Earnings Labs

GE Aerospace (GE)

Q1 2015 Earnings Call· Fri, Apr 17, 2015

$282.72

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Transcript

Scott Davis

Management

Okay, welcome everybody. Thanks for coming to our Annual Industrials Conference. We’re excited to have you all here, we’re excited for what I think we’re going to deliver in the next two days. I believe we have 62 companies in attendance, well over trillion dollars of market cap, this is an unusual -- those who've been to this conference in the past, it's an unusual mix of folks, I’ve been running conferences for 15 plus years and this is the highest percentage of portfolio managers and generalist of any conference that I’ve been around, it's plus 50%. So, we generally tend to get a really good healthy mix of different styles along not only different market caps and hedge funds as well and it really helps. So couple of things that we do that’s a little different at this conference versus maybe some of the others that this a Q&A conference and we would love to get as much audience participation as possible, we'll have mic runners and such and you can ask your questions, we also have the audience response system which is a -- which is something we started with few years ago experimenting with and now we have a time series of data really interesting. And so, there will be six questions that we ask in all the sessions over the next two days and try to come up with some conclusions as for where the sentiment is on the Group and individual stocks and such to ask that we publish the data and we make it available to you. We have an analyst round table at the end of each day which is an opportunity since many of you might be sitting in one-on-ones or certainly with four tracks can’t attend every session, it gives you…

Jeff Bornstein

Management

Well, there is no question that volatility continues to be pretty dramatic in the world whether you are talking about, Central Bank policy and the impact on exchange rates, what’s going on in the commodity markets particularly around oil. It’s I think for the most part it’s the new norm and so for us we’ve got to figure out a way to grow and proposer no matter what the environment is. And I think that’s one of the strengths, when we look back at 2014 despite all that volatility we still managed to grow organically above 7% which I think we felt quite positive about and that’s partly driven by lot of new product introductions, investments we’ve made over the last number of years that are really differentiating a number of our businesses and the investment we made in global growth four or five years ago which was no small investment to grow in the growth markets and expand the GE footprint across about more than 180 countries and so we need to win where the growth is happening where investment's happening, so I think 2014 was a testament to some of those early investments. And I think it’s interesting I am not an economist but there is no question at least in my mind that the cut in the oil prices is going to be a stimulate of dividend if you will to consumers globally when you think about places like the U.S., Europe, China, Japan, India which are big energy importers, I think this could meaningful from a simulative effect. And maybe we’re going through a little bit of a change here as the growth over the last five to seven years has all been about growth markets, emerging markets and we maybe pivoting a little bit here…

Scott Davis

Management

Yes, that’s a great summary. I was reading with by the market share data to our power gen as we’re getting the core data on the airplane that we had done yesterday and it’s amazing you guys have won 52% market share in the last year, our forecast is 35% and I believe your market share over the last five years was something in the neighbourhood of 45% or 46% if my math is right. Which again is our long term forecast has been more around 40%. So you won share in power gen, I think it’s pretty clear you won share in medical so what’s going on with Siemens itself through that data you are winning 100% market share on locomotives, this cap has prompt experts to shut out of the market right now, till like mid-2016, I am sure I am forgetting other businesses -- aircraft engines, you have done great on a commercial side, defenses a little tough, commercial has been trying to uptick. But the skepticism I get from folks many in the audiences is did you price those contracts when that share was in that margin to make shareholders happy?

Jeff Bornstein

Management

So, listen I think that are you going to be in the game to start, right, if you're not taking orders, the margin discussion is [worthless]. So that’s a pretty good run down, I think we if you don’t mind spending just a minute -- so you think about PowerGen, I don’t love the timing in the Mccoy data or reports, I'd rather this to be a European process, nonetheless the -- a year ago I was at this conference and was having lunch with a bunch of investors and they were all over me about how another gas serving competition that's not German was suggesting that they were going to absolutely eat our lunch and they have [indiscernible] serving space et cetera et cetera. And at the point in time I wasn’t ready to really talk in detail about, we had officially launched it, and I said just hold the thought. So, we’ve launched the H-turbine in the first quarter of last year, we take -- we’ve got 15 years in backlog, we’ve been with one technical selection on 30 and we’re bidding another 60 to 70 as we speak, this is by far within the gas serve and PowerGen space the most successful launch of a product we’ve ever had. And it really has been a leap front in technology build around efficiency. So, we’re very excited about it. Same-store transportation in Tier 4 we invested when everybody else was not, when customers were telling us they didn’t seek demand for locomotives, we ploughed ahead and so we’ve got this now [indiscernible] is a very good company, they have great technology, they are going to have a product. But we’ve got this window, we got to take advantage of it and our equipment business it's all about growing…

Scott Davis

Management

Okay, good answer. Let's go to the audience response question, I just don’t want to forget, so you all have this fancy handheld device in front you, you currently own the stock yes over weight is number one, number two is yes equal weight, number three is yes underweight and four is no. Please vote, yes you can vote now, you’ve got about 10 seconds in a couple of sessions we'll have this all figured out. Okay, all right. Only 15% of the audience is overweight the stock and there is a fair amount of non-owners. Let’s look at last year’s data and compare if we have the same thing. Okay, so we have with last year’s data then we’ve got the two year average we have a larger proportion we’ve got a smaller proportion of over weights now than we’ve had in quite some time. Okay, so that leads me to the next question of what is it that investors are struggling we’ll get to this in a sec, but what is it that investors you’ve been out in the road now for meeting with people you’ve been in job for 18 months what is it that people are missing. Or flip that upside down and say what is it that the GE management team is missing that isn’t capturing the attention of investors and getting people to own the stock.

Jeff Bornstein

Management

A couple of thoughts, I think when there is no question that this remix of 75-25 the commitment we made was as we do that and make GE Capital small [indiscernible] but we committed that in that process we were going to continue to grow earnings for investors over that period of time, so far we’ve done that. I think that there has been a lot of uncertainty around GE Capital and what’s the right size, what options do we have, what’s it mean to be a -- subject your dividend and capital allocation policy in GE Capital is subject to ultimately in 2017 to a formal CCARs process publicly et cetera. I think that’s -- I get a lot of questions around what the optionality or what’s the right -- and we are absolutely laser focused on monetizing the entirety of $130 billion red portfolio and we will continue to look at the balance of the portfolio and make sure it is we are staying in platforms that had real value. There is no question in mind the verticals in our financial service business are, aviation leasing business, our energy finance business, our healthcare finance business, are massively informed and add enormous amounts of value to our industrial businesses. The middle market are great platforms particularly domestically they are very-very good platforms and we just got to be laser like focused on those things that and the regulatory world we live in today that we can stay in and generate a return on capital that makes sense for you all and to the extent we can that’s stuff needs to get monetizing add capital returns to the company. So a lot of this is going to play out in the next couple of years, we are focused on being…

Scott Davis

Management

Yes. Let’s do the next question. There used to be clock in here too and I think when I repainted the place I forgot to put the clock back up. Okay, what's your general bias towards the stock right now positive, negative or neutral, let’s vote. Okay, it's not bad, let's compare to prior years and see what this means, all right substantially more positive than last year. Okay, is that two year average number right, could that be possible? It doesn't look accurate. I am not very good at math though.

Jeff Bornstein

Management

That would say the 2013 was absolutely remarkable.

Scott Davis

Management

Well, you should fire the analyst who's in charge of that, I don't know who that guy is. Let's go to next question. In your opinion through cycle EPS growth for GE will be above peers in line, with peers or below peers? Let's do it, I think we should be more specific on industrial EPS, total EPS, but okay everybody vote, above peers about 60%, so clearly folks have been -- it's interesting they are more bullish on the peer group than which maybe they are more bullish in macro than…

Jeff Bornstein

Management

Listen, I think part of the discussion here is and I think I was very clear with you and investors November ’13, I said we were going to invest in restructuring to make this pivot work into make our industrial businesses more competitive. So, we were in a $1.65 a share in 2014 including the $0.11 making charge associated with that investment, now I think you want us doing that and they are roughly 18 months' paybacks, it's hard to allocate capital on returns much better than that, so I think they make all the sense in the world, but if does have the effect of reducing headline EPS…

Scott Davis

Management

Also maybe speak to some of the skepticism asked and I’ve been amazed when I picked up GE back start doing the work in 2001, I read everything I could read dating back about 20 years, I was amazed how many people dislike the RCA deal in 1986 and it was every analyst on the street and I got a copy of I think every research report that I could find, every analyst on the street hated the RCA deal and that’s probably be one of the best M&A transaction in the industry of mankind, right, I mean we think about the value that was creating essentially got NBC for free. I went on record a year ago or wasn’t quite a year -- maybe it was year ago and said I thought the Alstom deal was one of the five best deals I’ve seen in my career and I’ve been laughed at, mocked many a times, what is that the people don’t get about Alstom?

Jeff Bornstein

Management

I think that the push back idea when I get push back -- I would say now maybe not everybody is honest with me in meetings…

Scott Davis

Management

They are scared of you.

Jeff Bornstein

Management

They are not, I don’t know why they would be scared, they own the company, I don’t know why they'd be -- most people I have met have been generally pretty supportive. Occasionally and when I've gotten push back here, it's mostly been around are you buying an asset a no growth asset, are you buying something that’s got less than GDP kind of growth over the long-term. I don’t get a lot of push back on the fact that there are synergies in this value creation opportunity, I haven’t got a while there, it's been more on the growth side about whether you can really drive growth across those asset base when you put the two of these together. Now we feel like we -- obviously we can’t and otherwise we wouldn't have done the transaction. And I think over the long-term I think Alstom does a number of things for us beyond solidify our position in the power generation space and particularly gas revenue and renewables and gives us the world’s best in turbine technology. It also meaningfully increases the install base of the company about 30% or 40% increase to our install base and we have demonstrated I think over time that we know how to build a very compelling service franchise around installed assets, say 30 plus percent margins are growing year in and year out and we can -- we think we can overlay that capability on Alstom's install base which is pretty substantive and although they have a decent service business, they don’t have all the tools and have not invested in all the technology that we have over time. So, I think there are compelling reasons to think that we can grow these assets over time in combination with our own and create enormous amount of value, but that’s the biggest push back I get.

Scott Davis

Management

Those deals not about growth are they?

Jeff Bornstein

Management

No, it was not underweight non-growth.

Scott Davis

Management

Okay, let's go to the next question, I am sure we get through all these. In your opinion what you do with excess cash, bolt-on M&A, larger M&A, share repurchases, dividends, pay down debt, internal investments, so lots of options here, a highly varied group of companies at this conference, sorry we have to keep this fairly general, but why don’t we all vote on that and see folks think. Okay, share repurchases 56%, let's compared that to prior year, it'd be interesting to see what people say in other companies…

Jeff Bornstein

Management

Yes, that will be helpful.

Scott Davis

Management

So hopefully this data is accurate just like it's higher level of the purchases, so that segways into my next question, which is one of the conversations I have with investors on GE is around the industrial balance sheet and as you take risk off of the capital side of the balance sheet and we re-risk industrial and also some of that dilution and I think that the general consensus we released that people aren’t asking GE to be less risky of a company, they’re just asking GE to be less geared towards businesses that lack competitive advantage specific competitive advantage, the certain bank assets.

Jeff Bornstein

Management

Within GE Capital.

Scott Davis

Management

Within GE Capital, that’s right. So what is the push back? I mean I know we have to pay for Alstom, so that’s an issue right now but what is the problem? Is the regulatory challenges with the Fed is it the rating agency pushback I mean what’s -- I mean from what we can gather at least you could take on a of debt and buyback shares and it would have a meaningful offset to some of the dilution from the…

Jeff Bornstein

Management

So we have both implicit and explicit support of GE Capital through the IMA and otherwise. We borrowed $300 billion of debt last year we had it some levers last year, we’ll be in the markets this year as well, we do have a maturity this year and we may do -- it’s the markets are incredibly attractive. So we may do a bit more than the maturity that we have this year in the fixed income markets. I think what you have to think about in balance is doing a substantial leveraging of the GE balance sheet to buy shares back we can’t today anyway we have a 360 billion E&I $500 billion asset financial service company that at synchrony is largely wholesale funded. So we have to be careful about the fact that although they’re much smaller in the capital markets today than they were in the go-go days by a long shot and the demand for debt from GE Capital whether that’s term debt or CPE is extraordinarily high. That support on the back of a AA company is extraordinarily important to that financial service business. And so I am a little bit reluctant to as what you described as risk is at the moment now as we continue to shrink GE Capital we’ll have more and more flexibility. But at the point in time we are today, I wouldn’t want to put the rating, the ratings impact on GE Capital I don’t think is a risk that we ought to be biting off at this point. I think we need to continue to stay focused on what we’ve told you we’re going to do and which is shrink GE Capital and as we shrink GE Capital our optionality and our flexibility will continue to increase.

Scott Davis

Operator

Let’s do audience Q&A because I am sure there is a couple of questions out there, at least let’s get your questions ready and let’s do the next question on the ARS first and then we’ll go into whoever must raise their hand after that, let’s go to question five please. Do we have a question five? I think we do. Okay. In Europe what multiple of 2015 earnings should GE trade? This is PE, okay. And the answers are pretty explicit on there. So let’s vote on this. Okay, so let`s compare this to last year, it seems somewhat similar to other companies, I don’t think it’s that similar. Let’s do the last question so we get this out of the way. What do you see the most significant investment issue for GE core growth margins, capital deployment or execution strategy, this is from the eyes of the investors. So significant investment issue for GE would you care about core growth margins, capital deployment or execution/strategy? Let’s vote on this and then we’ll go to the audience. That’s interesting, okay. So I thought I would have expected margins to be the most important because that’s…

Jeff Bornstein

Management

Well I think we’ve made a lot of progress and the one thing I would ask you to do is if you look at the individual business and the margin rates and compare them to their competitive set, so compare our aviation business against rolls and prior compare our translation -- our margins in most cases are best in class in the individual. So having said that there is more we can do.

Scott Davis

Operator

Let’s look at prior years. Yes, it’s strange, so core growth had a huge step up. Let’s see what that trend is the next couple of days because your core growth has been excellent.

Jeff Bornstein

Management

It’s been good.

Scott Davis

Operator

Yes, it’s been excellent. Okay. So let’s go to the audience and if the audience involves some questions, anybody wants to kick it off at the back I can’t see who it is, the lights are in my eyes, but go, please go right ahead.

Q - Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Actually I have a couple of questions, if you can help me. First question is on oil and gas maybe your view on at least the next year or two within your business and then separately as you’ve shrinked GE Capital to the tax rate of GE Capital's preferential relative to GE Industrial, just maybe your thoughts on how that shakes out from the earnings standpoint? And also the tax rate for overall GE as you kind of give up some of the advantages of being a lot larger, so both tax rate and also capital deployment GE Capital allows you to lever up a little bit more, your leverage GE Capital is an all-time low, I think just maybe some thoughts about that?

Jeff Bornstein

Management

I didn’t get all of that, what was the first part?

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

So the first question was your outlook for the next year to the tune of oil and gas?

Jeff Bornstein

Management

Oil and gas. Okay, I will come back and take that one. So what we said at year-end was we initially had a plan and that were for oil and gas going into the fourth quarter that was kind of 7% and 9% revenue growth and double-digit on profit growth and that obviously changed pretty dramatically as we got into the fourth quarter and what we shared with investors coming in out of the outlook meeting was that we expected the oil and gas business to be flat to down 5%. Now I didn’t need that, we obviously evaluated a lot of other much more severe scenarios and we have the team, Lorenzo and the team executing a plan that assumes a tougher market than down 5%. And what we’ve said is that even in those much tougher scenarios we still think we’re within the framework of EPS guidance that we gave at year-end for $1.10 to $1.20 of industrial earnings, before GE Capital. Now they are executing like crazy on everything they need to get done around cost, we will be -- our employment levels will be going down not just similar to what you see in the balance of the industry, we’re reducing the number of P&Ls, simplifying the organization structure, driving like crazy on material cost and conversion cost productivity, consolidating plans, everything you would expect us to do we’re doing to deal with this. Now what I think is important is through that process coming out the other side, we’ve got to be a much better stronger, more competitive business than we were going into this cycle that was true in the past, PowerGen, Aviation, when we came up the backside of the power bubble and power and water, we have one product it was a…

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Yes, there was a couple of parts of that, and one was that GE Capital is under levered.

Jeff Bornstein

Management

Yes, I think we feel like we have more, we have excess capital in GE Capital. Today we’re the way on an adjusted leverage basis where lever is roughly three-to-one we might be actually slightly below three-to-one and overtime we planned on giving that capital out and we go through CCAR process et cetera and we get to where we need to be with the regulators on a [indiscernible] we hope to get that excess capital out, there was something on tax rate.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

And yes, that GE Capital has structurally lower tax rate.

Jeff Bornstein

Management

It does, it has a structurally low tax rate, but it was a quite…

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

As you shrink perhaps the overall tax rate.

Jeff Bornstein

Management

In GE Capital or for the total company?

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

For total company.

Jeff Bornstein

Management

As we -- I don’t know everything else being equal, as we shrink GE Capital I don’t think that company’s tax rate might move a few 100 basis points, I don’t think it's a dramatic change, I think when you’ll see dramatic changes if we get a change in tax policy and tax rules, if we do get comprehensive tax reform which we absolutely support you will get a meaningful change in the company’s tax rate but even if GE Capital shrinks the proportion of our international earnings is changed and when it’s not changing the total mix of earnings and so I don’t expect that the company’s tax rate is going to markedly change in the next year or two.

Scott Davis

Operator

Okay, let’s go to questions on the floor.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Just a little bit more on oil and gas please if you don’t mind. How much of your exposure is upstream versus downstream and [indiscernible] obviously was onshore but how much is offshore because arguably there is going to be a paradigm shift more shale, less offshore over the rig count offshore drop. So maybe speak to long term outlook of your offshore business.

Jeff Bornstein

Management

So about 25% to 30% of our oil and gas business is what I would describe as kind of offshore, so subsea some of what we sell that’s above the platform on top, we look at our subsea business today, most of the revenue we expect to generate in 2015 is in backlog, these are much long -- as you know much longer cycle projects, the idea that you would stop or pause and in process the demobilization cost are absolutely enormous on these projects. So I think that projects that are in motion that we’re participating on are going to continue to be in motion. Having said that on new projects, new investment I think you should expect that a lot of these are going to get delayed or pushed to the right. Having said that we just got back from Africa and West Africa is going poor we are bidding some big-big multibillion dollar transactions in West Africa and subsea. But I think in 2015 subsea maybe and may end up being less of a revenue story and might be more of an order story looking beyond 2015. Then you get another 20% which is upstream which is onshore U.S. conventional little bit of you mentioned [indiscernible] and that business I think is definitely going to get impacted. I think that will we’ll probably see there is drilling where we make deal piece. I think as we’re going to see and are beginning to see the biggest deterioration we expect those businesses to be down year-over-year kind of double digits that’s the way we plan them, that’s the way we think they’re going to play out. And then when you get to downstream in M&C, measurement and control business, we think that going to be significantly less impacted, in total we’ve got slightly less than 60% of 2015 expected revenue in backlog so we’re not starting at a zero point here we’ve got ability to underwrite to some degree how we think 2015 revenue is going to come out. Obviously you’ve got 30%-40% at play but I don’t think downstream in M&C, M&C is 50% of that business is completely oil and gas unrelated it’s got very much an industrial focus. So that’s kind of the split on the business. So onshore upstream U.S. non-conventional and drilling BOPs I think are where we’re going to see the biggest impact.

Scott Davis

Operator

Okay. We have 30 seconds left any final questions? Okay, look I want to thank Jeff. I want to thank the audience here for participation and patience and working through the first round of the ARS and thank you. Good luck.

Jeff Bornstein

Management

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Good seeing you.

Scott Davis

Operator

Yes. Thank you.