James M. Loree
Analyst · Barclays
Okay. Thanks, John. As John indicated, I'll hit the segment info fairly quickly. It is a fairly clear and relatively simple story this quarter, operationally. And the first part of the story, relating to CDIY, is just a terrific performance by that team, with a 6% organic growth and 180 basis points of profit rate accretion. The organic growth was 7% in North America. We had double-digit growth in the emerging markets and we were flat in Europe. Now of all those accomplishments, I would say the last one perhaps was the most challenging to deal with and perhaps the most impressive because they were able to take what in Southern Europe was a down 10% to 20% type of performance across those countries and translate it into an overall flat performance. Really outstanding work in the U.K. and real strong in other parts of Europe, excluding the south as well. So they've taken the new products and they've done some really creative promotions, and they've really worked hard to offset the difficult market conditions in Europe. And now moving to the global business. The Professional Power Tools, up 14%, as John mentioned; consumer, up 9%; hand tools and fastening was flat, as new storage products and Black & Decker Hand Tools strengths were offset by lower U.S. sales as we exited some dilutive-margin promotion activity that we had engaged in last year. What's really impressive to me is the profit rate, 14.5% in the fourth quarter. That's really strong for the fourth quarter for this type of business. And as you will probably recall, the margin rates have been pretty strong in CDIY all year. And we think that -- as we enter 2013 with strong organic growth momentum, that we have a new watermark for operating margin rate that represents a sustainable -- we think, sustainable level, with perhaps room for even further improvement. In the home market, that's firming up as we sit here today, and a solid new product pipeline so we're pretty bullish on this segment for the future. And then moving to Security and Industrial. The story is -- it was articulated as basically weakness in Europe in both these businesses negatively impacted the growth and profitability in the segments. Security had negative 3% organic growth and positive growth, if -- albeit 1%, but still a sea change in terms of performance in CSS North America and we're happy to see that. Minus 5% in Europe. And the Mechanical Access business, which is primarily U.S., was up 3%. The operating margin rate in Security was 15.5%, essentially flat, down 20 basis points versus the prior year; and 17.3%, excluding the Niscayah dilution that -- or rate dilution that occurs because of the lower rate. Although, the Niscayah integration is continuing to progress smoothly and they've essentially doubled their operating margin rate since the inception of that integration activity. CSS overall was down 3% organically: North America up 1% and minus 5% in Europe. And as I mentioned, the Commercial Hardware organic sales were up, in total, 3%; and in North America, 4%. We have a very interesting business model shift going on in Mechanical Access in the U.S., and that is that we're converting our direct business to be served by independent distributors, which is freeing up our sales force for -- from the transactional activity to become much more hunters, hunter-type activity. And also, this change enables us to really pursue more aggressively the commercial construction market, which is heating up as we speak. So that's the story for Security. Industrial, 16% operating margin rate, down 40 basis points versus the prior year. The operating leverage in Engineered Fastening continuing great performance there, offset by the declines in IAR Europe. And John talked about the numbers, with IAR down 5% organically, Engineered Fastening up 6% and infrastructure down 2%, for a total of negative 1% organic growth. Engineered Fastening at 6% positive was a good, really good, story when you put it in the context of the light vehicle production globally, which contracted 1.5%. And they also had a terrific performance in Europe, being up 3% despite the issues on that continent. And they also -- the team at Emhart also made terrific progress planning for the Infastech integration, which we expect to -- the deal to close here over the next several weeks. So all that, very encouraging. The infrastructure business. The declines moderated, so trend is getting better there. And actually, oil and gas, that -- the larger part of the segment there -- or the subsegment was slightly positive organically, reflecting what we think is a bottom in the U.S. onshore market, which is very encouraging. In fact, we see activity beginning to become -- pipeline activity beginning to generate very significant activity in the -- North America. And then offshore remained strong. The issue in -- that made the subsegment negative was the hydraulics business was down about 10%, relying heavily on -- end market relying heavily on scrap steel, which was a tough story in the latter half of the year. So that's the segment information for this quarter. Now I'd like to spend some time on the initiative that we as a team have been aggressively pursuing for about 6 months now. And we think the #1 catalyst for positive reevaluation of the company in the stock market will be the demonstrated capacity of this team to achieve 4% to 6% organic growth, which has been a long-standing objective of ours ever since John's arrival. And if you average out the organic growth over the long term, we've been running around 3%, if you exclude 2009, which was a kind of an outlier of a year. It will be about 1% if you included '09. So we haven't really hit that objective. And if you look at the last 5 years, there's lots of external factors that have been attributable to that. However, we cannot accept the fact that the external environment, a, has been weak; and we cannot accept the lower performance just because the external environment has been weak. And we don't really expect the external environment to be much better over the next 5 years, with continued issues in Europe, slow growth in the U.S. and maybe somewhat slower but still robust growth in the emerging markets. So as a team, we've decided that we would take matters into our own hands and we would rev up our organic growth engine. And a lot of the acquisition activity that we've pursued over the last few years has put us in a position where we're actually able to do that, leveraging some of the value propositions that we've acquired and capabilities that we've acquired over the years. So we have an initiative, I've talked about it before, which adds up internally to slightly over $1 billion of revenue over a 3-year period. We're going to commit to $850 million, which would give us the ability to tack on a couple of points of organic growth, on top of the 1 to 2 to 3 that we kind of expect attributable to all our other activities and our core activities in these relatively slow markets. So that's how we're going to get to 4% to 6%. We're going to have these incremental activities that require some significant funding and a lot of execution. So about $100 million of operating expense investment over the 3-year period, with about $65 million of it this year and about $50 million of onetime CapEx, is the price for implementing these programs. I'm going to talk about emerging markets, which is the single largest element of the $850 million, at $350 million. But first let me just quickly cover some of the other ones that add up to the other part of this major initiative. Very exciting is the smart tools and storage element. It's about $100 million; includes MRO vending, tool-locating systems, electronic can bonds [ph]. It leverages our CribMaster and AeroScout acquisitions. And we've -- we're in the process now of adding about 40 sales executives, primarily in the U.S. but also in some other areas around the world. That's under way and looking very, very positive. $150 million will come from health care and security verticals. The acquisition of Niscayah and AeroScout enable us to take a whole new approach to health care where we can bring safety, security, efficiency and compliance to hospitals at a time when they sorely need it and, in many cases, are desperate for improvements in these areas. It's just for health of their enterprises. And we have the value proposition which is very, very powerful and we've really developed it at this point in time. And now it's incumbent upon us to take it to the market and start selling it. And so we are adding about 75 account executives in health care and education, which is also, obviously, in the security vertical, a very, very relevant place to be right now. And these -- the hiring of these folks is well under way. The value propositions are intact and I'm very confident that we'll get to the $150 million. Then on the U.S. government. You might ask, why go into the U.S. government right now when the spending looks like it's going to go down about somewhere in the neighborhood of 5% to 10%? But the reality is, as the -- as we look back in our market share with the U.S. government over time, we're kind of underweight in this area and we haven't attacked it in a very efficient manner over the years. And so what we're finding is that we need to have feet on the street at the locations where things are actually purchased by the government and not necessarily just in Washington. So we are putting about 20 people on the street to cover U.S. government in the regional areas, with focus on California, the South and Virginia. And we expect the U.S. government sales to increase by about $100 million over a 3-year period. And that will cover several of our different businesses, including CDIY, IAR, the security business and health care. And then we have offshore. Offshore today has already been a great story, somewhat masked by the weakness in onshore which, as I mentioned, is now subsiding. And offshore is going to continue to grow. It's about $100 million today. It was about $20 million when we bought CRC. And the latest chapter in that exciting story will have to do with 2 things and primary things. One is building portable spool bases, which is a -- kind of a revolutionary idea that our CRC folks came up with which helps the pipeline company save enormous amounts of money by moving the spool bases to where the oil is, as opposed to just the fixed spool bases that exist today. And then the other area is a major push into Malaysia, where the offshore activity has increased dramatically over the last few years. And we're in discussions now with the major producers, pipeline companies in that area to implement a major growth program there. And then the final part of this is just finishing up the Black & Decker revenue synergies. As John mentioned, we're closing the book on the merger today, so we won't be talking about that much more. But we didn't want to lose sight of the last $50 million that -- of revenue synergies that we have planned for that and so we'll just track it and manage it using the process that we're using here to drive this organic growth engine. And that process is basically taking the integration approach that we used so successfully over the years for our various acquisitions. And using that kind of program management, resource allocation, tracking, monitoring, pulsing-type of an approach to ensure that we manage this organic growth initiative as tightly, as we did those various acquisition integrations. And that is under way, and so far so good. We feel real confident that we know what the status of each one of these initiatives is and that, if we do run into issues, that we'll know quickly and be able to respond quickly. So all of these initiatives are up and running. We will generate a minimum of $100 million of organic growth, as a result of them, in 2012, and then another $350 million to $400 million a year for the following 2 years after that. And the thought is that once we get through this that we will have made enormous progress, just like we did with the Stanley Fulfillment System, in making this organic growth part of the fabric of the company and therefore changing the inherent structural organic growth rate of the company up into that 4% to 6% range, which we think will have enormous value creation potential for the equity. So let's move on to a little bit more color on what we're doing in the emerging markets. And this is really a major step function change in the way that we're approaching emerging markets. Historically, we've managed the various regions of the world as very -- tight P&L's, with incremental investments generally made at the local level, monitored by the businesses, with input from the businesses, but because of the tight P&L management and, most of these initiatives, when you make the investments, the payback is greater than 1 year, so any time that there were external market issues or that type of thing, there was frequently kind of pulling back on the incremental investment. And we still -- despite the fact that we only made incremental investment, we still have terrific growth from the emerging markets. And today, they represent about 15% of the company. They typically have grown over the last 5 years about 20%. Last year was slightly lower than that as they have slowed down a little, but they continue to be major growth drivers. They continue to have above-line-average operating margins. So roughly in the neighborhood of 20%. It will be -- operating margin will go down slightly as we make some major funding commitments, but it will still be well above company line average. So we have funded a major push. As I mentioned, the totals that we're spending this year will be about $65 million. And a good half of that -- slightly more than half of that will be spent on the emerging markets where we're going to add about 1,000 commercial resources over the next 3 years. And that, as I said, is well under way. We're also moving the management of these various markets from a business-led center of gravity with, generally speaking, U.S. headquarters to a regional-led center of gravity led by one individual, who was appointed in the fourth quarter, Jaime Ramirez, who ran our Latin American business for -- first with Black & Decker and then with Stanley Black & Decker and grew it from $200 million to about $900 million over an 8-year period. He is a proven veteran who has aggressive growth track record and also strong profitability management and people management. So he's the right guy, he's on board. He's about 4 months into – or, excuse me, 3 months into his planning process. He's got his organization assembled, and we're off and running. We're also moving from high-price-point Western-designed products, which only cover about 10% to 20% of the market, to mid-price-point products, which will be designed locally, which address about 70% of the market. Now the high-price-point products will continue to sell because over time we'd like to move our MPP customers up into the high-price-point products. But that -- the heartland of the market right now in the emerging markets is the MPP. And these products need to be designed locally by local engineers who are in touch with local market customs and local market needs. So we have formed 3 renew SBUs with global emerging markets responsibility because one thing we have found is that, although there are nuances from region to region, many of the products across all these markets are very, very similar. And so at late-point identification, we can have a relatively streamlined product structure. And those 3 SBUs are in power tools, hand tools and Commercial Hardware. And then the other thing that we're going to do is we're going to go from a limited MPP line, which we talked about, but we're -- much of which is sourced, and we're going to go to a much more of an in-house manufactured line in the emerging markets and for the emerging markets, with local plants that are dedicated to local markets. We can't have high-cost plants that serve the West, even though they're located in the emerging markets, serve the local markets because we can't get to the right cost structure. So we will have several new plants. We started that with the opening of an Indian plant last year. And we'll have plants in China and Turkey. We'll expand our plant in Brazil. And we'll continue to build plants as necessary as the volume begins to build up. This will not require enormous capital expenditures. There will be a combination of small acquisitions and relatively small capital expenditures for these plants. We're also moving from an under-resourced commercial organization in the emerging markets to a very significant troop movement, with feet on the street sized to the market opportunity and over 1,000 commercial resources to be added. And you might say, "Well, that -- what does that mean in the context of what you have now?" And it will be more than doubling the resources that we have in those markets today. So, just to give you some context. And then finally, we're going from separate CDIY and IAR efforts in Tools and Storage to one unified effort focused on growth. Now as a company, we are the only one with power tools and hand tools. We're also the only tool company with strength in both the CDIY and the IAR channels. And it's very interesting, when you get into these markets, the channels become very blurred between CDIY and IAR. So instead of spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to take our structure and account for it and manage it in a way that isn't a natural fit with the markets, we're going to leverage the advantages that we have, the power tools, the hand tools, the CDIY, the IAR. And we've constructed an internal JV, which will take the best elements of CDIY's aspects and IAR's and it will be managed by the leader of the region. And there'll be no time wasted on internal things like trying to sort out who gets credit for what, it will simply be focused on growing in the marketplace, which will help us drive these powerful results. So this is a pivotal moment in our company's evolution, in my view. I think in the past we've demonstrated prowess in cost control, acquisition, integration, deal execution, working capital management, so on. But as I mentioned earlier, our organic growth has been okay but not superior, not an outperformance, let's say, for what it could be. And that's despite the fact that we've more than quadrupled the size of the company over the last 10 years, and now we're going to add organic growth to the fabric of our culture. And I think it'll be a very, very positive thing for our employees and our stockholders. I'll turn it over to Don now for the rest of the financial presentation.