Tag Archives: EIX

Miscellaneous Earnings Call Notes 2.26.16

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Dean Foods FY 1Q16 Earnings Call

Gregg Tanner

Global milk production continues to increase

“We expect global dairy fundamentals to continue to be overall supportive to our business as production growth continues to outpace demand. Year-over-year, total milk production from the top seven exporters continues to increase, albeit at a much slower pace compared to the initial robust expansion experienced in 2014.”

Export volumes continue to decline

“I think the other thing that wasn’t in our prepared remarks is that we’re seeing export volumes continue to decline, so it’s leaving more milk in the U.S., which I think will help us longer term to kind of keep the prices more manageable as well.”

Greenlight Capital Re’s (GLRE) David Einhorn on Q4 2015

Entered 2016 with lowest short exposure ever

We entered 2016 with 16% net exposure, the lowest we’ve entered any year. The Greenlight Re investment portfolio returned 1.2% in January while the S&P 500 fell about 5%. Our shorts have been helpful and returned 7% in January. We started to see some reversion in the market in January and February as the markets have sold off we become a little more net long as our shorts have fallen in value and we found a few things to buy.”

Consumer could come to the rescue

“On the bright side, the U.S. consumer may come to the rescue as we are nearing full employment, wages are slowly rising and there is an effective tax cut in the form of low energy prices. It remains to be seen whether the U.S. consumer will provide support for corporate earnings and if not at least we hope they buy iPhones, GM cars, and Michael Kors bags particularly at Macy’s.”

Heidrick & Struggles International’s (HSII) CEO Tracy Wolstencroft on Q4 2015 Results

Everyone is focused on the volatility but no one is frozen by it

“We are all like you looking at the opening of 2016 and seeing the volatility, whether it would be how it emanates from Asia, from the energy markets, consequent knock-down effects in financial services, etcetera. We find in our client dialogue that while everyone is focused on it, no one is frozen by it. That may – does that that evolve? We will see. But I would say that every – certainly myself in meetings with clients as well as in meetings with our consultants, we are trying to get a barometer on what you are asking every single day. And it would be very difficult for us to give a broader trend line to what I just described.”

Rich Pehlke

Certainly seeing volatility in economic conditions affect client decisions

“We certainly are seeing the current volatility in the economic conditions factoring the client decisions about what they are doing and what they are thinking about the growth of their business and how they are going to deploy capital. The good news is as we have said many times is that talent is the hot agenda item for most leaderships and boards today. But at the same time, capital deployment certainly has an impact on driving our business. Where we have probably seen the most is as is consistent with what you have read in the news, where we probably see the biggest volatility right now is in the APAC region, simply because of the impact of China and what you see going on there in terms of people thinking about the region itself. And then certainly from a sector standpoint, we have seen more discussions and commentary in areas like financial services, which really are driven by large financial institutions from larger banks and obviously they moved and certainly have an influence on some of that. ”

Edison International (EIX) Theodore F. Craver, Jr. on Q4 2015 Results

SCE is a “wires focused business”

“We have positioned SCE as a wires-focused business, consistent with our views on industry transformation and in alignment with California’s public policy objectives to move the state to a low carbon economy.’

Bank of Montreal (BMO) William A. Downe on Q1 2016 Results

Surjit Rajpal – Chief Risk Officer, BMO Financial Group

Delinquency tick ups because the quarter ended on a Sunday?

“The question that you asked relates to the fact that this quarter again was on a weekend. And the difference between this quarter and the last quarter was that this quarter was on a Sunday, as opposed to ending on a Saturday, which really means that two days of payments that you would normally receive had to be deferred to the Monday following. And that explains the difference, because right after the weekend, the delinquency rate did go back to normal levels. So, I wouldn’t read too much into the early-stage delinquencies that you see in the chart there.”

90 day delinquencies have increased in Alberta

“So, when I look at the 90 days, you did notice that there was a quarterly increase of 14 basis points year-over-year, and that is telling in some ways. And we looked at Alberta in that respect as well, because your question if it’s more related to what’s going on in Alberta. In Alberta, year-over-year, there has been an increase of 34 basis points, which is actually much more telling. ”

Stifel Financial (SF) Ronald J. Kruszewski on Q4 2015 Results

IPOs were down 65% in 2015

“The number of priced U.S. IPOs in the fourth quarter of 2015 decreased to 32 from 68 during the same time period. That’s really down 53%. For the full year of 2015, the overall U.S. IPO market was down in terms of both number of transactions, which were down 41%, and dollars raised, down 65%. Certainly a difficult year in the IPO market and not starting off particularly strong this year.”

The reality versus the market’s perception are completely different

“The reality sometimes of what’s going on versus the market’s perception are completely different. This is one of those times.”

Target (TGT) Q4 2015 Results John J. Mulligan – Chief Operating Officer

Customers trust that you’re in stock

“What I think is much more important, when you talk about essential categories, ultimately this is about the guests trusting that you will have the merchandise they want when they come in our stores. If a new mom takes her baby out in 10-degree weather for diapers and formula, you better have diapers and formula in your store.”

HP (HPQ) Dion J. Weisler on Q1 2016 Results

Haven’t seen stimulation of demand from Windows 10

“I would say that Windows 10, whilst I still believe it’s a tremendous operating system platform and universal apps and continuing computing make devices like the Elite x3 a reality, we have not yet seen the anticipated Windows 10 stimulation of demand that we would have hoped for, and we’re carefully monitoring any sort of price developments that could further weaken demand. ”

Campbell Soup (CPB) Denise M. Morrison on Q2 2016 Results

Weather had some impact

“Finally, weather is not something we control and it’s certainly not the main reason for the decline in our soup business, but we believe the unusually warm winter had a negative impact on the entire category in the first half. ”

Edison International 1Q14 Earnings Call Notes

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A digest of some of the top insights that I’ve gathered from this week’s earnings calls.  Full notes can be found here.

Need to be able to spend on infrastructure

“Beyond 2017, we see the need for annual capital expenditures in electric infrastructure to support reliability at level similar to those we are proposing in our 2015 GRC. A central tenet of our strategy is that we should lead in modernizing the distribution system. Building this next generation grid require significant technical know-how and capital investment.”

Rate case based on growth prospects for So Cal Ed

“This is something Edison is particularly well positioned to do. The foundation of our investment case is the strong growth prospects for SCE. We also recognized the need to have a strategic eye on the transformative changes occurring in our industry that extend even beyond California. With this in mind, we are selectively pursuing other growth initiatives both with SCE and in competitive businesses.”

Investing where public policy provides incentives to invest

“nside the utility, the pieces that we’ve mostly focused on are really things that further public policy initiatives within the State.

So for instance, that California ISO along with some other State agencies have clearly identified a set of ‘Preferred resources’ that would be used for dealing with some of dislocations with San Onofre going out. So these are things like distributed generation, storage, energy efficiency, demand response.

So we are looking at some pilot projects that would provide referred resources particularly in the areas most affected by San Onofre going out. And that would be additional growth opportunity within the utility. The State has a mandate on energy storage 1,300 megawatts across the State. Our share of that is a little less than 600 megawatts within SCE and half of that can be actually owned and put in rate based by the utility.

So we are looking at those opportunities that would really ducktail with our modernizing the distribution system efforts. Community solars and other areas where that actually might be a combination of growth opportunities both within the utility and outside of the utility. So those are some of the high level areas.”

Focused on growth opportunities

“I think very long-term, if in fact we have good growth opportunities that’s really what will provide sustained earnings growth and sustained earnings growth ultimately circles back to providing sustained dividend growth. So it’s the usual balancing acted every company has to go through.”

A lot of energy in the state but not necessarily in the right places

” we’ve got a lot of energy in this state of times, but may not be in the right place and we need to have voltage in the right places too and to in order need combination a lot of things.’

Residential rooftop solar requires subsidies to work

“our sense is been the residential rooftop solar business models really largely requires subsidies and kind of cost shifting mechanisms to really be viable that is not been as appealing to us. As a result, we’ve really focused more on the commercials and industrial distributed generation activities.”

Not interested in putting residential solar into rate base

“for the foreseeable future. We would not really look to try to put residential rooftop solar into owned that, put it into our rate base.”

Provide the infrastructure to facilitate a distributed network

“our primary strategy is provide the network, provide the backbone through a modern distribution system that really facilitates any and all of these distributed resources. Whether that’s rooftop solar or whether its storage and anything else. That’s the part that we are uniquely positioned to do well and that’s really where our investment dollars are focused in the utility.”