Randall J. Hogan
Analyst · Hamzah Mazari
Thanks, Jim. And good morning, everyone. Before we discuss our third quarter results, I want to extend our thoughts and prayers to those who have been affected by the devastation from Hurricane Sandy. We know that a large portion of those participating in the call have been directly impacted by Sandy, and we hope for a quick recovery for each of you and everyone else affected. On Slide 3, let me begin the Pentair discussion by sharing some thoughts following the successful closing at the end of the third quarter of our merger with Tyco's Flow Control business. 4 weeks ago, we successfully completed the first step in an exciting new journey for Pentair. By combining Pentair and Tyco's Flow Control businesses, we've strengthened our leadership positions in the markets we serve. And by all accounts, Day 1 of the new Pentair was a great success, with all businesses and functions reporting smooth transitions. Consistent with our initial discussions around the deal, we begun $400 million in share repurchases and have authorization for the other $800 million in place already. We also announced the increase in our first quarter 2013 dividend, and as a result, 2013 will mark our 37th consecutive year of increasing our dividend. We continue to spend a significant amount of time visiting employees around the world. We visited over 30 of the Flow Control sites and seen approximately 25% of our new employees. I'm extremely impressed with the tremendous talent we have and are now 30,000 person-strong organization. Together, we have even more capabilities to go after expanded growth opportunities and aggressively pursue efficiencies. Integration activities, which led to the success of Day 1, were exciting. But they were just the beginning. The real work has just started. Let me share with you how we're moving forward. First, it's imperative that our 8 Global Business Units drive strong business performance to achieve their operating and financial targets. Additionally, each of these business units is pursuing growth and cost synergies that align with the vision and expectations inherent in our merger. Each business unit is developing robust project funnels to ensure we realize strong synergy capture, not only over the next 100 days but through 2013, 2014 and 2015. The integration and standardization team, or IST for short, will continue to drive Pentair-wide program management of synergy capture and the rollout of our standardization initiative. The IST was designed and built to be an ongoing organization, not just the team to get us through Day 1. The IST will drive critical standardization programs, which involve taking the best practices from both organizations to create one enterprise-wide standard. One example is the Pentair Integrated Management System, and of course, rolling out the Lean Enterprise element of PIMS throughout the entire organization. Nearly 10% of the Flow Control employees have taken part in Lean Enterprise training already. In addition, functions in finance, HR, legal, compliance, marketing and communications will be implementing standardization programs as well. With the 8 business units working in close connection with the IST, we're gaining even more confidence in the synergy targets we communicated over 6 months ago, when the transaction was first announced. And by driving PIMS and functional standardizations through our organization, we will have the operating processes to ensure consistent and strong performance. While we're in the early stages of looking at revenue synergies, we've seen some examples that we're very excited about. Whether it is leveraging Flow Control's strong relationships and energy, or Pentair's reach into the global food and beverage channel, we look forward to sharing more about these opportunities, as our teams come together and identify how to leverage the new combined company for growth. We have a tremendous company with extremely talented people. I've seen in my many visits around the company that our Win Right culture is being exhibited everyday. With a successful Day 1 behind us, we now have a significant work to do to ensure we meet and exceed the commitments we have made to our employees, our customers and our shareholders. Now let's turn to Slide 4 to discuss legacy Pentair's third quarter results. The third quarter marks the last quarter for legacy Pentair as the transaction closed on the final day of the quarter. The key point that I want to make about our core business is that the third quarter, once again, demonstrated our strong operating performance as seen by a 7% improvement in adjusted operating income and adjusted operating margin expansion of 110 basis points to 12.4%, driven by strong price and productivity. Sales declined 3% on a reported basis owing to FX translation headwinds as volume and price grew 1% in the quarter. We delivered adjusted EPS of $0.64 cents, up 10% from $0.58 cents, and at the top of our range before including a $0.01 benefit from a favorable tax rate. Unfavorable foreign currency translation continues to mask our strong pricing, and we continue to see volume gains in many verticals such as Industrial, Agriculture, Pool and Energy. There are headwinds that remain, including in telecom, Western Europe and China, but overall, fast growth region sales were up low double-digits in local currencies as the Middle East, Latin America and India are seeing strength, showing our investments continue to pay off in these regions. Despite constrained volume gains due to the market headwinds, we continue to see strong productivity. Further, our pricing is gaining momentum and lower material inflation is allowing those pricing actions to flow more quickly to the bottom line. We delivered $62 million in free cash flow during the third quarter, bringing the year-to-date total to $203 million, and putting us well on our way to convert more than 100% of net income to free cash flow once again, something we've done consistently over the last 12 years. All in, we delivered another quarter of solid operating performance with well-executed productivity initiatives, good price realization and continued growth investments. This great execution comes on top of the momentous effort expended in finalizing this transformational merger, while delivering on our legacy business targets. Now let's turn to Slide 5 for a review of our Water & Fluid Solutions segment performance. Water & Fluid Solutions sales declined 1% on a reported basis, increasing 2% when excluding the negative impact of FX. Despite the flat volume, we delivered 2 points of price in the quarter, consistent with what we have seen in the past few quarters. Excluding FX, Aquatic Systems delivered 7% sales growth. Treatment/Process grew 6%, and Flow Technologies declined modestly, owing to tough year-over-year comparisons. Let me begin with Aquatic Systems, where once again we saw another great performance. Sales were up 7% in the quarter, reflecting continued share gains and good pricing. Aquatic Systems ended their pool season with inventories in good shape and continued pricing momentum. Building off good secular trends around sustainability, efficiency and automation, we continued to see strong gains in sales of our IntelliFlo pumps, up 7% in the quarter and nearly 30% year-to-date, as well as in heat pumps, which grew 41% in the quarter and are up a comparable amount year-to-date. The gains are not just coming on the residential side of Pool, as we saw almost 20% growth in our commercial business the quarter. We continue to expand coverage and penetration, growing our dealer base over 10% year-to-date. Within Treatment/Process, water purification sales grew 6% year-over-year on local currency, comparable to the growth rate experienced last quarter. Fast growth region sales continue to grow at double-digit rates, with India up 60% on expanded coverage and added new products. In contrast, sales in the U.S. were up only modestly and Europe was relatively flat, largely in line with our expectations and continuing the trend we saw in the first half of the year. We discussed the pending launch of our industry-changing innovation, Hybrid DI, which combines the benefits of reverse osmosis filtration with those of a water softener, using capacitive electrodes to remove hardness and total dissolved solids from water without employing salt. The Hybrid DI is shipping for field trials and there continues to be growing interest in this new technology, particularly with commercial customers. We continue to see signs of strength among our filtration and purification systems businesses, while our water treatment valves and tanks business is showing signs of bouncing off the bottom in North America and stabilizing in Western Europe. Within North America, we're seeing share gains due to improved delivery performance and more feet on the street. Last quarter, we discussed the U.S.A. builder, alpha test, as part of our rapid growth process. This program targets a select group of homebuilders that are growing in areas such as Denver, Houston, San Antonio and Tampa. We've seen great success early on with 70% -- 75% close rates versus 30% with our traditional programs. As we look forward, we expect to triple the size of this initiative by the end of next year. Water purification continues to make progress towards our next proof of concept, as this business has driven PIMS throughout the entire GBU. And despite the ongoing challenges resulting from a depressed residential market these past 6 years, the team has continued to improve operationally, driving gains in delivery and productivity, and resulting in dramatic improvements in operating margins and ROIC, and equally important, supporting investments in innovation and global expansion. In the other part of Treatment/Process, which is process technologies, that business grew top line 5% on an organic basis, as continued gains in Energy were partially offset by delayed projects in both water and beverage. We are now past the 1-year anniversary of our acquisition of CPT, and we continue to focus on the integrations and standardization efforts within process technologies. The beverage business, while experiencing some project delays during the quarter, is setting up nicely to end the year with several expected shipments. As we brought together Pentair and Flow Control, we've already experienced an early win in the food and beverage space. A major beverage company has combined its purchase of hygienic valves from Pentair and food process valves from our new Valves & Controls business. While this is just one example, it illustrates the breadth of the combined product portfolio and strength of our brands. Finally, let me discuss our Flow Technologies business, where sales declined 3% in local currencies during the quarter. While our residential pump business had a tough comp in the third quarter, with the absence of any major weather-related activities, we continued to see strength in our agriculture business and growth in our municipal and Industrial backlogs. Agriculture saw its growth moderate to high single-digits, as there were some impact to buying patterns in September from the drought experienced in much of the country over the summer. The outlook for our agriculture business remains strong entering next year. We highlighted last quarter that our municipal business experienced an uptick in orders and backlog, and the third quarter saw that trend continue. We've seen our municipal backlog grow for the last 5 quarters and our year-to-date backlog is up 14% compared, and at the levels last seen in 2010. The growth in our municipal backlog is signaling some increase in sales in this vertical starting in the fourth quarter and into the first half of 2013. Based on what we've seen, it does not appear that municipal market itself is bottom, but we're seeing signs of activity in the traditional break and fix category and it appears that our investments in customer service the past couple of years may be contributing to our order's success. The right half of the page show second quarter Water & Fluid operating profits and margins. Water & Fluid adjusted operating margins increased 60 basis points to 11.6% in the quarter. Successful pricing actions and strong productivity helped to offset inflation in foreign exchange headwinds. And we continue to make progress at CPT as the adoption of PIMS has contributed to improvements in quality, delivery and cost. In summary, the Water & Fluid Solutions segment has experienced a number of headwinds in 2012. We have continued making investments and we are seeing improvements in key markets, such as North American residential, which bodes well for 2013. Now let's move to Slide 6 for a review of Technical Solutions. Technical Solutions, by the way, is the new name of the segment, so we've gone to that now. This is still the Technical Products business you know. Technical Solutions remains a bifurcated story with the top line, once again, showing a modest decline, down 2.5% in local currencies, while robust price and productivity contributed to operating margins exceeding 20% for the second consecutive quarter. While the Datacom and telecom markets experienced over 20% sales declines each, Industrial continues to grow albeit at a moderating pace. General Electronics showed gains in the quarter, and other markets, such as security and defense and Medical, are also experiencing some growth. Enclosures & Cabinets, which represents nearly 60% of Technical Solutions, grew sales 2% in the quarter, as strong pricing help mitigate small volume declines. As mentioned previously, growth in Industrial continued to be a beacon of light for the top line in Technical Solutions, as the group continues to identify opportunities to expand in the catalog channels, where new distributors continue to be added. We continue to make good progress in building out our stainless steel watershed enclosures, particularly within the food and beverage vertical. For example, a major food producer has spec-ed in [ph] these enclosures into all equipment and wash-down areas in an effort to reduce the risk of contamination. Cooling, approximately 10% of Technical Solutions sales was flat this quarter, following mid single-digit growth last quarter. The sequential decrease in the growth rate was due to slower communications markets. While cooling is a smaller piece of Technical Solutions today, we continue to see attractive long-term growth characteristics for this business, and are investing accordingly as we tailor product design to meet local needs, localize production and train fast growth region sales teams to expand globally. In North America, we continue to build out our MRO strategy and have launched a couple of alpha tests as part of our rapid growth process to test ideas there. Systems & Solutions, approximately 20% of Technical Solutions sales, has seen the sharpest decline this year, and that trend continued in the third quarter as a result of the greater than 20% declines experienced in the Datacom and telecom markets. While we expect the top line to remain challenged for Technical Solutions exiting 2012, we continue to invest in new products and global expansion, while driving price and productivity to grow operating income. Let us now turn to Slide 7. Before we look at the new Pentair, we want to assure you that the legacy Pentair business remains on track towards our previously communicated expectation for the full year. In the fourth quarter, we will continue to see the top line challenges and headwinds that we've experienced this year, such as the challenging Western Europe markets and the shrinkage in Datacom and telecom markets. Counterbalancing these challenges however, we are seeing growing backlogs in our municipal business and beverage, and beverage is entering its typically strongest season for shipments. In local currencies, we have seen ongoing strength in fast growth regions with the exception of China, and we expect this trend to continue. As demonstrated by our strong price contribution in the first 3 quarters of the year, pricing is a discipline at Pentair and a trend we expect to continue. Operating margins have benefited from price and productivity, 2 elements within our control. We have seen some moderation on the inflation front, which has helped, but we continue to drive productivity. For legacy Pentair, we are on track to deliver adjusted operating margin expansion of 80 basis points for the year and low double-digit adjusted EPS growth. Now let's turn to Slide 8. In summary, our legacy business performed in line with our expectations, and we successfully closed our transformational merger with Tyco's Flow Control business. This year has not been without challenges, but we continue to demonstrate our ability to drive strong operating performance through elements within our control. We are doing this while still investing in the long term, as evidenced by our continued expansion into new areas such as Energy and agriculture and a strong new product pipeline like Hybrid DI. In addition, we're starting to see some tailwinds emerge as we begin to look ahead to next year. Energy and agriculture remain areas of growth for us. But at long last, we're seeing signs of a long-awaited improvement in the North American residential market. As mentioned previously, municipal is seeing good growth in its backlog, which is a sign that another long beleaguered market is showing some signs of bouncing off the bottom. We've seen great execution led by PIMS, as evidenced by our strong margin performance. The integration of Flow Control is well under way, as we have our corporate structure in place. We've identified projects for over half of our sourcing targets, and we have quickly identified revenue synergies, opportunities in Energy and food and beverage. With that, I'll turn the call over to John.