Earnings Labs

U-Haul Holding Company (UHAL)

Q3 2013 Earnings Call· Thu, Feb 7, 2013

$52.36

-0.42%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning, and welcome to the AMERCO's Third Quarter Fiscal 2013 Investor Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Jennifer Flachman. Please go ahead.

Jennifer Flachman

Analyst

Good morning, and thank you for joining us today, and welcome to the AMERCO Third Quarter Fiscal 2013 Investor Call. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that certain of the statements during this call regarding general revenues, income and general growth of our business constitute forward-looking statements contemplated under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, and certain factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. For a brief discussion of the risks and uncertainties that may affect AMERCO's business and future operating results, please refer to Form 10-Q for the quarter ended December 31, 2012, which is on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Participating in the call today will be Jason Berg. And I'll now turn the call over to Jason.

Jason A. Berg

Analyst

Thanks, Jennifer. I'm speaking to you today from Phoenix, Arizona. Joe Shoen, our Chairman and CEO is not available for this morning's call. Joining me today from here in Phoenix is Gary Horton, our Treasurer; and on the phone from Reno, Nevada is Rocky Wardrip, our assistant Treasurer. All 3 of us will be available for questions after the prepared remarks. Yesterday, we reported third quarter earnings in fiscal 2013 of $1.89 per share as compared to $0.04 a share for the same period in fiscal 2012. Included in last year's third quarter result was $1.61 non-cash charge for reserve strengthening and our property and casualty insurance subsidiary. Such a charge did not recur this year, so therefore, excluding this out of the ordinary charge, third quarter results for last year were $1.65 or just compared to $1.89 for the third quarter just ended. To minimize repetition during my prepared comments, all of my period-over-period comparisons today are going to be for the third quarter of fiscal 2013 to the third quarter of fiscal 2012, unless specifically noted. Excluding our insurance subsidiaries, operating earnings and our core Moving and Storage segment increased $11 million to nearly $73 million for the quarter. For the quarter, our U-Move revenues increased by about $19 million to $395 million. Transaction growth is largely responsible for the revenue increase. This growth in transactions has been facilitated by the steps we've taken to improve our customer experience and our company locations at our dealers and through our website, uhaul.com. To both support and contribute to this growth, we've continued to expand the number of rental trucks in our fleet as well. A somewhat mild winter in most of the country has not hindered the growth of U-Move revenue. Revenues from our trailer and towing device fleet…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And our first question will come from Jiang Shayn of CL King & Associates.

Jiang Shayn

Analyst

I'm on for Jim Barrett. With regards to Enterprise, I think you alluded last quarter that Enterprise entered -- with spending some hundreds of millions of dollars entering the truck rental space. I also read in your 10-Q, with regards to improving pricing. If you could give us a little bit more color on that please.

Jason A. Berg

Analyst

A little more color on what, on price?

Jiang Shayn

Analyst

On the pricing, yes, in the truck rental space with regard to Enterprise entering the space, with that as a backdrop. I also read that you guys are improving. You seeing improving pricing with regards to FY '13.

Jason A. Berg

Analyst

Okay, I'll clarify. As far as pricing in fiscal '13, there hasn't been any significant shift in pricing for the better or for the worse. Enterprise, Joe brought them up during the last call, however, they've been in the market for some time. And I would say that there hasn't been any new effects to pricing over the last 3 months related to their presence in the market. It continues to be extremely competitive between the other 2 national competitors, our local competition. Then Enterprise is just another mix into that. Our growth right now in revenue is coming largely from transaction growth. There's a little bit of extra money that we're picking up per transaction. That can be split out between pricing, also product mix which depends upon what's our -- how many one-way rentals are we doing versus in-town rentals, one-way rentals are typically a larger dollar amount per transaction. And then if we rent larger trucks versus a smaller truck, you're going to see a little increase in that too. So it's a combination of all of those things. I'm hesitant to say that there's any significant improvement in pricing.

Jiang Shayn

Analyst

Okay. With regards to the transaction growth, was this mix -- and other issues, would you be able to quantify that for modeling purposes?

Jason A. Berg

Analyst

For the quarter, it was in excess of 6%.

Operator

Operator

And our next question comes from Ian Gilson of Zacks Investment Research.

Ian T. Gilson - Zacks Investment Research Inc.

Analyst

I understand that all those -- the cleanup work et cetera on the East Coast is now complete. And I know that you do not transfer equipment, you let the flow of orders dictate that. But although the cost was minor, there must have been some disruption on the infrastructure to impact your business, in my opinion. Although you do say there's no real change, was that no real change year-over-year, or an estimated no real change because of the impact of Sandy?

Jason A. Berg

Analyst

It was no real change in relation to the quarter and largely to Sandy. What we found was that, for the last couple of days of October, when that took place, we saw -- obviously, saw a decrease in transactions. However, in November and even trailing a little a little bit more into December, we saw that we were a little bit ahead of where we've been at, which we're kind of interpreting that as kind of a pickup of some of the transactions that we may have lost during that timeframe. You mentioned that we're -- that we've largely recovered. There's still some significant property damage. All of the centers are up and running, however, there's 2 or 3 locations that we still have some significant work to do -- to repair the storage component of the facility. And I think there's still some work going on there. However, all of them are renting equipment at this time. And does that answer your question?

Ian T. Gilson - Zacks Investment Research Inc.

Analyst

Yes, do you have enough equipment that you need going out for the summer?

Jason A. Berg

Analyst

Yes, I believe so. And then we do still have -- I haven't heard anything specific as far as our operations folks having an issue with that. We do still have some time to pivot, if there was a shortfall, so if that was the case, I think we could probably correct it in time.

Ian T. Gilson - Zacks Investment Research Inc.

Analyst

I haven't checked recently, but could you run down the location of where you build that equipment. I know you're building them in Phoenix. You have -- you used to have a place out in L.A. Where are all those locations now?

Jason A. Berg

Analyst

We have one outside Detroit, Michigan. I think in Massachusetts, we have a location. That was Philadelphia, I should say. We still have the one in -- out here by Phoenix, and then in California. And I think I'm forgetting one. And it's just not coming to me right now.

Ian T. Gilson - Zacks Investment Research Inc.

Analyst

Okay, so any shortfall of equipment could be made up by building extra out of Philadelphia?

Jason A. Berg

Analyst

Sure. Rocky, did you have the answer to that?

Rocky D. Wardrip

Analyst

I was going to say I think Chicago was another location that we're producing at.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And our next question will come from Jamie Wilen of Wilen Management.

James Wilen - Wilen Management Co., Inc.

Analyst

The number of transactions is up by 6%. Are we adding a lot more dealers or basically all the dealers are becoming a little bit more productive?

Jason A. Berg

Analyst

The dealer count is increasing at company locations. We're becoming a little bit more effective. We've added equipment to the fleet. So I think it's been a little bit across the table. For the last couple of years, we've picked up quite a bit in utilization. We've added quite a few trucks and been able to digest that without losing utilization. So we're always continuing to add dealers. I don't know exactly how many we're up now, but I suspect that we're up a few hundred since the last time we reported.

James Wilen - Wilen Management Co., Inc.

Analyst

Okay. And then the number of trucks that you now have on the road, obviously, the new equipment's more expensive than the truck that's been retired. How was -- what's the size of the truck fleet that are year-over-year?

Jason A. Berg

Analyst

Well, as Joe mentioned during the last call, we're going to limit our disclosure on the actual fleet count to once a year when we do our 10-K, as we've been able to get a good truck count from our competition. I would say that to your point about cost, our fleet is intentionally stratified as far as age goes because at our dealers, you're looking at a lower transaction count, whereas we have including our dealers, over 16,000 distribution points throughout the country. Our competition has maybe 1/10 of that. It necessitates the different sort of fleet and the type of fleet that we have, which kind of renders the average age, not as meaningful of a statistic.

James Wilen - Wilen Management Co., Inc.

Analyst

When retired the vehicle, is there any gain, loss you've retired, whatever $150 million to $200 million this year?

Jason A. Berg

Analyst

Yes, sure. And on our financial statements, we -- the gain or loss on disposal of equipment gets netted against our depreciation. However, we do break that out. And for the quarter, we had a gain of $1.8 million this year compared to about $700,000 last year. A little over $1 million of that was from a property that we sold. So the fleet game was about the same as it was last year for the quarter, about $700,000.

James Wilen - Wilen Management Co., Inc.

Analyst

Jason, could you talk to the economic sensitivities of both your businesses, the truck rental and the self storage? And does housing turnover -- if that increases, how much can that move the needle? And just how each of those business are affected by the economy?

Jason A. Berg

Analyst

Sure. What we found to this last cycle where we had significant issues in the housing market, that really didn't affect our transaction count much at all. We had done some things ourselves that had affected pricing. But we thought -- well we that we were fairly resilient to the economic changes that took place on the moving side. On the storage side, the closest thing that we've been able to correlate to has been just raw employment numbers in any given area. And we lost a couple of percentage points of occupancy there during that timeframe. So I would say that as far as the economy goes, the storage business maybe a little more susceptible to changes in portions of the economy versus the moving business.

James Wilen - Wilen Management Co., Inc.

Analyst

Okay. And lastly, as I called in and asked to be in the U-Haul conference call, they didn't have a record of you, until I utilized the corporate name. I'm just wondering if one day we can actually change the corporate name that we're traded under to U-Haul? Just wanted to dig in, hopefully, that will happen.

Jason A. Berg

Analyst

I'm carrying the Jamie Wilen flag within this building. And I took the concerns to the Board of Directors, in fact, yesterday. So it continues to be heard. It's not quite on the same frequency that I'm hearing from you. However, it is on a frequent basis that they're hearing it from me.

Operator

Operator

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Berg for any closing remarks.

Jason A. Berg

Analyst

Well, I'd like to thank everyone for participating in the call today and for your thoughtful questions. And we look forward to speaking with you in June for our year-end results. Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.