Earnings Labs

Spire Inc. (SR)

Q3 2010 Earnings Call· Fri, Oct 29, 2010

$89.88

-1.09%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, everyone and welcome to Standard Register’s Third Quarter 2010 Conference Call. Today’s conference call is being recorded. As a reminder, the presentation slides for today’s conference are available by accessing the Investor Center section of the Standard Register website at www.standardregister.com/investorcenter. I will now turn the conference over to Shaun Smith. Please go ahead.

Shaun Smith

Management

Hi, good morning. And welcome to Standard Register’s Third Quarter 2010 Investor Call. Joining me today is Joe Morgan, Chief Executive Officer and Bob Ginnan, Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, I’d like to remind you that today any forward-looking statements that we might make are covered by the Safe Harbor statement that can be found in the company’s earnings new release as well as accessing our website. In addition, we will make references to financial measures that are not in accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles or GAAP. Management believes that the use of those measures will enhance our audience's understanding of our financial performance and are not meant to be considered in isolation or a substitution of GAAP. For today's call, Joe Morgan will have a couple of comments regarding the highlights for the quarter that will be followed by Bob Ginnan's overview of the financial statements, at which time Bob will turn the call over for questions that him and Mr. Morgan will answer. So with that I turn the call over to Joe Morgan.

Joe Morgan

Chief Executive Officer

Good morning. We're excited today to be talking about our earnings and performance for the last quarter. As you're probably well aware at this point, this is a key pivot point in our turnarounds leading to transformation. And so I'm going to talk a little about that. One of the things that we're doing a little different today is that we've taken this investor call and a follow-up town hall with all of our employees to Boston. We have a great deal of business on the East coast and we have a fairly good size number of employees for our company there as well. So part of our transformation is to connect the performance of the business with employees throughout the country. So we're doing that just by way of reference, so a few a highlights for the month. As Shaun pointed out, I'm going to provide some specific details to give a little bit clearer view of how we're performing against our strategy. First is around revenue. We came back to growth. It's been a long time since we've grown as a company and it's the sixth quarter in a row where we've demonstrated performance improvement. We're feeling more stable, of course, that the revenue level which is a key driver for the future of the business. From a gross margin standpoint, we saw slight improvement on a percentage basis when you adjust for LIFO. On an SG&A basis we're controlling our expenses while we reinvest in the business, and the MyC3 plan that we announced last year has progressed quite well. And as we mentioned, we have reinvested a good portion of some of the earnings improvement opportunity that's come from that in the business, and that's a key factor in our transformation. And then from a net…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. At this time, we are ready to begin the question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions) I would like to introduce the first question as Charlie Strauzer with CJS Securities.

Charlie Strauzer

Management

Let's just talk a little bit about, if we can, about the return to growth year and, obviously very modest growth, obviously, but still growth nonetheless. And your thoughts on kind of where this kind of takes us from here for not only this year, but maybe into next year. Obviously, Q4 you've got moving parts with various changes in the number of weeks. But try and give us some directional sense as to what you're seeing kind of early on in the quarter already.

Joe Morgan

Chief Executive Officer

Well, we've had this conversation pretty often, Charlie. As you know, we're in this turnaround. We feel that we're getting to stabilization as we've noted. You can look at the trend that's dictated on the slide that we've shown and you can see the progress. I wouldn't draw that line into the future and suggest that that sloped line is going to be the answer. But I will tell you that the investments we're making and the approach we're taking we feel more positive about the business than we've felt in a really long time. We're not yet in a position to declare victory. We have a lot of work to do yet. So we're really not in a position to give the kind of guidance that I think you're looking for. But you can see through the trends, stability and underneath that stability is a lot of really, really good work in the business.

Charlie Strauzer

Management

Is it safe to say, though, that things have not gotten worse, though. I mean, it seems like you've seen a modest pickup a little bit here and you've picked up some new wins, but it feels like it hasn't gotten worse at least, right?

Joe Morgan

Chief Executive Officer

No, I think it's getting better. I mean, I would say that we're in a stronger position. We lost essentially $100 million in the economic downturn period and it's very difficult to get that back, obviously, because of that adjustment. But I would tell you that through that period the investments that we've made have made us a stronger company. The insight that we have in the market is incredibly precise. And the pipeline that we have is very market focused and it's grown. I can give you some factors on that. Our pipeline in our commercial business and our healthcare business is up 20% quarter-on-quarter and I'm talking about late stage. And our industrial business is a little bit less than that in terms of growth, but some of that is just due to the in-mold labeling. It's taking us a little longer to get adoption of IML than we thought because of the nature of the technology. That's not to say that the opportunity is any less than we thought, it's just that it's taking a little bit longer due to the technical challenges. But I feel very good about it, but I'm just not in a position yet to state what the next number is going to be. But we're not going to be talking about our goal is not to be talking about degrees of decline as being a positive comment about our company.

Charlie Strauzer

Management

Excellent. And if you look at some of the areas where you are seeing that pickup, how much, if you can maybe kind of help us out here in terms of how much of that is pure organic, just your sales force driving the growth versus end-user, kind of already established customer growth and demand?

Joe Morgan

Chief Executive Officer

Okay. So that's a good question. I would say the growth in healthcare is predominantly our sales efforts. I would say our industrial business and again, this is rough, would probably be a third of the growth is industry rebound and the balance is market share gain. And then in our Financial and Emerging sectors the Financial market is a little we're recovering there but it's still not where we want it to be. As you can tell by the performance versus prior year, it's still a little bit down. Our Emerging business is also a little bit down. That's a different discussion. But I'd say Healthcare and Industrial, the majority of the growth that we're seeing is related to our go-to-market effort and organic activity. The one thing that is interesting, though, is we are participating more and more outside of our normal portfolio and the professional services and more solution technology opportunities for us are expanding as well, which is an exciting point for us.

Charlie Strauzer

Management

And Joe, when you kind of look at the current competitive environment that's out there, obviously, your large cross-town rival has dipped into a prepackaged bankruptcy. I mean, what are you seeing there in terms of potential customer win pickups there or share gains? And also, too if you can talk a little bit more about the overall competitive environment and maybe some potential acquisition opportunities that may be coming out. Because obviously there are some distressed properties out there that have been surfacing given the current environment.

Joe Morgan

Chief Executive Officer

I'll start with the easiest one which is the acquisition. We're not interested in buying print assets that are not focused in the market segments that we're involved in. So that would kind of be the only interest that we might have. Our acquisition opportunities that we see on the horizon are more around technologies and solutions that are helping us advance our position in key markets like Healthcare and Financial Services. So you're right, though, there is a lot of activity there. And the interest in having us participate in those types of things has grown with our market focus. So I think as time goes on, especially with cash flow hopefully improving, we'll be in a better position to take advantage of some of those changes than we may have been over the last few years. But that will become an increasingly important part of the strategy, although I'm not announcing anything at this point. In terms of the competitive environment, you're right, we do have a company in the same zip code that's had some challenges. We compete in our Healthcare business probably with them more than we do in other segments. As we get to the enterprise level, especially in the Emerging business and Financial Services, we have another large more traditional printing competitor that we compete with. But more and more what we're finding especially as we've reshaped our business to be market focused, the competitive landscape has changed a lot. A lot of the competitors that we're in with now are not they're not print providers, they're solution providers, technology providers. And sometimes it's creating a partnership opportunity for us. Other times it is in fact a competitive situation. But I fully expect in the next probably a year to 18 months as we talk about competition as it relates to Standard Register, it will be very different than the competition that we've traditionally talked about.

Charlie Strauzer

Management

Got it. And then just, obviously, you still think that you kind get to break even cash flow for the year. You've got $25 million estimated payments on the pension. Any thoughts as you're looking into next year about the pension that any changes that we should bake into our models here?

Bob Ginnan

Management

Charlie, this is Bob. We're in that range of 25 million next year. We don't know exactly where it's going to hit, but we've kind of talked about it before that it's probably going to increase a little bit, maybe up to 30. But I think that changes every day. So...

Charlie Strauzer

Management

Of course. And you do a reval on the pension usually in January, is that correct?

Bob Ginnan

Management

It’s part of the year-end closing, but yeah, it occurs in January, yes.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. (Operator Instructions) So at this time there are no further questions, and I would like to turn the call back over to Shaun Smith for closing remarks.

Shaun Smith

Management

Okay. Thank you, Laurie. That concludes our call for the third quarter of 2010. We look forward to giving you our annual results in February. Thank you and have a great day.

Operator

Operator

Thank you everyone for participating on today’s conference. The conference has concluded. You may disconnect at this time.