great Lakes Review

Analyst

Thanks for taking the follow-up. Just looking at the Zebra Enterprise business, just prior to the acquisition, I'm sorry looking at the thermal barcode printer business, Zebra was about, I don't know, four times the size of its nearest competitor. Looking at the new Zebra, how does the company's market share compare to its other major competitors? Anders Gustafsson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: You mean in printing specifically or across the entire portfolio?

Jason A. Rodgers - Great Lakes Review

Analyst

Right, across the entire portfolio. Anders Gustafsson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. So on the printing side nothing has really changed, although we saw one of our competitors acquire one of our smaller – one of our larger competitors acquiring one of our smaller competitors I guess, so they have gained some share, but it's still a very modest share compared to our position. On the mobile computing side, according to independent market research all these numbers are independent market research, it's not our assessment. We have a high 30%, 40% market share. Our nearest competitors probably mid to 20% market share. On the data capture side we have low to mid 30% market share and our nearest competitor is probably about 10% lower there also. So we are the clear market leader in the three largest vertical or product segments that we compete in.

Jason A. Rodgers - Great Lakes Review

Analyst

That's helpful. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Standby, we have more questions going to the queue. And we do have a question from Donald Bisson from Century Capital.

Donald M. Bisson - Century Capital Management LLC

Analyst

Good morning. Anders Gustafsson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Good morning.

Donald M. Bisson - Century Capital Management LLC

Analyst

I'm wondering, what is your depreciation quarterly run rate? And I'm trying to get at what D&A number excluding what you're already adding back to your adjusted numbers, so just depreciation I guess?

Dean Lindroth - Vice President of Finance, Zebra Technologies

Analyst

I don't have that with me. I'd be happy to work with Doug to get that back to you after the call. I just don't have that here with me, my apologies.

Donald M. Bisson - Century Capital Management LLC

Analyst

Okay.

Operator

Operator

And then I'll turn it back over to you, Doug, for any closing comments. Douglas A. Fox - Treasurer & Vice President-Investor Relations: Okay. With that, first of all, thank you very much for joining us today, this morning, and we look forward to keeping you up-to-date on our progress as the year unfolds. And of course, we'll be around for additional questions following the call. Thank you very much for joining us today.

Operator

Operator

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. That concludes today's conference. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.