Paul Nicoletti
Analyst · Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Thank you, Manny, and good morning, everyone. As many of you know, we are holding our Annual General Meeting at 9 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time this morning. We'll keep our formal remarks brief on this call to allow enough time for questions and conclude the call at 8:45 a.m. I will summarize the first quarter results and will then turn the call over to Craig to provide his comments before we open up the call to questions.
Celestica has delivered a solid first quarter with strong operational and cash performance, despite an overall muted demand environment. First quarter revenue was slightly below $1.7 billion and came in at the high end of our guidance range. First quarter revenue declined 4% sequentially, while on a year-over-year basis, revenue was down 6%, mainly due to weaker demand across a number of customers.
Some further highlights for the quarter. IFRS net earnings of $43.2 million increased 44% year-over-year. Adjusted earnings per share of $0.25 came in slightly higher than our guidance range. Non-IFRS operating margin of 3.4% was up 10 basis points from the same period a year earlier. ROIC continued to be strong at 23.7%. We generated $44 million of free cash flow for the quarter, and we repurchased and canceled 6 million shares as part of our share repurchase program.
From an end-market perspective, our diversified end market grew 3% sequentially, while on a year-over-year basis, this end market grew 58%, with approximately 1/2 of the growth contributed from our acquisition in 2011. The diversified end market now represents 19% of our total revenue, up from 11% in the first quarter of 2011. Our Consumer end market, which represent 23% of revenue, declined 12% sequentially, as we expected, and was down 14% year-over-year, primarily due to demand weakness in program transitions at one of our largest customers. As we stated in our January earnings call, we have consolidated our Enterprise Communications and Telecommunications end markets. The Communications end market represents 33% of total revenue and was sequentially down by 5%. On a year-over-year basis, Communications was down 15% as we experienced demand declines across a number of customers. The Server end market represents 15% of total revenue for the first quarter and grew sequentially by 4%, driven by one of our major customers in this end market. Compared to the first quarter of 2011, revenue from the Server end market was down 8%. Storage was 10% of total revenue and was slightly up sequentially. On a year-over-year basis, Storage declined 19%, primarily due to demand softness across a few customers.
The top 10 customers represented 71% of revenue for the quarter, down from 74% for the first quarter of 2011. Our top 5 customers represented 51% of revenue, down from 54% for the same period last year. We had one customer in the quarter who was greater than 10% of revenue, with RIM representing approximately 19% of total revenue in the quarter.
The company posted first quarter IFRS net earnings of $43.2 million or $0.20 per share compared to IFRS net earnings of $30 million or $0.14 per share in the same period last year. IFRS net earnings in the first quarter were higher on a year-over-year basis, primarily due to lower SG&A expense and restructuring recoveries recorded in the quarter. Adjusted net earnings for the quarter were $53.6 million or $0.25 per share compared to adjusted net earnings of $54.7 million or $0.25 per share for the same period last year.
Our adjusted tax rate in the first quarter was 6.1%, lower than our typical 10% to 12%, due to the country composition of profits this quarter and differing tax rates by country. Going forward, we expect to be back in the 10% to 12% range.
Adjusted SG&A expense for the quarter was $52.6 million or 3.1% of revenue, which was 8% lower than the first quarter of 2011, primarily due to lower variable compensation and overall spend, as well as bad debt recoveries.
Finally, pretax return on invested capital was 23.7%.
Moving on to working capital performance. Our inventory position increased by $32 million in the end of the fourth quarter. While portion of this increase is to support revenue growth into the second quarter, we can see a fair amount of demand churn in the first quarter which also contributed to this increase. We expect to achieve inventory reductions and inventory churn improvements as new programs ramps in the second quarter.
As we mentioned last quarter, we negotiated cash deposit to fund higher inventory levels for one customer. At March 31, the cash deposit was $99 million and is reflected in our cash and accounts payable balances for the quarter. We assumed to repay this deposit. Going forward, we expect the reduction in cash deposits from this customer.
Cash -- capital expenditures for this quarter was $39 million, which is higher than our average CapEx of 1% to 1.5% of revenue. Included in the first quarter CapEx is the expansion of our operations in Johor, Malaysia. Craig will provide more color on this investment during his remarks.
Cash cycle was 35 days compared to 36 days for the fourth quarter of 2011. We generated free cash flow of $44 million in the first quarter, driven by a continued strong collection of receivables.
Moving to the balance sheet. The company's financial position continues to be strong. Cash balance at March 31 was $647 million, a decrease of $12 million from the end of the fourth quarter. At quarter end, we had no outstanding debt, and our credit facility remains undrawn.
As an update to our current share repurchase program, during the first quarter, we repurchased and canceled 6 million subordinate voting shares for a total cash outlay of $56 million. At the end of March, there were 192.7 million subordinate voting shares and 18.9 million multiple voting shares outstanding.
As we continue to have a strong net cash position, I'd like to comment on our cash position, how we currently employ cash, our expectation for the uses of cash going forward. Our cash balance of $647 million at the end of the first quarter includes $60 million of A/R sales and cash from 1 customer of $99 million. Normalizing for these 2 items, we had $488 million of cash at quarter end. Operationally, we typically require approximately 5% of annualized revenue in cash and manage the ebbs and flows within the quarter along with the geographic distribution of our cash. Taking into the -- into account the amount of cash we need to run the business, along with the 2 items mentioned earlier, would leave approximately $130 million of excess cash based on the cash balance at the end of the first quarter.
As we have mentioned in the past, our primary objective for excess cash continues to be investments in the business to support growth in targeted areas. You've seen this with our investment to accelerate our growth in the diversified markets and services. At the same time, you are also seeing our discipline to return excess capital through our current share repurchase program. Although the pace and size of our share repurchases will vary depending on the opportunities we see, we do expect this to become our main vehicle to return capital and to be a systemic way for Celestica to continuously adjust it's capital structure.
Let me now turn to our second quarter guidance. Though majority of our end markets appear to be stable, visibility remains limited. For the second quarter, we anticipate revenue to be in the range of $1.65 billion to $1.75 billion. Though overall revenue is expected to be relatively flat on the sequential basis, we anticipate reductions of approximately 10% in Consumer, offset by growth in the balance of our end markets, with the strongest growth coming from Storage and Servers. For adjusted earnings per share, we expect the range of $0.20 to $0.26 per share. At the midpoint of this guidance, operating margin would be approximately 3.4%. Non-IFRS SG&A expenses is expected to be in the $53-million-to-$56-million range.
I will now turn the call over to Craig for some comments on the current business environment and our progress on several key initiatives.