MasterCard Earnings Call NUGGETS: Focus on Control, FX Headwind

On Wednesday, MasterCard Incorporated Class A (NYSE:MA) reported its second quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call. Take a look.

Session 1: Focus on Control

Sanjay Sakhrani – KBW: I had a question for Ajay. You mentioned that you’d kind of focus on items that you can control as long as the economic uncertainty continues and I was just wondering if you would just elaborate on those levers a little bit more, maybe specifically around the operating margin, I think, Martina gave some color as to what you guys are anticipating, but what happens if the top line doesn’t pan out as you expect it to?

A Closer Look: MasterCard Incorporated Class A Earnings Cheat Sheet>>

Ajay Banga – President and CEO: Let’s first discuss the top-line for the second half. I have tried to layout that I believe what drives our top line are those three concentric circles. The outer most one being the growth of personal consumption expenditure, and a lot of my commentary in the beginning was around how I am not sure where that will go, maybe not at the 5% or 6% that we have been consistently getting over the last few years. Although, I don’t know for a fact I am just assuming that things look a little dodgier on that front than they did a little while ago. The other two concentric circles; one, is what percentage of that PCE goes into electronic transactions versus cash and currently around 80% something goes into cash and I am still very focused on growing the electronic share in that. Hence all the effort on government programs, prepaid programs, social security, social benefits, all that that you see, as well as small ticket payments, mobile payments, all that comes from trying to change the ratio in that space. And the last concentric circle, is our share in the 15%. I think, if you do the math on the way our transactions are growing not just because of U.S. debit, you will find that we are making some progress there as well, although we’ve always got more work to do in that space. So, I kind of think of those three levers. I think of the outermost concentric circle in revenue being less than easy to predict today and focus on the next two. That’s the top line. Now, let’s talk the other way, expenses. I think what you’ll find us doing is to ensure that we meet our guidance of at least 50% of that operating margin we have talked about, but fortunately over the last six months we have been doing better than that. If we find that there are opportunities for us to put money back into strategic initiatives that feed our revenue growth in one of those two opportunities, either to grow electronifications or to grow our share within the electronification, we will keep doing that, because that’s what we are trying to do to keep our franchise growing through all these economic volatility that we see today. Now within that, if I had a choice, the easiest level to control is A&M, I’ve talked about that in the past. G&A tends to be something I want to invest in consistently, I can’t start and stop a strategic initiative without losing a lot of the momentum, but A&M, I can work with, so that’s what Martina was trying to indicate to you in her commentary, but we are very focused on that two-year goal of 12 to 14 percentage points of revenue growth CAGR on a constant currency basis, we are very focused on the minimum 50% operating margin and that 20% EPS growth also on a constant currency basis, that’s what our focus is. I’m going to play with every element in the P&L in the meantime to ensure we deliver on that focus and navigate our way through this system and keep growing our share.

Session 2: FX Headwind

Moshe Katri – Cowen & Co: So if I’m looking at gross dollar volumes, especially in the rest of the world in credit, it was up 8.3%, last quarter it was up 17.6%. Is it possible just to reconcile the differences and maybe just give us a feel on what sort of FX headwind you had there?

Martina Hund-Mejean – CFO: The FX headwinds for volumes were really not different than what we have been calling out right now. We’ve said, when you look at GDV, the GDV on new constant currency basis was about 15%, on a U.S. dollar basis it’s about 9%, so you have a 6 percentage point headwind on GDV and when you look at credit versus debit there is really not much difference from that.

Moshe Katri – Cowen & Co: So the 17.6% should be – if you kind of look at this on apples-to-apples basis it should be roughly – this quarter should be somewhere in the 12%, 13% range if I just (indiscernible) for FX headwinds?

Martina Hund-Mejean – CFO: I think directionally you are correct.