Operator
Operator
Greetings, and welcome to the Tredegar Corporation 2014 annual financial results review. [Operator Instructions] It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Neill Bellamy. Thank you. You may begin.
Tredegar Corporation (TG)
Q4 2014 Earnings Call· Mon, Mar 2, 2015
$9.46
-1.46%
Same-Day
-5.23%
1 Week
-7.25%
1 Month
-2.02%
vs S&P
+0.95%
Operator
Operator
Greetings, and welcome to the Tredegar Corporation 2014 annual financial results review. [Operator Instructions] It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Neill Bellamy. Thank you. You may begin.
Neill Bellamy
Analyst
Thank you, Danielle, and welcome to the Tredegar 2014 annual financial results review. Our earnings for the fourth quarter and full year 2014 were released after the market close today, and you'll find our press release, 10-K and supplemental materials, including non-GAAP reconciliations, on our website under the Investors Section at www.tredegar.com. As a reminder, some of the statements made here about the future performance of the company constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities law. Please note the cautionary language about our forward-looking statements that is contained in our press release. That same language applies to this call. Please note that our comments today regarding financial results exclude all non-operating or special items, and reconciliations related to any non-GAAP financial measures discussed today may be found in the slides accompanying this presentation and our supplemental materials on our website. With that, I'll turn it over to Nancy Taylor.
Nancy Taylor
Analyst
Good afternoon. I'm Nancy Taylor, Tredegar's Chief Executive Officer. With me today is Kevin O'Leary, Tredegar's Chief Financial Officer. Thank you for joining us today for our annual financial results review. The agenda for today’s call is to discuss our yearend performance for 2014 and to update on our outlook for 2015 and beyond. We issued our earnings press release after the market closed today so as you see, 2014 was a year of mixed results. A tough year for our Film Products business and a breakout year for Bonnell, our aluminum extrusion business. I’ll get to the performance highlights shortly. First, a minute or two on our strategy. We’ve been focused on long term growth to diversify our market and customers in both of our businesses. As part of that strategy, we’ve made significant investments in our businesses. Those investments, which have been thoughtful and deliberate, lay the foundation for Tredegar’s long term growth. As we wind up recent investments to add capacity and capability, we’re now in a position to take advantage of favorable growth trends in several of our markets, which in turn should drive earnings growth and strong cash flow generation. Now moving to our 2014 performance. I’m going to discuss our performance highlights and then Kevin will walk you through the numbers. As tempting as it is to start with Bonnell’s terrific performance, I’ll begin with Film Products, and in particular, the issues around our flexible packaging films, which were the biggest drivers in Film Products overall performance in 2014. Throughout last year, we commented on the 3 major issues that negatively impacted the contribution of our flexible packaging films. Operational inefficiencies in our Cabo, Brazil plant, the 5 month delay in the startup of our new flexible packaging line, and very challenging market dynamics.…
Kevin O'Leary
Analyst
Thank you, Nancy. I’ll start off with an overview of reported net income for the fourth quarter and full year for Tredegar Corporation. For the fourth quarter, diluted earnings per share from continuing operations were $0.40 per share. Excluding special items, earnings per share from ongoing operations were $0.23 per share. And for the full year, diluted earnings per share from continuing operations were $1.11 per share. Excluding special items, earnings per share from ongoing operations were $1.13 per share. Details of special items, which include the impact of non-operating investments, asset impairments and restructuring charges, are available on our website, along with additional information on discontinued operations. Now let’s focus on earnings per share from ongoing operations. The key components of variants for the quarter and full year were similar. So I’ll focus on comments on the full year. In 2014, as I mentioned, earnings per share from ongoing operations was $1.13 per share compared to $1.15 in the prior year. The key drivers were as follows. Earnings before taxes from ongoing operations was up $2.4 million. A couple of key drivers here. The combined operating profit from our business segments, Film Products and Bonnell, was $5.5 million below 2013. I'll get into the details results for our business segments in a moment. Noncash pension expense in 2014 was $6.7 million, a decrease of $7 million compared to 2013. As we’ve discussed on previous calls, the lower pension expense in 2014 was primarily a result of an increase in the discount rate of 78 basis points to 4.99%. Other corporate expenses were down approximately $1 million for the year. And finally, the full year effective tax rate on income from ongoing operations was 35% compared to 31% in 2013. The increase, which was driven primarily by geographical income mix,…
Nancy Taylor
Analyst
Thanks, Kevin. Now let’s talk about 2015. As Kevin said, 2014 was a building year and 2015 will be a year of execution for Tredegar. While we have a couple of key strategic projects that we’ll complete during the year, for the most part we’ve put the investments in place to drive top and bottom line improvement and that’s what we intend to do in 2015. For Film Products, that means leveraging our value added capabilities for our flexible packaging films and driving continuous improvement in our flexible packaging operations. It also means the continued successful ramp up of our new flexible packaging line. As I mentioned earlier, we expect market conditions for our flexible packaging films to be difficult, particularly in the first half of the year, but should see our commercial efforts translate into improved results as the year progresses. In the first half of the year, mainly in the first quarter, we will be impacted by the remaining year over year profit impact of the loss of the baby care elastic laminate volume in North America, which we estimate at about $2 million. The first quarter we’ll be expanding our anodizing capacity at Bonnell to address our customers growing demand. While this temporarily requires us to take capacity out of the system and will impact first quarter results, this expansion positions us well for the long term. As we look at the full year, we expect year over year volume growth for both Film Products and Bonnell in 2015 driven by solid market growth in our key market segments. In Film Products, we’re really pleased with the results from our new product and expect them to drive growth. As I mentioned earlier, our new surface protection films, ForceField PEARL, has been a major success in the market.…
Operator
Operator
[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Drake Johnstone with Davenport.
Drake Johnstone
Analyst
Good evening. My first question has to do with your Film division. I get the impression from your release that you had a $4.4 million one-time cost in the fourth quarter associated with your flexible packaging line. And I’m assuming the impression from your release that you don’t expect that cost to reoccur. So would suggest in the first quarter that your volume and price remain similar to the fourth quarter, that you probably should be higher by that amount?
Kevin O'Leary
Analyst
Hi Drake, this is Kevin. Thanks for the question. A couple of things. The $4.4 million number is the operational impact for Film Products. It’s not a one-time non-recurring thing. There are some one-time adjustments for inventory that we described that’s roughly $2 million. We also expect that the spending that had to improve the efficiencies in flexible packaging over the second half of the year were approximately $2 million that we don’t expect to happen again in 2015.
Drake Johnstone
Analyst
Okay. And on the capital expenditures, it sounds like it’s coming down a little bit in 2015. Do you expect a more significant step down in 2016?
Kevin O'Leary
Analyst
We expect that certainly we have $40 million in 2015. I don’t think we project anything much beyond that. Our feeling is if we have opportunities that require investments, we’re comfortable doing that. But right now if you look at the target for 2016, we don’t require significant incremental investment beyond the $40 million range we see in 2015 and beyond.
Drake Johnstone
Analyst
Okay, thank you.
Operator
Operator
Our next question comes from Mario Gabelli with GAMCO Investors. Please go ahead.
Mario Gabelli
Analyst · GAMCO Investors. Please go ahead.
Hi. Mario. Hi everyone. I missed part of the call, but I think I sit at too many conference calls, but I always want to listen to yours. Kevin and Nancy, can you talk a little bit about what I call intelligent. You had a negative swing. Do you have a value on your balance sheet and where do I find that value around the status of this asset called Kaleo, if I’m pronouncing -- how do you pronounce it?
Nancy Taylor
Analyst · GAMCO Investors. Please go ahead.
Yes, Kaleo and that is --- they used to be called Intelliject. So it is one and the same. Kevin, you want to answer that?
Kevin O'Leary
Analyst · GAMCO Investors. Please go ahead.
Yeah. The valuation we have in our balance sheet is I believe $39 million at yearend. You can see a description of it on page 59 of our K.
Mario Gabelli
Analyst · GAMCO Investors. Please go ahead.
The one I didn’t have. All right, so any --- is there a mark-to-market based on last money in or it is basically just a valuation based on book earnings and EBITDA? How do you market?
Kevin O'Leary
Analyst · GAMCO Investors. Please go ahead.
We basically do a number of cash flow projections and we discount those cash flow projections and then come to an estimated value for the company.
Mario Gabelli
Analyst · GAMCO Investors. Please go ahead.
What percentage of the company do you own?
Nancy Taylor
Analyst · GAMCO Investors. Please go ahead.
Just under 20%.
Kevin O'Leary
Analyst · GAMCO Investors. Please go ahead.
20%, yeah.
Mario Gabelli
Analyst · GAMCO Investors. Please go ahead.
All right, so you’re not consolidating for any reason, are you? No.
Nancy Taylor
Analyst · GAMCO Investors. Please go ahead.
No.
Kevin O'Leary
Analyst · GAMCO Investors. Please go ahead.
No.
Mario Gabelli
Analyst · GAMCO Investors. Please go ahead.
And you’re just taking as a line item and there was a negative swing in Q4. All of a sudden if I look at your stock selling, it’s getting reasonably good investment here, but I gather you carried it under the other assets line in your balance sheet?
Kevin O'Leary
Analyst · GAMCO Investors. Please go ahead.
Yeah. This is not considered in our ongoing operation and it’s just, it’s an ...
Mario Gabelli
Analyst · GAMCO Investors. Please go ahead.
No, I got it. So that’s there. So secondly, just on the pension cost, you talked about the negative swing in 2015 like a lot of companies with the discount rate, etc. What was the cash into pensions in 2014 and what do you expect it to be in 2015?
Kevin O'Leary
Analyst · GAMCO Investors. Please go ahead.
The cash in was roughly $2 million in 2014 and …
Mario Gabelli
Analyst · GAMCO Investors. Please go ahead.
About the same?
Kevin O'Leary
Analyst · GAMCO Investors. Please go ahead.
Yeah, about the same in 2015.
Mario Gabelli
Analyst · GAMCO Investors. Please go ahead.
All right. So it’s a P&L hit. Is that hit incrementally smooth it out by quarter? Is it in the Q1?
Kevin O'Leary
Analyst · GAMCO Investors. Please go ahead.
I would say it’s across the year.
Nancy Taylor
Analyst · GAMCO Investors. Please go ahead.
Yeah. It’s across the year.
Mario Gabelli
Analyst · GAMCO Investors. Please go ahead.
That’s what I figured. And when you look at the receivables of $14 million, that just reflects the increase on the balance sheet year to year, that just reflects the higher revenues in the Q4 or is there any other issues?
Kevin O'Leary
Analyst · GAMCO Investors. Please go ahead.
No other issues there.
Nancy Taylor
Analyst · GAMCO Investors. Please go ahead.
No.
Mario Gabelli
Analyst · GAMCO Investors. Please go ahead.
All right. So that -- I’m looking at trying to develop a cash model for you. And there are a lot of little other dynamics and I’m sure the other analysts will ask them and I’ll come back. I’ve got the big picture. Thanks for the update and always like the amount of data you give. Take care.
Nancy Taylor
Analyst · GAMCO Investors. Please go ahead.
Thanks for listening in, Mario. Appreciate it.
Operator
Operator
[Operator Instructions] There are no further questions at this time. I’d like to turn the floor back over to Nancy Taylor for closing comments.
Nancy Taylor
Analyst
Thank you, Danielle. Thanks everyone for joining in today, and we appreciate your continued interest in Tredegar. So have a good evening.