Earnings Labs

Spire Inc. (SR)

Q1 2008 Earnings Call· Fri, Apr 25, 2008

$89.88

-1.09%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day everyone, and welcome to Standard Register's first quarter conference call. Today’s conference is being recorded. As a reminder, the presentation slides for today's conference are available by accessing the Investor Center's section of the Standard Register website at www.standardregister.com/investorcenter. Before we begin, a spokesperson from Standard Register will read a brief statement.

Bob Cestelli

Management

This report includes forward-looking statements covered by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Because such statements deal with the future events, they are subject to various risks and uncertainties, and the actual results for fiscal year 2008 and beyond could differ materially from the Company’s current expectations. Forward-looking statements are identified by words such as anticipates, projects, expects, plans, intends, believes, estimates, targets and other similar expressions that indicate trends and future events. Factors that could cause the Company’s results to differ materially from those expressed in forward-looking statements include, without limitation, variation in demand and acceptance of the Company’s products and services, the frequency, magnitude and timing of paper and other raw material price changes, general business and economic conditions beyond the Company’s control. Timing and completion and integration of acquisitions, the consequences of competitive factors in the marketplace, cost containment strategies and the Company’s success in attracting and retaining key personnel Additional information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected is contained in the Company’s filing with The Securities and Exchange Commission, including its report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 30th, 2007. The Company undertakes no obligation to revise or update forward-looking statements as a result of new information. Since these statements may no longer be accurate or timely.

Operator

Operator

Thank you, we will now turn the conference call over to Mr. Dennis Rediker, President and Chief Executive Officer of Standard Register. Mr. Rediker, please go ahead.

Dennis Rediker

President

Thank you, very much and thank you all for joining us here today on the call. With me today here our Craig Brown, CFO and Bob Cestelli, Vice President of Investor Relations, and Joe Morgan, newly appointed Chief Operating Officer of Standard Register. As usual I will make some comments about the quarter followed by Craig’s reporting on the financials and then we will take questions. Turning to the results the operating profit and we referred to operating profit before restructuring, asset impairment, pension amortization and other individual non recurring items. Operating profit for the quarter was up 11%, revenue was negatively impacted by loss of a higher volume, commodity funds and label application and some general price pressure, plus we do know that some of our business has been impacted by the economy, with less demand for our products and accounts that produce hard goods using the housing industry, our overnight package carriers as well as other manufacturing operations. We have some pressure on the units activity. In spite of the slower revenue, the operating profit improved over the last year helped by the lower SG&A expense, which resulted some of the cost reduction program that we announced in mid 2007. Cash flow -- cash flow was very good, positive in the quarter with a $10 million reduction in net debt from year-end 2007. During the quarter our concentrated efforts to win new business is beginning to payoff. Our Enterprise Document Management, sales and marketing approach landed us 39 new deals in the quarter, valued approximately $13 million annually. This compares with 46 new contracts last year and these all represent new business. Revenue from these contracts that were signed in the first quarter was started flowing later in the year. We have some specific marketing and sales campaigns…

Joseph Morgan

Management

Sure thanks Dennis. Over the next 100 days or so I have got the plans for focusing on a few key thinks. As the CEO my main role is around execution of the plan, I’ve bean very evolving our planning process over the last few years index. I’ve been leading that so I am very intimate with what we need to do there and with our alignment that could come through this new announcement and I am very confident that we can move – move that needle very quickly and this that’s the first thing I am focused on as alignment on accountability. The second thing is around decision making process with the new staff that I have, we are in really good position to make improved all in decisions around on key investments going forward. The third thing is the intense focus on the client I have spent a lot of time in the field with a lot of our customers, both new and existing clients and I see the opportunity before us and we need to continue to bring more people to that relationship with our clients, we’ll be focusing on that. The next one is the difference in the market which is really around trust the world’s most trusted document services company, trustees are key differentiator and that goes form the client all the way into our operations and everyone in our company and the culture. So, we will be concentrating tremendously there, Lean and Six Sigma those are two different things. The methodology will be applying that more and more throughout the company not just in operations meeting manufacturing, but also in our technology investments and then the final thing’s is around leaderships. We have invested quite a bit in training and making sure that we have the right people in place, and we’re going to continue to do that in creating an environment where we can continue to attract the right talent to drive our play in force. So those are the six main things that I am going to be focusing my attention on, but as you bolt that all down as Dennis, it’s really the pace of business that bringing energy to execution, which is what I will be spending my time on.

Dennis Rediker

President

Thank you Joe, that’s great and, we’re confident that this will pick up the pace and performance of the Company. Also yesterday at our annual meeting, we had a slide of directors approved, we have increased the number of Directors to eight and we elected in the annual meeting five of the incumbent and three outside the new Board members. These three new Board members bring a tremendous amount of solid credentials and a breadth of relevant experience. I’ll just take a moment to work through these three. We have first had David Bailis, who is now running his own consulting business after retiring from, as a Senior Vice President of First Data Corporation. Michael Kohlsdorf, he is currently President and CEO of ADERANT Holdings and he is formerly the Senior Vice President for Ikon Office Solutions and finally Eric McCarthey, he is currently President for the Coca-Cola Company’s 7-Eleven global business team, where he is responsible for the second largest customer and complete operation’s, marketing of their activity with respect to 7-Eleven. These new Directors have already been through an orientation process and they have a great desire to be very engaged with what they see as a great future for the company. With Joe Morgan in place as COO, I will be focusing more on working with our new Board to develop our long-term enterprise value strategy leading to a more profitable growth that will increase value for our shareholders. Yesterday also the Board of Directors declared a quarterly dividend of $0.23 per share to be paid on June, 6th to shareholders as of May 23rd, 2008. So, that was the specific announcements from yesterday. Now Craig will provide us usual incredibly clear representation of the financial results for the first quarter.

Craig Brown

CFO

Thanks. Good morning everyone. We will walk you through P&L, I will talk a little more about the pension freeze implications to expense and funding and we will do a bit brief update on the cost reduction program that we announced last year that Dennis mentioned, and we’ll also touch on a couple of balance sheet items and discuss our cash flow for the quarter a little more detail. As Dennis indicated our revenues in the first quarter was just over $207 million. That was down $20 million from last year's number or about just under 9% decrease. We are now just indicate that the economy has had a role to some extent for probably at least 75% of this decrease. It takes a couple of different forms, first probably $13 million of the $20 million can be a trace to continuation perhaps even an up tick in competitive pricing related to customers who themselves are feeling pressure from the economy and are now looking for price reductions. A half of that $13 million occurred in the single account, which we expected and which ended there personally from us after the first quarter of last year. We've also observed few of our units of manufacturing in labels and other areas where we service the manufacturing industry and that was probably a couple of million if the20, and then the balance of about $5 million for various other reasons, but importantly about half of that remaining $5 million relates to a single customer who simply reduced their quantity of units this year, but they were not in a manufacturing industry. So, if we look by segment, and I’ll just mention the dollars, Document Management was $113.9 million in revenue fourth quarter. That compared to a 121.7 so that was off just…

Operator

Operator

Thank you very much. (Operator Instructions). We will take our first question from Charles Strauzer with CJS Securities.

Fred Buonocore

Analyst · CJS Securities

I am in for Charlie Strauzer. I am just wondered to see, if you could give us a sense where direction on gross margin, as well as your SG&A spend for the balance of the year relative to Q1?

Craig Brown

CFO

Well, we – who is this please?

Fred Buonocore

Analyst · CJS Securities

My name is Fred Buonocore. I am calling for Charlie Strauzer at CJS.

Craig Brown

CFO

Hi, Fred, This is Craig. We haven’t given guidance specifically about those numbers going forward our guidance, which we reluctant to leave intact from the prior period it was basically build around revenue and our operating profits as we defined it. So, I would say that we don’t want to give a specific numbers on that except to say that we are watching the cost very carefully and we are pleased with our performance in the first quarter, and we recognize the importance of a good cost control. So, I – that’s as far as I can go on that.

Fred Buonocore

Analyst · CJS Securities

I understand. And then secondly, Dennis you commented on the fact that, some of these other product areas had a certain point would more than offset the weakness in the printing business from a revenue standpoint. Do you have a sense for kind of the timing of that turnaround or can you give us some more color on that?

Craig Brown

CFO

Well, we have -- we said that we have expect to have a very modest revenue increase that’s the guidance we given in the past and while we’re starting off here with a little bit of weaker revenue, we have good strong back half as you just noticed, we’ve signed several new contracts which will produce revenue later in the year. So, you know our intention is still to strive for that modest revenue increase which is obviously the net effect of the traditional and printing business declining and the new lines of business growing. So, our intention is still strive to achieve that in the course of this year.

Fred Buonocore

Analyst · CJS Securities

Understood. Thank you very much.

Craig Brown

CFO

You are welcome.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Jamie Clement with Sidoti & Company.

Dennis Rediker

President

Hello Jamie.

Jamie Clement

Analyst · Sidoti & Company

Hi, Dennis first question for you. In your print supply chain management initiative, I don’t know if you have ever discussed the split I don’t know if you have the exact numbers, but maybe you can venture or guess. When you are procuring print for your customers, do you know approximately how much of that is actually flows through your plans?

Dennis Rediker

President

Actually, the sourcing of print that we talk about in our – in that print supply chain services, is the primarily or almost exclusively intended to be a service only offering. We don’t run that to our plans generally speaking, what we have is have a portfolio print partners. These are typically, we are sourcing a printed materials that we - that we traditionally do not produce and so, what we are offering as a service to customers to provide them a more effective way to resource their printed material from commercial printers and other special printers and managed the supply chain of those distribution warehousing and certainly of those materials. So, it really is a service offering, as we have mentioned before the gross margin on that is lower than our manufactured products but we have a very, almost no assets involved in it. So the return on that – that investment is, in all expanse and the return is very high.

Jamie Clement

Analyst · Sidoti & Company

Yeah. And Dennis who are going to ask a question was here there have been some other companies in your industry and I guess still there are. That -- they’ve talked about similar type of services where, a large percentages is still supported by their hard asset, you know what I mean so I just -- I wanted to make sure, that I understood the different there and thanks very much for that.

Dennis Rediker

President

Let me make one more comment. There are people who have a lot of printing assets and of course they want to offer those services to direct print to their assets. There is a movement that we see developing in the marketplace where our customers want to get the best deal in the marketplace without being captive to printer with who have the assets. And that’s a segment if you well. In the industry that’s developing pretty quickly and we unfortunately have been participating right all like that and we expected to grow significantly.

Jamie Clement

Analyst · Sidoti & Company

Okay. Dennis, I don’t know whether this question should be directed for you - to you or to Craig, but when you -- going back a couple of quarters to your announcement of the cost savings plan. I think that you know since that time, the economy has suffered some deterioration and obviously if that -- that plays out in your revenue line this quarter, but if you look over the year your comparisons. It really seems like your costs saving number held up and that you didn’t really suffer for any kind of – so called reverse operating leverage or anything like that. Now, the question that I have for you Dennis is, it seems like 2008 priority was to be able to reinvest for growth in certain areas of your business. Now, given the decline in the economy, are you still able to do that and still be able to put up a number like this?

Dennis Rediker

President

Where our investments that are in training, education, bringing in talent, developing technology is not and some specific assets as physical assets and we expect to continue to focus on investing that kind of money or that kind of investment into the places we want to grow. So, yeah I think our plan calls for us to continue to do that and that is the importance of the long-term future, if we don’t have that growth, in the growth areas, we are going to continue to see decline.

Jamie Clement

Analyst · Sidoti & Company

I agree completely. I just wanted to make sure, because you know to be honest, I was, I was pleasantly surprised given the economic environment, that your margins held up as well as they did. So, I just wanted to make sure that you are still investing for growth, as you said you would be on the prior call?

Craig Brown

CFO

Jamie just add to that I think that - I agree with you they did hold up well and we wherever possible are looking to eliminate other expense and take that and redirected the things where there are growth opportunities so we continue to try to do that wherever we can.

Jamie Clement

Analyst · Sidoti & Company

I apologize if I missed this. The savings as a result of the pension actions that you all have taken, is that part – originally you talked about $35 million of annual savings, that you’ve accomplished by the end of 2007. You suggested there might be another $5 million that you could realize at some point in 2009, is that the pension number that sort of that around that $5 part of $5 million number?

Craig Brown

CFO

No.

Jamie Clement

Analyst · Sidoti & Company

No. Okay. Okay all right. Thank - thank you very much

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions). Gentlemen at this time there appeared to be no further questions.

Dennis Rediker

President

All right well I want to close up by saying then - that we’re working very hard to drive the top-line growth while we maintained our improved cost structure and actually achieve additional productivity, and so, we look forward to talking with you of that results in the second quarter. Thank you for joining us in the call and we will talk to you again.

Operator

Operator

Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen for joining today’s Standard Register’s first quarter conference call. This does conclude the conference. You may now disconnect.