Avery Dennison Corp (AVY) — Q2 2018 Earnings Call Transcript

Thank you, Susie. Today, we’ll discuss our preliminary unaudited second quarter results. Please note that throughout today’s discussion, we’ll be making references to non-GAAP financial measures. The non-GAAP measures that we use are defined, qualified, and reconciled with GAAP on Schedules A-4 to A-8 of the financial statements accompanying today’s earnings release. We remind you that during this call we will make certain predictive statements that reflect our current views and estimates about our future performance and financial results. These forward-looking statements are made subject to the Safe Harbor statement included in today’s earnings release. On the call today are Mitch Butier, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Greg Lovins, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Now, I’ll turn the call over to Mitch.

Thanks, Cindy; and good day, everyone. I'm pleased to report another good quarter. Sales grew 10% on a constant currency basis, adjusted operating margin expanded by 30 basis points and adjusted EPS grew 27%, with our two largest operating segments exceeding our expectations for the quarter. Label and Graphics Materials delivered a strong quarter, sales grew organically by over 7% driven by continued solid demand as well as the timing factors we discussed on previous calls. High value categories and emerging markets continue to deliver above average growth. As you know, these are the two key catalysts that enable our consistent GDP plus growth over the long term not only in LGM but across the portfolio. Since the beginning of 2017 in light of ongoing inflationary pressure, we've implemented multiple price increases in every region in which LGM operates. Our standard operating procedure during periods of inflation, as you know, is to use our material re-engineering capabilities to offset rising costs and, as necessary, to raise prices. During the past three months, inflation has been more pronounced and persistent than our ability to offset it, requiring another round of price adjustments in multiple regions. Despite the inflation, operating margins remain strong in LGM during the first half of this year, once again demonstrating the resilience of this business. As we've discussed in previous calls, we've increased our level of investment in this high-return business to keep pace with industry growth and to drive further productivity improvement. To that end, our new coating asset in Luxembourg is now fully commercialized and, as we've also discussed previously, we're adding capacity in other regions as well and we're on-track to see those assets come online by the end of next year. Turning now to Retail Branding and Information Solutions. RBIS delivered another strong quarter with nearly 10% organic growth and significant margin expansion. The base business delivered over half of the total organic sales growth from RBIS this quarter with strength across all customer segments. RFID once again grew more than 20% in the quarter as the market for these products continues to build momentum. We continue to see strong engagement among apparel retailers and brands across all stages of the pipeline, as well as promising early stage developments in other end markets. And we're investing to support this growth with higher spending for business development and R&D as well as higher CapEx spending, including investments to bring on new production capacity in both Eastern Europe as well as a new dedicated site in Asia next year. In short, we’re pleased with the progress we've made in building our intelligent labels platform as we lean forward to drive this high growth opportunity. At the same time, we're happy to see the positive results of the transformation of the base business that we started just a couple of years ago. Combined, these catalysts should deliver another year of solid growth and margin expansion in RBIS. The Industrial and Healthcare Materials segment delivered organic growth of 3% in Q2. We expect total segment organic growth to be back within our long-term target range of 4% to 5% plus beginning in the second half of this year. IHM’s adjusted operating margin, while down versus the prior year, improved sequentially in line with our expectations. The team is making good progress in integrating last year’s acquisitions and we remain confident that we will achieve our growth and margin targets for this business over the longer term. All-in-all, another good quarter; our strategic playbook continues to work for us as we focus on our four overarching priorities: driving outside growth in high value product categories, growing profitably in our base businesses, relentlessly pursuing productivity improvement and remaining disciplined in our approach to capital management. We continue to position the company for superior value creation over the long-term and are well on track to deliver our seventh consecutive year of strong topline growth and double-digit adjusted EPS growth. Now I'll turn the call over to Greg.

Thanks, Mitch, and good morning, everyone. As Mitch mentioned, we delivered another strong quarter. Adjusted earnings per share was $1.66, up 27% compared to the prior year, which was more than a nickel above our expectations, strong operating results more than offset a modest headwind from currency translation. We grew sales by 10% excluding currency and 7.5% organically following a softer Q1 due to various timing-related factors. Our organic growth for the first half of the year was 5.5%. Currency translation added 4 points to reported sales growth in the quarter with an $0.08 benefit to EPS compared to the same period last year. Our adjusted operating margin increased by 30 basis points to 11.5% as the benefit of higher volume more than offset higher employee-related costs and the impact of increased investment spending. We realized $9 million of net restructuring savings in the quarter, most of which benefited RBIS. Transition costs for LGM’s European restructuring are ramping up now, so we'll see a decline in second half net restructuring benefit compared to the first half of the year. And turning now to cash generation and allocation, our free cash flow year-to-date was $128 million, up $35 million compared to the prior year. During the first half of the year, we repurchased nearly 950,000 at an aggregate cost of $103 million. With the 16% increase in our dividend rate in the quarter, we paid $85 million in dividends. Year-to-date, we returned a total of $188 million to shareholders compared to $147 million for the same period last year. We made the decision earlier this month to settle our U.S. pension plan liability through either lump sum benefits to participants or the purchase of annuities from one or more insurance companies. Our first step in this process is a planned contribution of $200 million to this underfunded plan before August 15, allowing us to deduct that contribution on our 2017 U.S. income tax return. Later this year, we’ll pay out lump sum benefits to those participants who choose to receive them, and we plan to purchase the annuities for the balance of our obligations in the first half of next year. We expect to incur certain non-cash settlement charges in the fourth quarter of this year, based on the amount of liabilities settled with the lump sum payments and with the balance recorded next year when we purchase the annuities. This action has no impact on our leverage capacity as the unfunded liability was already largely reflected in the metrics used by rating agencies. However, it does impact the calculation of our leverage target using a simple net debt to adjusted EBITDA ratio. As a result, we've updated this target from our previous range of 1.7% to 2% to a new range of 2.3% to 2.6%. Let me turn now to the segment results for the quarter. Label and Graphic material sales were up over 7% organically in the quarter with strong year-to-date organic growth of 5.4%. As expected, the various timing factors that we mentioned in last quarter provided a boost to Q2’s growth rate. Results for the quarter reflected continued above-average growth for high value product lines and stronger than usual growth for the base business. The strength in high-value categories was broad-based, with high single-digit results across most product lines. In particular, sales for our Graphics and Reflective segments, which came in a bit below expectations last quarter, picked up as expected in Q2. Breaking down LGM for organic growth in the quarter by region, both North America and Western Europe were up mid-single digits. Growth in emerging markets was high single digits with continued strong growth in South Asia and high single-digit growth in China. Sales in Latin America were up double digits due in part to the pass-through of currency-related inflation as we invoiced in U.S. dollars in a number of these countries. Our adjusted operating margin for the segment remained strong, roughly comparable to the prior year at 13.8% despite the inflationary headwinds we've experienced. Raw material inflation came in higher than we expected at the start of the quarter. Excluding a net benefit from currency-related changes, the net impact of pricing and raw material costs remained a headwind for us this past quarter. We now anticipate mid-single digit inflation for 2018 compared to our low single-digit estimate at the start of the year. In light of this trend, we've announced new price increases during the quarter in North America, Europe, South Asia and Latin America. While the inflationary pressures are more significant than we anticipated a quarter ago, we continue to expect to fully recover the cumulative gap between cost and price that we've experienced since the middle of last year. Shifting now to Retail Branding and Information Solutions, RBIS delivered another excellent quarter. The team continues to execute very well on its business model transformation enabling market share gains while driving significant margin expansion. RBIS sales are up nearly 10% organically driven by both the base business, which was up mid-single digits, and RFID, which grew by more than 20%. As with LGM, holiday timing between the first two quarters played a part in this. For the first half, sales growth for the base apparel business was above our long-term target for this portion of the segment. The adjusted operating margin for RBIS expanded by 260 basis points to 11.2%, driven by the benefits of higher volume and productivity, as well as the reduction in intangibles amortization. These benefits were partially offset by higher employee-related costs and the impact of higher investment spending, particularly in RFID. Note that the reduction in acquisition intangibles amortization has now fully anniversaried at the end of Q2. This has been roughly a 100 basis points source of margin expansion over the past four quarters. Finally, turning to the Industrial and Healthcare Materials segment with the benefit of the Yongle and Finesse Medical acquisitions during the second quarter of last year, sales rose 35% ex-currency. Sales growth on an organic basis was 3% driven by mid-single digit growth in the industrial categories, partially offset by low single-digit growth in healthcare categories. IHM’s adjusted operating margin declined by 170 basis points reflecting intangibles amortization and depreciation expense associated with last year's acquisitions, as well as the net impact of pricing and raw material cost. These headwinds were partially offset by the benefit of organic volume growth. As Mitch indicated, in the back half of the year, we expect IHM’s organic growth will be back within its long-term target range and expect the operating margin to expand compared to the prior year. Over the long term, we remain confident in our target of 4% to 5% plus organic growth for this segment and expect to see margins gradually expand to LGM’s levels or better by 2021. Turning now to our revised outlook for the company for 2018, we've raised our expectations for adjusted earnings per share and are now targeting to be in the range of $5.95 to $6.10. At the same time, we’ve incorporated the impact of the planned pension termination in our outlook for reported EPS. We've outlined some of the key contributing factors to our guidance on slide 9 of our supplemental presentation materials. In particular, just focusing on the changes from our last guidance, we now estimate that organic sales growth will be approximately 5% to 5.5% for the year at the high end of our long-term target range, reflecting a higher contribution from pricing to offset inflation. At recent exchange rates, currency translation represents a roughly two-point addition to reported sales growth and a pretax operating income tailwind of roughly $18 million for the year, down from the roughly $35 million tailwind we anticipated in April. Due to the strengthening of the dollar in the back half of Q2, currency translation is expected to have a larger impact on the results for the back half of the year than it did for the quarter. Finally, we estimate average shares outstanding, assuming dilution, of roughly 89 million shares. In summary, we're pleased with the progress we've made this quarter. We remain confident in our ability to achieve both our 2018 and long-term goals. Now, we’ll open up the call for your questions.

One quick question on the organic world. I mean, it was very strong this quarter. Would it be possible for you to say how much was price and how much was real fundamental value?

Yes, overall, we had a modest price benefit in the quarter particularly in LGM. As you know, we've announced pricing actions starting late last year in a number of the regions. It’s a relatively modest impact in the second quarter and we expect that to continue to grow in the back half of the year, given that we've announced further pricing actions in the middle part of Q2 that took effect in late second quarter. So overall, a relatively modest impact in Q2, but we expect that to grow as we move through the back half.

Thanks for all the details. Good morning to you. Two questions to start and I'll turn it over. One, can you review some of the statistics you had shared on performance in LGM in Asia and what kind of sequential trend you saw there and what kind of exit rate you're seeing into the third quarter? Recognizing, obviously, a very short lead time on your business, so just because things might be doing one thing early in a quarter, doesn't mean it's going to work out that way later in the quarter. And then the second question I had to the extent possible can you comment on what benefit you should get from the restructuring actions in LGM in 2019 from the 2018 charges? If you've mentioned in the past, forgive me for asking you to go over what you covered in the past?

So, I'll start with the restructuring question in LGM. As we said, most of that savings won't start to kick in until 2020, so little to no savings in 2019. We'll still be doing some transitioning in 2019 and actually have some incremental transition costs next year versus our baseline. Overall, no savings in 2019 that'll kick in until 2020. In LGM Asia, I think our trends have been relatively consistent there as we've seen strong growth across several of the emerging countries in Asia and we expect that to continue as we go into the back half. In China, in 2017, we saw high single-digit growth throughout the year, bounced around a little bit by quarter due to some of the price increase timings we’ve talked about. Overall, we expect to continue seeing mid-to-high single-digit growth in 2018 and going forward in China. In South Asia, we're seeing strong growth in India. It's been generally in the high teens and we expect that to continue as well, and we've seen relatively good growth in ASEAN as well in the high single digits. So we don't see much change in the trends there overall across Asia.

On LGM, sales grew 7% and margins were sort of flattish. I think you cited higher employee costs and raw material costs. Is it possible to quantify kind of roughly how much of the impact of those two items were? And I think you've indicated the raw material costs you should recover some of that in the second half, with the higher employee-related costs is that something we can expect to continue into the second half as well?

So as you said, we had an overall relatively modest impact of the net impact of pricing and inflation in the quarter. Just as you indicated, we expect to largely cover that in the back half for the pricing actions we took near the end of Q2. Employee cost increases are largely due to the kind of annual wage inflation that took place basically in the middle of the second quarter, so that will continue through the back half, but nothing more unusual than that from the employee cost perspective in LGM.

My question was more on the guidance, just sort of as we look at the raise to the full year. Obviously, if the negative from currency, a little bit of a positive benefit from share repurchase and then on organic goes a little bit higher. When we look at that organic, how much of that organic is better volumes versus a better outlook for say price cost or pricing in the second half of the year? It didn't sound like your view on price cost was that much better because you're getting pricing, but the costs are going higher, so just really trying to flesh out that change in the organic and how that contributes to the higher earnings guidance?

Yes, Scott. As you indicated, a lot of the increase in the organic growth is actually due to the extra pricing actions that we started taking as we saw further inflation in the second quarter since the last time we've talked. We've taken further pricing across each of the regions. We don't see underlying volumes being much different in the back half from what they were in the first half. We do have a couple of headwinds in the back half such as some of the price increase pre-buys we had last year in Q4, ahead of some of the actions we took last year that weren't effective early Q1, as well as in RBIS we had a tailwind in the last year basically due to some embellishment sales related to the World Cup. That's a headwind for us in the back half as that has now gone past. Overall, we don't see outside of those couple timing related things much change in the organic volume growth rate, but we'll see some incremental price in the back half from what we saw in the first half. As you mentioned on currency, the net impact of currency and share count is roughly I think $0.10 to $0.11 for the year, with the majority of that as I said earlier really in the back half as the currency rates were moving across the second quarter. We saw some impact in June and we'll really see the larger impact versus our previous guidance in the second half of the year.

With regard to the RFID platform and the strength that you're seeing there, can you give us a little bit of color as to where that strength is coming from? Is it more on the existing customers just using you more or is it on increased engagements and turn-ons? If you can just give us a little bit of color on that? And as a follow-up question, just on the tariff side, I understand, for the most part, you're making product where it gets used, so you probably don't see any issues directly yourselves. But when you think about the potential for indirect exposure because of the customers that you're servicing and what they may have to entail, can you give us any thoughts on how you think the tariff issues may impact you, if they do at all?

Just as far as RFID, what's driving the growth? It continues to be across all stages of the pipeline. We are seeing, within apparel, continued ramp, and there are some customers who are already in full adoption where we're seeing growth as they further deploy it. Others are moving from a pilot into full adoption which is driving the growth. It’s basically a consistent trend of what we've seen of people moving through the pipeline with several customers at a time at any point in a particular year driving a vast majority of the growth within apparel. Outside of apparel, we continue to see a lot of exciting opportunities going on, largely in the early stage of the pipeline where we're working through the business cases and various pilots. The pipeline within that area is over 65%, particularly in food, beauty and aviation. We've discussed our three end markets that we're working to develop, and it's still early stages. The revenue from those are about 5% of our overall RFID growth. But the pipeline in those areas is growing even faster than what we're seeing overall. So we have good trends across the board, both in apparel as well as outside of apparel. Regarding tariffs, specifically, the direct impact is relatively modest. As for the indirect impact, we must consider the macro environment which might obviously affect us. We think about our standpoint: we manufacture goods in the region where they are ultimately sold. So if there is some disruption, particularly between China and the U.S., we think we're well placed to work with our customers and our markets as the industry would need to rebalance demand and supply. Given our global presence, that's something we would be able to leverage our position to support our customers in making the transition they need. Overall, we don't expect any real direct impact, and the indirect impact would depend on assumptions around the macro.

Can you comment on what drove the outsize growth across your base RBIS business during the quarter, and is this a dynamic that you foresee could continue moving forward throughout the remainder of the year?

Overall, what we're seeing in the base RBIS business is a continuation of the trend we've been discussing regarding our transformation. Focusing on getting more competitive, faster, and simpler has enabled us to consistently gain share for a couple of years now, and that is continuing. We're seeing it both in U.S. and North America. Additionally, we don't have the data yet on what we think markets were doing in Q2 itself, but I believe there is a general pickup in the apparel and retail landscape overall. So those are the two key drivers in the base. Furthermore, we did have a little bit easier comps as Greg highlighted in his prepared remarks regarding the timing of holidays and so forth that depressed Q2 of last year a little bit.

Greg, just one more on the organic growth guidance and what happened in 2Q. So correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you said that virtually all of the increase in your organic sales growth guidance is a result of price rather than volume, such that your full-year volume outlook hasn't changed much if at all. If indeed that's the case, why were LGM sales above your expectations in the quarter? Was that also price related?

Yes. I think overall, just as you said, the larger increase in our guidance is largely price related, driven by the fact that we did another round of price increases late in Q2 that were not in our guidance when we talked a quarter ago. It is really the largest increase there. Additionally, I mentioned earlier some of the timing challenges overall. We had some extra price in Q2 related to those increases that took effect in the middle to late part of the quarter, so that was a bit of the impact in second quarter as well as just continued strong performance across the different regions. In both North America and Europe, we had low to mid-single digit growth in each region in the quarter, and we had strong performances across the emerging regions in the second quarter as well. So overall, it was good strong performance across each of the regions that helped drive the strong Q2 volumes.

My question focuses around the emerging markets and the growth trends there. In the past, you’ve characterized emerging markets primarily in LGM as above average in terms of profitability. I’m just wondering if that's still the case and if you could just talk about the regional industry structure in those areas and any changes in the way you see the competitive landscape or the industry structure addressing those emerging markets?

Overall, as far as the emerging market growth trends, as Greg commented on, they are pretty broad-based and consistently strong. The only exceptions to that broad theme are the Middle East and Africa, which are flat. Regarding Korea, it is experiencing some macro reasons that we think are not showing the same level of growth overall. For emerging markets, we continue to see consistent strength in various growth areas, and we predict this trend will continue. As far as EBIT margins within the emerging regions, yes, they tend to be a little bit higher on average. The magnitude of that has diminished over time, largely as we've raised the EBIT margins within some of the other mature regions over that timeframe as well. So it remains true, but to a lesser degree than we've previously discussed.

Thanks for taking my follow-on. Two questions for you. One on RFID and then one on the pension plan accounting. On RFID, Mitch, if you can comment a bit further in terms of whether you’re seeing any additional trialing and piloting by customers or if the better than 20% growth is more or less seeing the same cadence? The reason I ask is I remember you saying your guidance is 15% to 20% or better than that, and that your growth rate in 2Q was obviously at the higher end of your range. So I'm trying to parse what's driving that, whether it's piloting or more adoption by existing customers? On the second question, can you just explain in simpler terms how you get a $600 million charge next year from terminating the pension plan and funding it to the tune of $240 million, recognizing that it’s non-cash?

Yes, just specifics on RFID. Again, it's following what we typically would see as far as the program moving through the pipeline. The key drivers of the growth are broad-based across that. The biggest dollar drivers would be firms moving from pilot into full adoption or others that were in the early stages of full adoption last year further progressing. On a relative basis, actually, the biggest single movers are items in the early stage of the pipeline, which have actually increased even faster than later stages, as you would expect for a technology and a program that’s in a stage of development. So it remains early days relatively speaking in apparel, and we see significant opportunity as you know and we’ve talked about in the past in food, aviation, and beauty.

George, regarding your second question on pension, the overall $600 million charge relates to part of the pension liabilities sitting on the balance sheet in other comprehensive income (OCI). As we settle that amount, it gets released to the P&L, similar to what we experienced a couple of years ago when we did a lump sum, resulting in a charge related to the part of that lump sum that was sitting in our OCI on the balance sheet. So this basically relates to future payouts that would have been expected over time, but will now happen over the next couple of quarters.

Mitch, just one broad question. First of all, kudos to you on another really good quarter. You guys have beaten and raised - you've raised your guidance for I don't know how many quarters in a row or years in a row for that matter. If you had to parse out how much is something you're doing versus just industry conditions having been consistently better than you expected that the previous quarter, how much would you attribute to which pocket and just give us a broad sense for what you think transpired over that period?

I think it's a number of factors, Adam. So thank you. We are in growing markets and 50% of the portfolio is exposed to the two key catalysts for growth: high value segments and emerging markets, which clearly puts us in a good position. Second, we're extremely well positioned within those growing markets, and in our two primary businesses, we are the market leaders and continue to gain share over time as we leverage our competitive advantages. Lastly, around our strategy, our four key strategies, we moved to this a couple of years ago really segregating our approach to the marketplace. Our cost structure has improved over that timeframe, and we laid out the long-term targets that those were not just aspirations for us but commitments. We're hitting a lot more wins than losses, which, combined with having the best team within the industry, has enabled us to be in this position.

I just had a follow-up on IHM. When you think about recovering cost inflation, how do you characterize price cost recovery in IHM compared to LGM and RBIS? Is it equivalent or is it a different model? IHM, I think you've spoken about realizing synergies from the larger LGM business with adhesives and leveraging personnel from the LGM team. I'm just wondering if you can give an update on that as well?

Sure. Just as far as inflation within IHM, IHM has not seen as much inflation relative to the size of that business; a lot of the inflation we've talked about if you look year-over-year has been paper based, and if you look forward in the second half versus the first half, it's largely paper based. So there's been some but it's been more modest. A number of the IHM categories lend themselves, if there is inflation, to putting through annual price increases and so forth; it's not a significant story within IHM. As for the progress of IHM being able to leverage the capabilities within LGM, that is progressing. We previously mentioned it was not where we wanted it to be, but some of the margin improvement you see in the second quarter is starting to reflect the fruits of those initiatives and we see more opportunity to do so going forward. This is a key strategic element of our focus here, building the IHM platform on top of the strengths of LGM.

Great, thank you. Another great quarter, and we think this is shaping up to be another great year as we continue to execute our strategies and leverage our market-leading positions in growing markets. I want to thank our entire team within Avery Dennison for once again delivering strong results. Thank you, everybody.