Randall J. Hogan - Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Analyst · Goldman Sachs
Thanks, Todd. And thank you all for joining us today. Let's begin by reviewing Pentair's fourth quarter highlights shown on slide number 2. Overall, Pentair fourth quarter sales of $830 million were 12% above the $743 million generated last year. Our organic growth was plus 7% in the quarter or up 4% in local currencies. The diversity of our businesses and markets enabled us to grow despite softness in North American residential markets. Fourth quarter sales in our Water segment were up 13% versus last year or up 6% organically. Water sales were led by success in our key growth initiatives, such as foodservice and industrial filtration and strong sales growth in pool equipment and Water International. Our Technical Products business grew 9% in the fourth quarter as sales in our electrical business were up double digits, and our Asia and Pacific region posted over 40% growth once again. As the slide shows, Pentair expanded margins 330 basis points, both Water and Technical Products contributed significantly towards this margin expansion. Looking at total company margins year-over-year, the positive impact from volume and price coupled with solid productivity, foreign exchange, and a nice contribution from acquisitions provided 600 basis points of margin growth. This easily offset a negative 270 basis point impact from total inflation. The company delivered $0.48 per share of earnings from continuing operations on revenue growth of 12%. The $0.48 of EPS includes the $0.01 benefit from a non-recurring tax item as well as a negative $0.04 impact from additional restructuring and a legal settlement we had in the fourth quarter. Adjusted earnings per share were $0.51, up 65% versus the fourth quarter 2006 adjusted earnings per share of $0.31. Also in the quarter, the company significantly modified its long-term defined benefit and retiree medical plans. The change provides greater flexibility and control to our employees while reducing the uncertainty regarding the company's long-term liability. The change triggered an immediate curtailment benefit that was partially offset by additional one-time cost actions we took in the quarter. The impact of the curtailment benefits and costs provided a positive $0.02 of EPS, which is included in our $0.51 adjusted earnings per share and it's approximately 50 basis points of the margin in the quarter for the total company. John will provide additional detail on the benefit plan changes a little later in the presentation. Finally, a great success in '07 was the tremendous free cash flow delivered in the quarter and the year. Fourth quarter free cash flow equaled $96 million and for the year, we generated $285 million of free cash flow, an improvement of $104 million year-over-year and well above our goal of $250 million. So those are the highlights for the fourth quarter. Now, let's turn to slide number 3 and review our Water business in more detail. In the fourth quarter, Water grew sales $65 million to $566 million, up 13% versus last year’s sales. Organic sales were up 6% or up 4% in local currency. The composition of our total Water sales are shown on the top left section of slide 3. Let me give you some color on our sales by business and region. In our international operations, we continue to see impressive results. Our European Water business was up 51% year-over-year or up 12% after removing the impact from the Jung Pump acquisitions. Eastern European and Middle Eastern sales, each expanded approximately 20% in the quarter. In Asia, we continue to drive strong double-digit growth in the fourth quarter. Our Asian Water sales were up 28% year-over-year driven by sales in China for Filtration and Pump Systems and also in India led by sales of commercial pumps, food service solutions and rural water systems. One of the most exciting developments here is the success we are beginning to have in selling systems by focusing on application based solutions. Examples include the drinking water system for the new Beijing airport and the drinking water and commercial pool solution at the Shanghai World Financial Center. Pentair was selected as the Partner of Choice in Shanghai as we were the only company that could provide both the drinking water solutions and the commercial pool solutions that customer was looking for. Now, let's shift to discussing our domestic water businesses. First, we recently renamed our pump business, flow technologies. The new name better reflects our global growth strategies as exemplified by our system wins in China. In our North American flow technology business, sales were flat, as solid growth in commercial and municipal vertical markets, new products, and pricing actions offset declines in residential markets. Commercial and industrial market sales will remain robust with growth in the double digits. While we also continued to have double-digit growth in our Fairbank [ph] municipal pump markets where we finished with a record backlog of orders. Our North American pool and spa sales were up 11% compared with Q4 of last year. As we stated in our last quarter's conference call we expected to see solid sales growth in pool equipment in the fourth quarter as our order pace was good and year-over-year comparisons were less challenging. Our leaning energy efficient and noise reducing IntelliFlo pump and related products continue to yield double-digit growth. While the market remains down, our growth demonstrates the power of our distribution channel and the importance of our new products. As you know the fourth quarter is also the period when we, in the industry offer the early buy program to keep our factory's level loaded during the normal off-season in winter. The result of this year's program exceeded our initial expectations and was significantly higher than 2006. Despite this we remain cautious with regard to the pool market. We are aggressively managing our inventory levels and we maintain a laser focus on productivity and lean initiatives. North American filtration sales were up 11% driven by the Porous Media acquisition. Organic sales were down slightly as continued momentum in our commercial, food service and industrial markets could not offset declines in residential water treatment. Let's review our Water margins. You can see our Water operating income walk on the top right section of the slide. As it shows, water margins were up 450 basis points on an adjusted basis. We had a strong impact from growth, which contributed a positive 290 basis points, productivity added 450 basis points as our efforts derived lean and reduced our variable and fixed-cost structure yielded solid results. Included in this productivity is a positive 80 basis points associated with the aforementioned change to our long-term defined benefit in retiring medical plan, net of cost actions. In aggregate, growth and productivity more than offset a negative 290 basis point impact from total inflation and enabled us to achieve adjusted water margins of 12% for the quarter. Before we transition to technical products, I would point out that we have some modest restructuring charges in the quarter. In our flow technologies business we consolidated our product line associated with our residential pump business. This will improve our cost position longer term. We also settled a portion of the horizon litigation by agreeing to pay the claim for legal fees from the original trial in 2000. We will continue to update you on the status of this litigation in our SEC filings. Restructuring charge and the legal settlement are included in the final component of our operating income walk and allow you to bridge adjusted to reported operating income. So in summary, we continue to make solid progress in our Water business despite turbidity in the North American residential market. We're working on the right things to move our margins higher while also investing for future growth in the most attractive vertical markets. Now, let's move to slide number four and review our Technical Products business. In short, Technical Products had another great quarter. We grew sales 9% and expanded adjusted margins 150 basis points to 15.7%. Looking at Technical Product sales results, our international business continue to grow nicely. Technical Products Asia grew 44% led by electronics growth in China, and European sales grew 8%. In North American electronics our sales were down 3% because of lingering effects of contraction and consolidation in the telecommunication market. Our North American electrical business grew 10% versus last year as we continue to expand our vertical market presence and gain share in a strong market. And we exited 2007 with double-digit order rates in our electrical business, which continues to see strong demand. Technical products margins are highlighted at the top right section of slide number four. Together, growth and productivity contributed 360 basis points of margins expansion. This easily offset the impact of a negative 210 basis points from total inflation. Our Lean-driven productivity actions continue to produce solid results as we had excellent conversion on a 9% sales growth. As we announced in October, we took action to exit our electronics factory outside Chicago. The pre-tax charge associated with this action as shown in the walk is a negative $2 million item. The bridge is adjusted and reporting operating income and margins. This action will improve our North American electronics cost structure as we continue to right size this business given the drop in sales volume. So, Technical Products delivered a strong top line and executed well by delivering another outstanding quarter. We are carrying good momentum in 2008 and see continued strong electrical performance and strengthening in global electronic market. Please turn to slide number 5, our 2007 full year financial summary. In a few minutes, I'm going to detail our observations on the full-year key accomplishments. So let me quickly just touch on the financial highlights for 2007 on this slide. Sales for the full year grew 8%. 4 points of growth came from Porous Media and Jung Pump acquisitions, which have been seamlessly integrated into our businesses and are exceeding expectations. Sales in both water and technical products were up mid-single digits on an organic basis as our key growth initiatives yielded tremendous results and the power of our brands and channels allowed us to get price in most businesses. Total year growth was very good given the significant slowdown in the North American residential markets, which impacted Water and the North American telecom and datacom markets, which impacted technical products, particularly in the first half of the year. We made significant improvements in our water margins ending the year at a little over 12% as our Lean initiatives and cost actions on structured G&A and supply chain are producing results. Technical products maintained margins in the range of 15% as volume conversion and continued progress with Lean and cost actions made a nice impact. We were able to overcome escalating commodity costs mainly stainless, steel early in the year and soft telecom and datacom markets in North America. We improved our ongoing tax rate by approximately 100 basis points and we exited the year with a more efficient tax structure driven by our European business structure and low-cost China operations. In the year, we took action to reduce operating cost structure by closing three high-cost manufacturing facilities and several distribution centers, which in aggregate reduces headcount by over 450 people. The benefits from both tax and restructuring will really play out in 2008 and beyond. And finally, we grew earnings per share at 21% on an adjusted basis to $2.08. This increased income along with better working capital management enabled us to generate $285 million in free cash flow, a record for the company and over 135% conversion of net income. So across the board, we certainly feel we made significant progress and we say we had a very good year in 2007. Let's move to slide number six, which is one of our standard earnings chart. I am not going to spend a lot of time on this one but I would like to point out some of our key performance metrics. As I just mentioned, we generated $285 million of free cash flow for the year. Please note the areas highlighted in yellow. The first highlight shows that we were much more efficient with regard to working capital, that was one of our goals for the year. You can see we had a year-over-year improvement of about $95 million in working capital, used it from 2006 to 2007. The second highlight is to point out that we continue to invest for growth in new products as demonstrated by the $62 million of capital expenditures in 2007, an $11 million increase year-over-year. If we take a look at the company's… take a look at the components of return on invested capital on the right side of the slide, you see our fourth quarter trailing net operating profit after tax or NOPAT was $262 million. Our average invested capital was $2.76 billion, which gives us an after-tax ROIC of 9.5%, a 10 basis point improvement over last year. We are on our path towards improving this metric, as we aggressively drive our operating results and remain very prudent regarding our use of cash. We finished the year with a 36% debt-to-total capital ratio and we are very comfortable with our current debt levels. As a reminder, the non-GAAP to GAAP reconciliation of these calculations and numbers are included in the appendix to this presentation. Now please turn the slide number seven. I would like to share my observations on a few of the key items we accomplished in 2007. Rather than read them through item by item, I would summarize them in the following way. We entered 2007 with the priority that we would make stronger operational improvements, this need with on the heels with a sudden and pronounced decline in the North American residential markets during the second half of 2006. At that time we expected this market would decline another 10% to 15% in 2007. That residential market forecast proved optimistic as the market actually declined over 25% in the year. Additionally, we did not anticipate the commodities would escalate as much as they did earlier in the year. So versus our original outlook, we were forced to weather even more negative headwinds. Yet we were well positioned to overcome these hurdles and we did. As you may recall, we took immediate and aggressive actions in the second half of 2006 to better position our company for choppy economic conditions. Also rather than rely on growth, we centered our forecast on execution and productivity through lean initiatives, G&A reductions and manage investments for focused growth opportunities. This commitment to the fundamentals really paid off throughout the year. We did grow sales in 2007, led by double-digit growth from our key initiatives, industrial filtration, food service, desalination and commercial pool, and in global markets, as well as our electrical business, which grew high-single digit. However, the bigger drivers of our earnings growth were productivity and our streamlined cost structure. Many of these accomplishments are areas we will continue to turn on as we head into 2008. For example, we continue to staff up and lean with 60 new positions dedicated to our businesses since the end of 2006. And now, we have over 120 dedicated lean specialists in the company. As many of you know, lean is a journey. We made measurable progress in 2007, yet we have much more room to eliminate waste, improve effectiveness and serve the customer better. The accomplishments from lean sourcing and other productivity actions enable us to expand full-year margins in Water by 140 basis points and helped us to maintain the 15% margins that we have in Technical Products. Additionally our tax rate was a point lower as a result of the successful investment to structure our Swissco [ph] organization in Europe. And we have a good debt structure, thanks to the tremendous free cash flow in 2007, that impressive $285 million I like talking about. We also are proud of continued commitment to our dividend record. About a month ago, we announced a 13% increase in our dividend to $0.68 per share in 2008. This is the 32nd consecutive year that Pentair has increased dividend. So in summary, we made substantial progress in 2007, and we have momentum in our key initiatives and productivity actions as we head into 2008. Now, please turn to slide number eight. We wanted to compare 2006 and 2007 snapshot of our geographic convertible market mix to highlight the composition of our businesses and the success we're having in reshaping them. As we have discussed, their focus has been to flow our resources to our most attractive opportunities, it's working. We have been driving strong international growth and we acquired German-based Jung Pump. In 2007 for the first time Pentair had over $1 billion in sales outside the US. While sales in the US remains 68% of total company revenues, that level is a reduction of five points versus 2006. We continue to have a goal to achieve 60% US sales and 40% international sales in a few years. Bottom half of the slide shows a similar story. Residential markets represented about 35% of Pentair sales in 2006. As we exit the year, we have a more balanced market portfolio and currently residential markets represent only 30% of our sales. In 2007, municipal, commercial and industrial markets grew and we feel we grew in excess of the market rates there. The success of our key growth initiatives, which are focused on industrial, commercial and municipal global opportunities collectively added approximately $50 million of sales and grew over 15% in their our right. We are steadily transforming in already diverse set of businesses into a more attractive set of businesses. We look forward to updating you next year and expect to show even more balanced diverse Pentair in 2008. Similar to the previous three quarters, I would like to highlight one of our businesses. This quarter we highlight technical products on slide number nine. Technical Products is a $1.1 billion global business unit, it combines two businesses, a $650 million electrical business and a $400 million electronics business. Each business manufactures and distributes enclosures to a variety of markets, customers, applications and geographies. These enclosures get very widely from small standard metal enclosures to sophisticated systems to provide thermal protection, shielding or other performance features. Electrical and Electronics combined generated operating margins of about 15% and an after-tax return on invested capital of approximately 20%. In electrical markets, you have the premier North American enclosures brand Hoffman. This world-class business is a leader in North American commercial and industrial markets and fast growing in the datacom field. But the lean enterprise culture and a deep knowledge of the various vertical markets it serves, this business has a strong position. Distribution, as we have the commercial and industrial electrical channel. While mainly leveraging our North American distribution network, we are building the business globally. The combination of electrical and electronics under the long time Hoffman leader, Del Nickel into one GBU will enable these two businesses to better leverage international distribution, manufacturing facilities and vertical market knowledge. Our electronic business sells predominantly direct to OEMs. Electronics is slowly improving from our first half of 2007 bottoming out of sales and margins. We have become too projects... too big projects centric and lost our focus on a few more attractive segment. We were too tied to the big Telecom datacom market and when consolidation began to occur in that market, many of large projects were delayed or cancelled. We reinitiated more discipline in the business with focus on growing our presence in military, aerospace and medical applications. We expect the combination of electrical and electronics will take advantage of excess capacity in the electronics business, and we have already taken action to reduce capacity with enhanced closure of our Chicago facility. To summarize, the foundation of Technical Products is strong. We have a tremendous operating culture within Electrical, and we expect the combination of these two businesses under one technical products GBU and continue to improve margins and keep growth heading in the right direction. Now, please turn to slide number 10. We'll just spend a few minutes discussing one of our global business unit's technical products. Early in my comments, I addressed Water and we have also formed three global water businesses. Flow technologies, pool equipment and filtration. As you begin… begin to consider Pentair's global position in these markets, we thought this overview might be helpful. GBU has scale and real growth opportunities. We continue to invest in new products, vertical market teams, and sales and application coverage. We look forward to updating you on the success each of these GBUs achieves going forward. Now please turn to slide 11, which is my last slide before I turn it over to John. Back in October, on our third quarter earnings call we introduced full year 2008 guidance. We also highlighted our view of the major markets we serve. We're 100 days older and wiser and we maintain much of the same outlook. Certainly, the markets haven't improved since we last spoke. We also know that when markets do change, it can be sudden. We see the North American residential market continuing to be negative and we're forecasting a moderating growth in commercial and industrial in North America. John will provide more detail associated with 2008 financial guidance but let me discuss the underlying Pentair drivers here. Building on our performance in 2007, we're starting with a productivity first view. In the second half of 2007, we took significant additional restructuring actions that will yield benefits in 2008. We also are beginning to see more momentum from our sourcing initiatives and the fourth quarter 2007 run rate is a very encouraging tailwind. In 2008, we'll continue to manage our G&A costs aggressively and we expect to benefit from lower interest expense, lower tax rates, fewer shares and the removal of step up charges associated with our Porous Media and Jung Pump acquisitions. We're excited about many growth actions and investments too. Our key growth initiatives are strong and getting stronger. The telecom and datacom markets we serve in electronics are improving and it shows in our order rate. The reorganization of our business to global business units will open doors for increased international opportunities. Additionally, we're prioritizing and investing in our best growth initiatives and geographies by staffing them with our best talent. So while our current view includes modest assumptions for growth, we have significant opportunities, actions, and good momentum as we head into 2008. I'll now turn it over to John and let him provide some additional color on 2007 financials, Q1 outlook for '08 and full year '08 financial outlook. John?