THOMSON REUTERS STREETEVENTS EDITED TRANSCRIPT DPW.DE - Full Year 2011 Deutsche Post AG Earnings Conference Call EVENT DATE/TIME: MARCH 08, 2012 / 01:00PM GMT 1 THOMSON REUTERS STREETEVENTS | www.streetevents.com | Contact Us © 2012 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. 'Thomson Reuters' and the Thomson Reuters logo are registered trademarks of Thomson Reuters and its affiliated companies. MARCH 08, 2012 / 01:00PM GMT, DPW.DE - Full Year 2011 Deutsche Post AG Earnings Conference Call CORPORATE PARTICIPANTS Martin Ziegenbalg Deutsche Post AG - Head of IR Frank Appel Deutsche Post AG - CEO Larry Rosen Deutsche Post AG - CFO CONFERENCE CALL PARTICIPANTS Stephen Furlong Davy Research - Analyst Damian Brewer RBC - Analyst Andy Chu Deutsche Bank - Analyst Dominic Edridge UBS - Analyst Robert Joynson Macquarie - Analyst Neil Glynn Credit Suisse - Analyst Penny Butcher Morgan Stanley - Analyst Johannes Braun Commerzbank - Analyst PRESENTATION Operator Good day and welcome to the Deutsche Post DHL full-year 2011 conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Martin Ziegenbalg. Please go ahead, sir. Martin Ziegenbalg - Deutsche Post AG - Head of IR Thank you, and a warm welcome here from Bonn to all of you out there on Deutsche Post DHL's full-year 2011 and particularly Q4 2011 conference call. As announced in our invitation, I've got here with me our CEO Frank Appel and our CFO Larry Rosen, who in the usual format will take you through the presentation I take it you have in front of you. And talking about material in front of you, also want to remind everyone of the IR stats book that we have sent out and that is available. And without further ado, I'd like to hand over to Frank, please. Frank Appel - Deutsche Post AG - CEO Good afternoon to everybody or good morning, wherever you are. So, I'm very pleased to report that we had a very good year in 2011. And let me jump straightaway into the presentation on page two that summarizes that we had a strong performance in Q4, not different from the previous quarters. We had (technical difficulty) and a strong increase of the DHL division's EBIT. So, on that basis, we are capable to propose to the AGM an increase in our dividend, from EUR0.65 to EUR0.70. And we want to give an outlook for the year that we will increase our EBIT to EUR2.5b to EUR2.6b, even further improved. If I go to page four, you definitely remember that we several times said, in three years, that we want to improve our performance along three bottom lines, to become the provider of choice, the employer of choice and the investment of choice. And I would like to give you now some highlights along these three dimensions. 2 THOMSON REUTERS STREETEVENTS | www.streetevents.com | Contact Us © 2012 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. 'Thomson Reuters' and the Thomson Reuters logo are registered trademarks of Thomson Reuters and its affiliated companies. MARCH 08, 2012 / 01:00PM GMT, DPW.DE - Full Year 2011 Deutsche Post AG Earnings Conference Call First of all, on page five, you can see that all the guidances we gave you with regard to EBIT we have met. So, starting with the Group, we outperformed the guidance by EUR40m. The Mail increased guidance we outperformed by EUR10m. The DHL division had a very nice growth rate and ending up with EUR1.72b. And finally, the Corporate Center remained flat year over year, and we achieved here the guidance as well. So, all the financial targets have been met. That allows us to -- it aligns with our finance policy to increase the dividend by EUR0.05, and that's now the second year in a row. We think that we should let our shareholders participate as well in the nice development of the Company. If I go to page seven, to come to the second bottom line, provider of choice, what makes me very confident for the future as well, that in all parts of the Company we made very good progress with regard to customer satisfaction. In the Deutsche Post part, we had record satisfaction, and that is externally measured. But also in the DHL divisions we made very good progress and we had very high satisfaction, ahead of the competition around the world. We have improved for a very critical touch point mentioned here, quite a bit in -- also in the other divisions, Forwarding and Supply Chain, we increased the customer satisfaction in most countries too. Why is that important? If the customers get more satisfied with our service, they definitely will show a higher interest in buying our services. One example where we made very good progress is with regard to the announced sector management. And here you see examples of four sectors. I don't want to go in too much detail here. What I want to share is that the Life Sciences & Healthcare sector has grown double digits, and that's definitely more than the underlying growth of that industry. That comes from the investments in new competence centers and good solutions, like the SmartSensor technology and other things. So, we are very happy that we succeeded in a very challenging and ambitious and expectation high industry. Also, in Technology we have expanded our footprint. The direct distribution for products out of Asia to European customers is doing very well. We have a very strong gateway to Africa and Dubai established. And we have a lot of technology customers. If I talk about Energy, we are seeing good progress as well. We also see huge opportunities in Latin America and Africa, and we will definitely focus on them. Finally, Automotive, very strong growth as well. We have invested here as well not only in conferences and sharing best knowledge like we did that already for years in Technology and Life Science. We have also established new distribution centers for some dealers. We see in these industries where we are gaining momentum, and that's based on a very much more structured approach to these sectors. The third bottom line is our HR piece, and that's important as well for US investors and analysts. We are deeply convinced if you have higher satisfied customers and more enabled and engaged employees, you will succeed as well with your financial numbers. 2011 was the third year in a row that we have improved the satisfaction and we improved it along all ITOs or KPIs, and you see here some of them. So, the organization is much more convinced about the synergy. They perceive their local and senior management much more active in leading the organization. We have improved massively on learning and development. The other ITOs are not different from the increase we have seen. These are huge increases. We won for our HR activities several awards, which is also showing that externally the reputation about our activities is going up. And finally, we have invested -- and this is all included in the P&L -- a lot of things in training and development of our people. And that's important because the more we train our people, the better the service will be they deliver. If we now go to page 11 and look into some of the highlights, starting with Mail, you can see here that -- on page 11 that we had made good progress along four key items, firstly the parcel concept, which is now in full swing, the deployment. We have seen already the impact of that in the last Christmas period, great service quality despite huge increase in volumes. We have a new price-cap formula, which gives us opportunity to potentially increase prices next year. We have a long-term union agreement with regard to how we deal with LR people and delivery men. And we have a solid agreement on the wage side, which is definitely a higher increase than you have seen in the last years, where we had zero, but it created a lot of positive momentum in the Company for sure. And we are confident that this is not against the targets we have in the Mail division. 3 THOMSON REUTERS STREETEVENTS | www.streetevents.com | Contact Us © 2012 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. 'Thomson Reuters' and the Thomson Reuters logo are registered trademarks of Thomson Reuters and its affiliated companies. MARCH 08, 2012 / 01:00PM GMT, DPW.DE - Full Year 2011 Deutsche Post AG Earnings Conference Call If you go to page 12, you'll see the nice development of the volumes on one hand. It was -- the Mail Communication volumes are stable, which is good, so we had no further deterioration. For 2012, we see -- we expect again a deterioration to 2% or 3%, but last year it was stable. On the Parcel side, we see very nice growth, by almost double digits, and that definitely will help us going forward because, as you might know, we deliver parcels and letter in 80% of the country in a joint way. So, whatever we lose in this year on the Mail volume side, we can replace it to a certain extent by increasing volumes on the Parcel side. So, that is a very healthy trend too. One comment on the ruling of the Commission about the state aid on page 13. We think that this decision is completely unjustified. It's not in line with decisions the EU has taken in the past. We think that state aid can't come from the prices and the revenue from customers, and that was the case here, what the EU said. So, they linked regulation with state aid, which I think is different from many other cases they have done. Therefore, we will appeal against that decision. And since we are very confident and also the auditors are confident, we don't have to put that into our P&L because the likelihood that you win or get the money back is very high. And therefore, we will have no impact on -- we had no impact on the P&L of 2011, and the payment will only be recorded in the balance sheet in 2012. Coming then to the liberalization, that's important for you as well because there has been some discussion as well to change the postal law. We think that is not needed because there is already significant competition. Here, we reflect on the Mail Communication market, because this is the market where we still have huge market share, as you can see here, but it's not as big as sometimes said. The other markets are much more competitive already. That's the direct dialogue marketing, where we compete with the Internet advertising, with newspapers, with people who distribute flyers or TV. So, we don't have any dominant position there, nor we have it for press services. So, we think there is no argument to do something about that, particular because the German postal law enabled as well the country to achieve a very high service quality for us. We have the most favorable prices achieved in Europe as well, without any price increase for 15 years. And we have a definitely state-of-the-art infrastructure. So, what will happen to the Mail division going forward? These are levers you have seen already in the past. We of course have some pressure through the esubstitution of the letters. We have some rise in transportation and labor costs to anticipate for this year. And we have some investments into our extension of the profitability. On the other side, there is a lot of possibility through the parcel growth, through the digital services, the new pricing regime, the productivity improvement and more efficient management of overheads. So, coming to the other three divisions, you see first on page 16 Express did very well the last year with regard to volume growth per day. We definitely have outperformed all larger competitors by volume growth. And the revenue development per day was very nice too. So, that's definitely a result of all the work we have done with the significant investment into the network, the training of the people, the advertising campaigns. Of course, we are very pleased for the first time since a long, long time we have outperformed the market by volume, and we haven't seen a slowdown in the fourth quarter yet. On page 17, you see our very good exposure to the Asia market too. So, we are by far leading in Asia, as you can see here, with regard to market share. Half of our shipments are touching in one way or the other Asia. And on the bottom of the page, you see how long we have been there and how much these countries are growing. So, we are linked to the growth engine of the world very much and we have a leading market position. So, that makes us very confident that we can grow our top line and our bottom line in Express further. Forwarding on the next page, page 18, you see that the volumes have been relatively stable, slightly shrinking, and was more shrinking in the second half than in the first half. We think that we have behaved to our revenue. Our volumes were stable in comparison to the market. So, we didn't lose market share, but we didn't gain either. That's the result of a very clear yield focused approach. We have, different from some competitors, not gained so much volume, but we have improved our gross profit and I think that's right. We have intentionally not bidded, or we lost customers which were not profitable anyway, and that is visible here. So, we didn't lose market share, but we improved our gross profitability quite a bit. Finally, Supply Chain on page 19. You see here not only our well-balanced portfolio around the industries but also around the regions. The footprint in Americas and Asia is growing rapidly. And we have one significant business with EUR1.3b annualized revenue in 2011, which is a record. In comparison, 2010 is also a significant increase. 4 THOMSON REUTERS STREETEVENTS | www.streetevents.com | Contact Us © 2012 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. 'Thomson Reuters' and the Thomson Reuters logo are registered trademarks of Thomson Reuters and its affiliated companies. MARCH 08, 2012 / 01:00PM GMT, DPW.DE - Full Year 2011 Deutsche Post AG Earnings Conference Call Where does that come from? It comes from really much better approach to how we sell. We have -- we made great progress in our training skills and in the approaches. And we didn't compromise on the margin, as you can see. Overall, the margin has improved, and we that see as well with that the new wins. So, we are not looking for cheap offers here; we are looking really for high-quality solutions. And despite we did that, we have increased our new wins quite a bit. And that's very exciting and makes us confident that Supply Chain will not only grow on the top line but also on the bottom line very healthy. So, overall, page 20, we had a great year. We stabilized the Mail. And you see that for the first time that the bottom line's really stable. In particular, if you take into consideration that the first half of 2011 still was impacted by the introduction of the VAT, which was a significant hit for the P&L, nevertheless, we made it possible to stabilize the EBIT on the same level. The EBIT growth of the DHL divisions was ahead of our long-term aspiration of 13% to 15%, more than 3.5% better, which is great as well. And we have seen also a good improvement of all the margins in all divisions. CapEx, we have invested significantly more than in 2010, but that's driven by organic growth. We see a lot of opportunities. And the Parcel investment is a reflection of the nice volume growth. The aviation network expansion is a reflection of the nice volume growth there too. We do an upgrade in IT in Freight and Forwarding, and we definitely see significant market expansion in the emerging markets. So, overall, we achieved all our goals and we made progress along all three bottom lines. And that makes us confident that we can continue in 2012 on that basis. With that, I would like to hand over now to Larry to give you a little bit more detail on Group financials in the quarter. Thank you. Larry Rosen - Deutsche Post AG - CFO Thank you. Good afternoon to everybody. I'm very pleased to further report on our very good financial performance for 2011. I will then, at the end, outline our guidance for 2012. So, over to page 22. Here, you see our profit and loss statement for the full year 2011. We had revenue growth of almost 3%, which was actually 5.3% organic growth, i.e. adjusting for currency and structure changes, and DHL organic growth was over 7%. EBIT growth was 10.5% compared to underlying performance in 2010 and 33% on a reported basis. I hope that this is going to be the very last time that we'll refer to underlying EBIT, as we need to do it now because we had it in 2010. As promised and forecast, we have not had two different EBIT metrics in 2011, but for comparison, in 2010 we still talk about it. But as of first quarter this year, when we report that in early May, we no longer will talk about underlying EBIT at all. So, Mail business was almost flat, as forecasted. And DHL grew by about 55%, or almost 19% adjusted for 2010 non-recurring charges. We see that as a great start on our way towards 13% to 15% average growth through 2015. The financial result was again heavily influenced by valuation effects from the Postbank transaction, and I'll come back to that point, also affecting net income, in a couple of minutes. Finally, our effective tax rate for the year was 23.7%, basically in line with our 25% guidance and consistent with the increase in earnings in higher-taxed countries. Page 23, you see our P&L for the fourth quarter. Revenue growth slowed, as we saw in particular weak demand in Forwarding together with our selective strategy that Frank talked about. But overall, we still had organic growth of 3.5% for the Group. EBIT grew by over 14%, with Mail at 10% and DHL at 13%. Most of the valuation effects we've seen from the Postbank transaction in fact came in Q4 this year, and they were just the opposite of the positive effects we had in Q4 of 2010. Again, I'll come back to these points regarding the Postbank accounting in just a minute. The tax rate was lower than previous quarters, as we again were able to activate a small amount of additional tax loss carry forwards due to our improved performance. 5 THOMSON REUTERS STREETEVENTS | www.streetevents.com | Contact Us © 2012 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. 'Thomson Reuters' and the Thomson Reuters logo are registered trademarks of Thomson Reuters and its affiliated companies. MARCH 08, 2012 / 01:00PM GMT, DPW.DE - Full Year 2011 Deutsche Post AG Earnings Conference Call Finally, I'll show net income before and after the Postbank effect on the next slide, and you see that on page 24. You see how distorting those accounting and valuation effects have been. And in fact, without those effects our reported net income would've increased 51% for the full year 2011 and 46% in Q4 alone. Well, even though the structure of the transaction has made our financial reporting a bit complex for a long time, the last three years, I hope to convince you on the next slide that both strategically and financially the decision originally taken in 2008 to divest our remaining stake has indeed been a very good decision. Now, over to page 25. We've now completed the last steps of the transaction virtually 10 days ago, February 27 and 28. And it's worth taking a look back to summarize the overall result. First, we continue to believe that it was the right decision to exit the banking business, not least due to the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, but also because it allowed us to intensively focus on our core Mail and DHL businesses. Secondly, we generated a profit of around EUR2.5b that came mostly in 2009 and 2010, though we do expect one final effect in the first quarter of this year from the full deconsolidation, and that will be a positive EUR186m. Finally, we generated almost EUR5b of liquidity that gave us a very comfortable position during the financial crisis, during the time of significant restructuring, especially in the Express business. And it's led to the positive net liquidity position that we still have today. On to page seven, you see our cash flow statement for the full year -- sorry, over to page 26, you see the cash flow statement for the full year 2011. Our cash flow performance improved as our operating earnings increased, as we had lower expenditures for restructuring, and we had quite a good working capital management, in particular in Q4, as you'll see in a minute. On the other hand then, as forecasted, we significantly increased capital investment for future growth. Key investments were Packet 2012, the Express Aviation Network in Global Forwarding, comprehensive upgrade of our IT systems, and new warehouses and transportation equipment for the Supply Chain business. Overall, free cash flow was up more than 50% to around EUR750m. On page 27, looking for a moment on the Q4 cash flow performance, as usual, or let's say seasonally, we had our strongest cash flow quarter with very strong contribution from working capital reduction. The much higher capital expenditures led to a slight overall decrease in free cash flow compared to Q4 of last year. On to page 28, you can see the evolution of our net liquidity position during 2011. Our significant investments for the future, together with the relatively high expenditure for the dividend, were the primary factors leading to the reduction in net cash for the year. But you do see the very strong performance also to be seasonally expected in Q4 on the right-hand side of the graph, where we generated more than EUR340m of net liquidity increase. And with EUR938m of net liquidity, we feel very confident about our ability to invest in and finance the further and full execution of Strategy 2015. Over to page 29, I'll now take a look at the financial performance for each division. Frank talked about the top line performance, so I'll focus more on EBIT. And here's the Mail division on page 29. In 2011, we took the first important step towards stabilizing the Mail contribution above EUR1b per year. In Q4, we saw a continuation of the trends from previous quarters of very strong growth in parcel volumes. We did see a small decline in letter volumes. EBIT performance was good, with a 10% increase over last year, which included charges for -- related to the new tariff agreement and some smaller restructuring costs, for example for the Global Mail business in the UK. Cash flow was again very strong seasonally, as in previous years. And the CapEx increase reflected timing effects, and especially the increased investment in parcel facilities. Page 30, the Express business continued to perform very well, despite increased investments in future growth. These investments include an expansion and modernization of the aviation network, increased investment in advertising and sponsoring, as well as further investment in a broad training program for the Express employees. We think these investments are paying off now and also in the future in terms of increased market share and higher levels of operating income. We're clearly growing faster than the market overall in our core TDI business. 6 THOMSON REUTERS STREETEVENTS | www.streetevents.com | Contact Us © 2012 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. 'Thomson Reuters' and the Thomson Reuters logo are registered trademarks of Thomson Reuters and its affiliated companies. MARCH 08, 2012 / 01:00PM GMT, DPW.DE - Full Year 2011 Deutsche Post AG Earnings Conference Call The jump in operating cash flow reflected higher operating income and also very good working capital management in Q4. Page 31, the Global Forwarding and Freight division saw a revenue increase of only 1% in Q4, due to the soft ocean and air freight markets, due to currency effects and also to our selective strategy to decline participation in loss-making or very low-margin business. This tactical strategy has paid off in an increasing gross margin trend and increased EBIT for the full year. Q4 EBIT was slightly down due to charges taken for some smaller restructuring initiatives. CapEx has increased as we invest in a comprehensive upgrade of our global IT systems. On page 32, the Supply Chain business, revenues increased by 4.3% organically, reflecting strong performance in gaining new business, a solid renewal rate and expansion in emerging markets. EBIT improvement reflects a more favorable contract mix, very good cost management and lower one-off costs to exit unattractive contracts. Frank already mentioned that we had new business gains worth EUR480m for the quarter, the highest that I can remember in the last three years, and that ended a quite strong year overall for new business gains. So, now let's take a look at the guidance for 2012, on page 34. We continue to have a base case forecast of a little bit below trend but still reasonable global GDP growth in the 3% to 3.5% range. With this key assumption, we forecast another increase in Group EBIT performance to EUR2.5b to EUR2.6b, including Mail at EUR1b to EUR1.1b, DHL in aggregate around EUR1.9b, so the growth driver again for the overall Group earnings growth, and Corporate Center costs are again around EUR400m. CapEx will pick up to around EUR1.8b, as 2012 will be a critical year for the large projects that we mentioned. And we also expect the effective tax rate to increase slightly, to 27%, as again the proportion of earnings in higher-tax jurisdictions is expected to increase. Finally, we expect net profit to increase in line with the increase in operating income. Finally, to wrap up on page 35, Q4 was for us a very strong end for -- to a successful 2011. We saw that several Mail EBIT stabilization levers have materialized in the course of 2011 and early 2012. The DHL footprint, in particular our position in high-growth developing markets, is delivering profitable growth. We continue to maintain and in fact have increased our level of cost flexibility in the now more volatile macro environment. And overall, we're well on track towards Strategy 2015 goals. So, thanks for listening, and we will be happy to answer your questions. QUESTION AND ANSWER Operator Thank you. Martin Ziegenbalg - Deutsche Post AG - Head of IR Moderator, so if you'll please initiate? Operator (Operator Instructions). We will take our first question today from Stephen Furlong from Davy Research. Please go ahead. Stephen Furlong - Davy Research - Analyst 7 THOMSON REUTERS STREETEVENTS | www.streetevents.com | Contact Us © 2012 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. 'Thomson Reuters' and the Thomson Reuters logo are registered trademarks of Thomson Reuters and its affiliated companies. MARCH 08, 2012 / 01:00PM GMT, DPW.DE - Full Year 2011 Deutsche Post AG Earnings Conference Call Yes. Good morning. I just have a question on the inventory-to-sales ratio. Do you think that maybe with US getting a little bit better there could be a potential for some restocking in 2012? Would that be something you might factor in? And then I was just wondering as well, in terms of the relationship between air freight and GDP, air freight seems to be very soft. I'm just wondering, maybe on the Express side, do you think something more episodical is happening whereby like iPads and things like this are driving the growth in the Express business much more than the heavier freight market? Thank you. Frank Appel - Deutsche Post AG - CEO Yes. So, may -- Stephen, let me link these two questions. So, we have not observed so far any major restocking. And that is in -- if you look into the development of air freight and Express, that is to a certain extent disconnected. I think there are two things in -- that we see a strong growth in Express or have seen a strong growth in Express in the last quarter. One is that we definitely have outperformed the market. But secondly, due to the relatively low stock we see around the world, more customers are using Express than just air freight. So, where the air freight has been declined in the last quarter globally, the Express I think hold up pretty well. So, these things are probably connected. The good thing about that overall is that we have not very high inventory levels in warehouses seen in the last quarter. And that makes me more confident that we will have a reduction in growth rates maybe this year but not a recession, because there is still ongoing traffic needed to fill the pipeline. And at the moment, we're even benefiting from that through a very healthy Express development. So, that would be my answer to both questions somehow, and how they are connected to each other. Stephen Furlong - Davy Research - Analyst Great. Thank you. Frank Appel - Deutsche Post AG - CEO You're welcome. Operator We will now take our next question from Damian Brewer from RBC. Please go ahead. Damian Brewer - RBC - Analyst Yes. Thank you. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. Two questions. First of all, DHL, on the Express side, the incremental margin both in Q3 and Q4 has fallen to somewhere in the 12% to 14% range. Could you tell us a little bit more about how much of that reduction from the normal level we've seen historically has been driven by upfront OpEx investment in programs, and at what point or what the inflection point is at which that begins to return to a more normal level? And then second question, and let's give them all in one go. Larry, could you give us some idea of, within the EBIT for each division, the nature and size of any of the not necessarily one-off but certainly non-repeating items you've seen in full year '11? I am thinking of things like the freight forwarding, efficiency restructuring, the Tag integration costs and the new tariff agreement in Mail, for example. Larry Rosen - Deutsche Post AG - CFO Sure. So let me start with the first one. I think you've kind of put your finger on at least part of the issue in Express. We have been increasing investment on the OpEx side in particular in advertising and sponsoring and training, and that clearly has led to a leveling off a bit on margins. Also a contributor is our expansion on the aviation network and the initial startup costs. If you just start up a route, you have some initial costs associated with that. 8 THOMSON REUTERS STREETEVENTS | www.streetevents.com | Contact Us © 2012 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. 'Thomson Reuters' and the Thomson Reuters logo are registered trademarks of Thomson Reuters and its affiliated companies. MARCH 08, 2012 / 01:00PM GMT, DPW.DE - Full Year 2011 Deutsche Post AG Earnings Conference Call But we think they're absolutely the right investments to make for the future. We see already the good benefits from that in terms of increased market share. We are clearly growing the fastest in the industry. There are things that we skimped on a little bit through the difficult time a few years ago, and they absolutely are the right things to do. That being said, we clearly have a close eye on operating margins, and we do believe that despite those investments that margins generally are heading in the increasing direction in Express. So the EBIT for each division. So in Q4, for example, in DGF we had around EUR16m of let's call them restructuring charges. We had the Tag integration costs or dilutive effects of around EUR20m. And Express, there was not too much that I would think of as a one-off nature. We talked already about the higher OpEx investments. And in the Mail business we had around EUR20m of restructuring expense in the UK for part of or one of the global Mail businesses, and some costs associated with the new tariff agreement we booked in Q4 as well. So does that answer your question? Damian Brewer - RBC - Analyst Yes, it does. Thank you. Can I ask one cheeky follow-on? The tax rates increased. If DHL part of the business continues to be more profitable at a mid-cycle profitability level, for example where DHL was ex the US, what would be the sort of tax rate you'd envisage the business incurring at that point? Larry Rosen - Deutsche Post AG - CFO You know, I think probably we would expect to see a kind of gradual increase on the order of 1% a year. Damian Brewer - RBC - Analyst Okay. Thank you. Martin Ziegenbalg - Deutsche Post AG - Head of IR Thank you. Operator Thank you. We will now take our next question from Andy Chu from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead. Andy Chu - Deutsche Bank - Analyst Thank you very much. Good afternoon, gentlemen. A few questions, if I may. Just following on from the one-off comments that have been made, I just wondered if I could just double check what you were saying, just to clarify. It sounds as though the numbers that you gave, Larry, add up to somewhere in the order of around about EUR60m. I just wanted to confirm that was EUR60m. A lot of those were in Q4, but for the full year '11 is that the level of one-offs that one would hope would not be carrying into 2012? And if that's the case, I guess the -- at the top end of your guidance of EUR2.6b that would basically assume a delta of EUR160m, of which EUR60m would just come from the falling out of these one-off charges. So I just wondered if you could just clarify that position, please. Thank you very much. Larry Rosen - Deutsche Post AG - CFO Generally, you're right, and it depends whether you classify the Verdi, or let's say the new wage agreement in the Mail division as one-off or not. We had a one-time payment that was part of the agreement that we booked in Q4. That was around EUR50m. But it's worth remembering too that we'll have the impact of the wage increase in the Mail division in 2012, and are not expecting any price increase until earliest 2013. So you have some offsetting effects. 9 THOMSON REUTERS STREETEVENTS | www.streetevents.com | Contact Us © 2012 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. 'Thomson Reuters' and the Thomson Reuters logo are registered trademarks of Thomson Reuters and its affiliated companies. MARCH 08, 2012 / 01:00PM GMT, DPW.DE - Full Year 2011 Deutsche Post AG Earnings Conference Call Frank Appel - Deutsche Post AG - CEO Yes. And maybe to add to that, Andy, so I think this is the first year that we only report a reported EBIT and no underlying EBIT. And we will -- of course will take always a conservative view. If we see that we have to book something, we will book it somehow. So therefore, you know that you said it's a one-off anyway, but we will continue to do the right thing to improve the overall performance of the business further. And if we see opportunities and they are digestible due to the strong performance we have, we will continue to do so. So I think you can make your calculation, but I think it would be very aggressive. And I would not promise now that we will not have in the next year some one-time items which we do as an investment into our operations, to improve long term the sustainability of our profit. Andy Chu - Deutsche Bank - Analyst Okay. That makes a lot of sense. And just in terms of the aviation network, could you just remind us what's been done on that front, please, in terms of the investment going in, and maybe by aircraft or hub sites, just to refresh me, please? Thank you. Frank Appel - Deutsche Post AG - CEO Yes. I can't tell you by heart. So we have expanded our intercontinental and we have invested I think 20 new airplanes for the renewal in Europe, which is not only more efficient airplanes but also air capacity wise. But also on the long range we added additional 747, additional 777. I can't tell you by heart but it's quite insignificant. But we can provide that after the call, how many airplanes we added, because that's public knowledge anyway. Larry Rosen - Deutsche Post AG - CFO Yes. Also, we are in the final stages of investing in our North Asia hub, in Shanghai, which is going to open this spring. And that's part of the higher investment overall in aviation that we are doing in Express. Frank Appel - Deutsche Post AG - CEO What we actually can share, what we haven't shared so far, is that we have an increase in co-loading from the DGF division on the Express airplanes. So that is working very well. That gives us new opportunities to increase our service qualities further. And that has increased -- the DGF division has went up quite a bit in volumes on the Express airplanes, which makes me confident that we can intensify our network even further on the back of core products from Express in addition to getting volumes from DGF. Andy Chu - Deutsche Bank - Analyst Thank you. Maybe just one last one, just to make sure I'm absolutely clear. Just in terms of your guidance for Mail, I just wanted to check that there is nothing unveiled in that Mail guidance of EUR1b to EUR1.1b. I guess over the years you've said it's around EUR1b. You're now over EUR1.1b for full year '11, but obviously the range is at or slightly below for 2012. I was just checking that there was nothing behind that guidance, please, that we should read into from a negative stance in terms of being a little bit more worried about Mail profitability. Thank you. Larry Rosen - Deutsche Post AG - CFO Well, again, it's in line with our long-term goal to have Mail stay above EUR1b of EBIT contribution. The top end of the guidance would see virtually the same contribution as in 2011. So there is nothing else hidden to be read into that guidance. Frank Appel - Deutsche Post AG - CEO 10 THOMSON REUTERS STREETEVENTS | www.streetevents.com | Contact Us © 2012 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. 'Thomson Reuters' and the Thomson Reuters logo are registered trademarks of Thomson Reuters and its affiliated companies. MARCH 08, 2012 / 01:00PM GMT, DPW.DE - Full Year 2011 Deutsche Post AG Earnings Conference Call But we should expect 2011 was a different year from the previous years, that the volume decline came to a standstill. We are not assuming that this will continue in 2012. We think that we will have a further deterioration of the volumes, and that of course has impact. And therefore we think that we are well advised to give you the guidance that the numbers will end up between EUR1b and EUR1.1b. Martin Ziegenbalg - Deutsche Post AG - Head of IR Which translates into a stabilization materializing. Andy Chu - Deutsche Bank - Analyst Perfect. That's very helpful. Thank you very much. Martin Ziegenbalg - Deutsche Post AG - Head of IR Cool. Thanks, Andy. Frank Appel - Deutsche Post AG - CEO Welcome. Martin Ziegenbalg - Deutsche Post AG - Head of IR Next question, please. Operator We will take our next question from Dominic Edridge from UBS. Please go ahead. Dominic Edridge - UBS - Analyst Hi there. Yes, just a couple of questions from myself. Firstly, probably just following on from Damien's question on the Express, could you just say what the pricing dynamics are at the moment there? Obviously your TDI revenue has grown about 2 percentage points more than shipments in 2011. Is that sort of trend going to continue? Is it going to be better or worse, do you feel, than this in 2012? The second thing is on Freight Forwarding. Obviously there have been a number of press articles about some changes within the management team there and some departures, and obviously now we have seen there is some restructuring going on. Could you just clarify what's happening and what sort of changes you're looking to make there? And a last one, which is purely financial. Just in the absence of the full annual report I know until next week or so, could you just talk about the provision movements in the cash flow statement, and what sort of quantum we should expect for this year as well? Thank you very much. Larry Rosen - Deutsche Post AG - CFO So, on pricing dynamics in Express, you have to consider also weight. We saw an increase in average weight per shipment. Right now, the outlook for 2012, all of the industry participants have introduced GPIs, general price increases, earlier this year. And the extent to which those will stick in a disciplined way is still being determined. We are optimistic about it, but I wouldn't want to make a precise prediction about pricing. 11 THOMSON REUTERS STREETEVENTS | www.streetevents.com | Contact Us © 2012 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. 'Thomson Reuters' and the Thomson Reuters logo are registered trademarks of Thomson Reuters and its affiliated companies. MARCH 08, 2012 / 01:00PM GMT, DPW.DE - Full Year 2011 Deutsche Post AG Earnings Conference Call So maybe on the provision movements, I would direct you to take a look -- given the absence of the full annual report, take a look on our website at the IR stat pack. So there you see all of the provision movement and cash flow, related cash flow effects for each division, and I think that will give you everything you need. Dominic Edridge - UBS - Analyst And any comments for 2012 at all? Larry Rosen - Deutsche Post AG - CFO No. I wouldn't expect very huge differences -- yes, I generally would say that we had the restructuring charges especially for Express in the past, and we tend to use those provisions over time. The usage might be slightly less in 2012 compared to '11. Frank Appel - Deutsche Post AG - CEO And as we talk about the management changes we have seen in the last 12 months, so this is a consequence of changing the head. Of course, the person usually tries to build up a right team for his agenda, and Roger has done so. And therefore that is not -- we have lost not a significant amount of people unwanted somehow. It's all a consequence -- some people retire even, so they were pretty old already. So if you reflect on some what was in the news, this is an interesting story to read and I laughed pretty loud when I read it. So sometimes you have your fun as well reading about your company. But overall, this is a logical consequence of some management changes we wanted to do anyway. So there is very clear focus, that we have the right team on board now to deliver our promises also in that division. Dominic Edridge - UBS - Analyst Okay. Thank you very much. Frank Appel - Deutsche Post AG - CEO Okay. Welcome. Martin Ziegenbalg - Deutsche Post AG - Head of IR Next question, please. Operator Thank you. We will take our next question from Robert Joynson from Macquarie. Please go ahead. Robert Joynson - Macquarie - Analyst Good afternoon, Frank, Larry. I've got one question on Mail and then a couple of questions on Express, maybe let's take them one by one. First of all, just starting off with Mail, just regarding the E-Postbrief, the previous guidance there has been for a spend of around about EUR500m over five years. Could you just confirm whether EUR500m is still the target number, and also whether that's expected to be expensed evenly over that five period or whether it's now expected to be more frontend loaded or indeed possibly backend loaded? Frank Appel - Deutsche Post AG - CEO 12 THOMSON REUTERS STREETEVENTS | www.streetevents.com | Contact Us © 2012 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. 'Thomson Reuters' and the Thomson Reuters logo are registered trademarks of Thomson Reuters and its affiliated companies. MARCH 08, 2012 / 01:00PM GMT, DPW.DE - Full Year 2011 Deutsche Post AG Earnings Conference Call So, we still intend to spend that over the period and we never commented exactly how that is distributed, but it's not a big volatility over the years in that number, so how that's spread. So being two years in a row, we have already expended quite a bit of that. Robert Joynson - Macquarie - Analyst Okay. Fair enough. And then, just on Express, just looking at development of the TDI volumes during the last few quarters, that's really been fantastic, especially given that global air freight volumes have been so weak over that period. Could you maybe just provide some detail on the composition of that growth in terms of variables such as market share gains in existing areas or new products or targeting new geographies, etc.? Frank Appel - Deutsche Post AG - CEO Yes, we can. I think we see a nice growth, an outperformance of the market around the world, including the US where we have seen strong double-digit growth, which we think is above the market. We have not introduced so many products. What the key driver behind that is, we have a much more trained and skilled workforce. We have a much more focused sales approach than we had. And finally and most importantly, probably, we had a record year in service quality. And you can see that as well in our satisfaction surveys of customers, that they compliment us very high on the service quality. And this is what we always said. When we retrenched, we said there are two legs which are needed. We have not only now superb quality outside the US, but also in the US. And I said that already in earlier calls, our service quality is probably second to none in the US because we have the shortest sorting window in the night and that gives us a lot of opportunities to show a lot of resilience in the service quality. So these are the key drivers behind that. We are not extremely aggressive on the market with pricing, so it's not -- we don't see a deterioration of our yield as somebody of you said already. It's really the combination of very skilled labor and excellent global footprint, and it's across all regions that we see very good development of our volumes. Robert Joynson - Macquarie - Analyst Okay. Thank you for that. And then just a final question, actually just touching on US Express, actually. I appreciate that you're not splitting out the profitability of that business any more, but could you maybe just provide some color on how the EBIT loss produced by that business has actually developed since it was last disclosed a couple of years ago? Frank Appel - Deutsche Post AG - CEO It has also contributed very nicely to our overall profitability improvement, for sure. As you said, Robert, we don't disclose these numbers intentionally, and therefore I can't say more. But we are significantly better than the $400m loss we shared I think one and half years ago (multiple speakers). Larry Rosen - Deutsche Post AG - CFO Run rate end of '09. Frank Appel - Deutsche Post AG - CEO So we have improved very much and they contributed also very nicely to the overall development of our numbers. Robert Joynson - Macquarie - Analyst Okay. That's very helpful. Thank you. 13 THOMSON REUTERS STREETEVENTS | www.streetevents.com | Contact Us © 2012 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. 'Thomson Reuters' and the Thomson Reuters logo are registered trademarks of Thomson Reuters and its affiliated companies. MARCH 08, 2012 / 01:00PM GMT, DPW.DE - Full Year 2011 Deutsche Post AG Earnings Conference Call Frank Appel - Deutsche Post AG - CEO You're welcome. Martin Ziegenbalg - Deutsche Post AG - Head of IR Next question, please. Operator Our next question today comes from Neil Glynn from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead. Neil Glynn - Credit Suisse - Analyst Good afternoon, everybody. If I could lead with a question on Parcels within Germany, clearly the market is developing quite strongly, which one would think would attract increasing competition. And I've certainly seen some comments from Hermes over the past few months. I am interested in your view as to how you expect the competitive landscape to develop. Can the positive revenue trend be protected, i.e. is there enough growth for everybody? And then, second of all, if I could delve back into the -- one of the previous Express questions, would it be possible to outline how your intra-Asia revenues are developing relative to your inbound and outbound Asia revenues, to give us some color as to how insulated you are from perhaps the European situation? Frank Appel - Deutsche Post AG - CEO May I answer the first question and the second I have not in my mind yet. Maybe, Larry, you can answer if you have it. But let me start with the Parcel growth in Germany. Yes, we are confident that there is sufficient space for growth for everybody. But beyond that, we just recently released an external study done on our demand which shows that one four -- one out of four customers, consumers, is demanding DHL as their sole provider for shipments. And the other three quarters we are definitely a partner as well. So what drives at the moment our growth, I think, and that's above the market growth, is the great service quality, the product offerings we have. And that makes me confident that we can continue to grow the business despite the fact that the business as such will grow pretty rapidly. The market share of online e-commerce is still relatively low, and we see still huge opportunities to expand that further. We have launched our own activities like MeinPaket.de, which is a website with more than 3m items already, which is very nicely growing. We have other ideas as well, too early to share, but to invest as well in our own -- facilitating e-commerce even further. So we expect until 2020 a further development, and we think there will be healthy growth, about 5%, until 2020 in this industry. Larry Rosen - Deutsche Post AG - CFO So, on the second question, intra-Asia versus inbound and outbound, in Asia Pacific we have overall growth of around -- between 10.5% and 11%, or 10.5% on the imports into Asia and 11% on exports from Asia. And the intra-Asia growth was not too much different from that in 2011. That being said, we certainly expect our position in Asia to be a competitive advantage for the foreseeable future, as we are -- our footprint in Asia, as we're in every country, DHL has a high share of the Express business in very many countries in Asia, we expect that we naturally will be able to benefit from high growth in intra-Asia trade. And even though that was not the case in 2011, it was around the same as export and import, we would expect it to be the case in the future. Neil Glynn - Credit Suisse - Analyst Thank you. 14 THOMSON REUTERS STREETEVENTS | www.streetevents.com | Contact Us © 2012 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. 'Thomson Reuters' and the Thomson Reuters logo are registered trademarks of Thomson Reuters and its affiliated companies. MARCH 08, 2012 / 01:00PM GMT, DPW.DE - Full Year 2011 Deutsche Post AG Earnings Conference Call Martin Ziegenbalg - Deutsche Post AG - Head of IR Thanks, Neil. And we have got time for a few more questions. Operator, please. Operator We will now take our next question from Penny Butcher from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Penny Butcher - Morgan Stanley - Analyst Great. Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. I have three questions. The first is in relation to your cash flow charge on page 28. I'm just trying to understand a little bit better what was included in the other effects decline in cash balance for the full year '11, and most especially in Q4. Because if we take your free cash flow generation for Q4, it would have assumed, I would have thought, a much bigger base of underlying cash at the end of the year. So if you could just explain perhaps what's included in those other effects that we need to take account of. My second question is in relation to the CapEx guidance of EUR1.8b. This has been quite a step up, at least over 2011. Could you give some guidance as to whether this is a reflection purely for 2012 and the CapEx level should moderate thereafter? Or should we expect maybe this higher level of base of CapEx to generate the EBIT growth in the future? And my third question is in relation to the Forwarding business. I think you alluded into the comment in the presentation that you're happy to continue to grow this business, but focusing primarily on quality customers. So should we infer from that that this is more about perhaps the revenue growth side and less about expansion of the margin in Forwarding going forward? Thank you. Larry Rosen - Deutsche Post AG - CFO So let me start on the first question, what's in the EUR524m of all other effects. The two biggest items are dividend, cash dividends paid to minority shareholders and also our cash net interest costs. There are a few smaller items, but those are the two biggest ones. So the CapEx guidance, we are kind of in a heavy -- I wouldn't necessarily call it peak period, but I also would not expect that CapEx would go up anywhere near substantially from the EUR1.8b. In fact, I think that probably a reasonable run rate for our Company in its current version is more like EUR1.6b. So we are spending a bit more because we've got all those strategic projects going now. We'll see those especially in 2012. A couple of them will continue in 2013, and then we might come to a more normalized period. Frank Appel - Deutsche Post AG - CEO Yes. And at DGF, of course we want to grow the business further, but we thought that 2011 is a good year to consolidate a little bit the customer front. The team is now focusing very much to see -- look for new business, and the hit rate is pretty high we have seen in the last months. We usually don't report that. So I'm pretty confident that we will see a change in the growth rate of the Forwarding business again, but on a much more robust gross profit base than we had before. And that, I think it was the right decision to go for. Penny Butcher - Morgan Stanley - Analyst Okay. Great. Thank you very much. Frank Appel - Deutsche Post AG - CEO You're welcome. 15 THOMSON REUTERS STREETEVENTS | www.streetevents.com | Contact Us © 2012 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. 'Thomson Reuters' and the Thomson Reuters logo are registered trademarks of Thomson Reuters and its affiliated companies. MARCH 08, 2012 / 01:00PM GMT, DPW.DE - Full Year 2011 Deutsche Post AG Earnings Conference Call Martin Ziegenbalg - Deutsche Post AG - Head of IR Thanks, Penny. And the next question, please. Operator Thank you. We will now move to our next question from Johannes Braun from Commerzbank. Please go ahead. Johannes Braun - Commerzbank - Analyst Yes. Hi. It's Johannes Braun from Commerzbank. I just had one question left, actually, and it's basically a clarification. I understand that you are currently in talks with the tax authorities on a potential tax reclaim by the authorities. I think it's regarding VAT. And the question would be is it already possible to give us an update on that and a potential at least rough indication of what magnitude of tax reclaim we are talking about here, and what that might potentially mean regarding distributable cash in 2012 if there is any impact at all? Larry Rosen - Deutsche Post AG - CFO So, we do confirm that we are in discussion with the tax authorities. To be realistic, we are always in discussion with the tax authorities in Germany and in other countries on different subjects that are coming up in audits. The article published in the press referred to VAT matters, and indeed that is the case that we are discussing those matters. But because we are not finalized on those discussions, neither we nor the tax authorities can really give details about it. That being said, obviously it's something that we have considered in setting the guidance for this year. And so some of the amounts mentioned in the press article seem to us to be exaggerated. Johannes Braun - Commerzbank - Analyst Yes, sure. Is there any timeline for a clarification or a definite agreement with the tax authorities? Larry Rosen - Deutsche Post AG - CFO I wouldn't want to necessarily give a timeline. Johannes Braun - Commerzbank - Analyst Thank you. Martin Ziegenbalg - Deutsche Post AG - Head of IR Okay. Thank you. I think there will be time for one final question if there is one out there. Moderator, would you ask around, please? Operator (Operator Instructions). We have no questions at this time. Martin Ziegenbalg - Deutsche Post AG - Head of IR 16 THOMSON REUTERS STREETEVENTS | www.streetevents.com | Contact Us © 2012 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. 'Thomson Reuters' and the Thomson Reuters logo are registered trademarks of Thomson Reuters and its affiliated companies. MARCH 08, 2012 / 01:00PM GMT, DPW.DE - Full Year 2011 Deutsche Post AG Earnings Conference Call Okay, well. Frank Appel - Deutsche Post AG - CEO Yes. Then let me summarize again. So I think we had a very good 2011 and we have achieved all our goals. We have laid the foundation for further growth by continual investing in our capabilities and offerings to our customers. So I am pretty confident that we can increase our profitability, as just shared with you, the new guidance in 2012. So thank you for participating and listening, and talk to you soon, I guess, again. Thank you and bye for now. Martin Ziegenbalg - Deutsche Post AG - Head of IR Thank you. Operator That concludes today's conference call. 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