United Technologies Earnings Call Insights: Change in Guidance, Otis Order Strength

On Tuesday, United Technologies Corp (NYSE:UTX) reported its third quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call. Take a look.

Change in Guidance

Joseph Nadol – JPMorgan: I’ll start out over at Pratt. Greg, I’m just wondering, you had your meeting, September 27, obviously very late in the quarter and you’re lowering hereby $75 million, I think, all due to spares. So is it really – I mean can we infer from that that really two weeks at the end of the quarter was responsible for the change in guidance? Or is it maybe just looking more into the fourth quarter? Also at Pratt, if you quantify that supplier payment?

Gregory J. Hayes – SVP and CFO: So I think Dave laid it out pretty well back in September. He said that we are not seeing the order rates to actually support this, there is only down 10%. So I think Dave was pretty forthright with everybody to say that we’re not seeing and clearly the last couple of weeks of September, we did not see any recovery in spares and we haven’t seen it as we sit here today. So the takedown is all spares, and I think again its unfortunate to take down the guidance late in the year, but it is what it is on commercial spares. I think the good news is we dissect the data, the narrow-body platforms, the V2500 and 757s are actually been recovering for the couple of quarters and where we see the weakness is primarily on the wide-body fleet and also in Europe. So, again, that is surprise I think, but it’s clearly a tough market right now. As far as the supplier payment, that was about $45 million, $46 million I think. It’s actually a settlement. It was a legacy claim between Pratt and Goodrich, which relates to the – on the sell on the C-Series. This had been in arbitration. We had an independent arbitratory command and we settled the claim and that was actually recorded on Goodrich’s balance sheet as of the close and the Pratt recognize the benefit in this quarter.

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Joseph Nadol – JPMorgan: Then secondly, on Goodrich, you mentioned that Goodrich earnings were better than expected. Is that due to less amortization or is that real underlying performance? What was – I don’t know if you, if I missed it, but what was the organic aftermarket growth at Goodrich during the quarter?

Jay Malave – Director, IR: Joe, organic aftermarket for sales was slightly below HS. HS had about mid-single-digit growth in commercial aftermarket and a Goodrich is a little bit below that, as far as military aftermarket, HS was down around 10% and Goodrich was down a little bit below that of close to mid-teens. While we have the chance, I just want to correct the statement that I made before related to Sikorsky on Slide 8, just want to clarify the operating profit decreased 6% and 12% lower sales.

Gregory J. Hayes – SVP and CFO: The part of your question as far as the underlying business, Goodrich didn’t do a little bit better than what we had expected. It was primarily aero structures at the end of the quarter, things actually look better, but amortizations clearly better. The big piece in the quarter that was really this transaction related cost, which were better than what we had expected. We took I’d say a very conservative view as we were looking at all of these costs and we had expected to expense some things that ended up on Goodrich’s balance sheet. So that helped by about a $100 million and then you had better performance and a little bit better amortization.

Otis Order Strength

Jeffrey Sprague – Vertical Research: Just wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on the Otis order strength in North America it sounds like Europe maybe driven by the big metro project, maybe there is something else there elaborate on that also. But what was going on in North America and is it more than a one-off?

Gregory J. Hayes – SVP and CFO: No, I think it’s a trend that we have seen that a recovery in North America and we’ve seen the ABI, Architectural Billing Index be above 50 for the last couple of months here and actually seeing good traction in quarters there. We got of course a new product introductions also that’s helping on the – in North America attacking some of the hydro market, so I think its product introduction that are recovered there. So that actually feels pretty good. Europe, well, Europe is Europe. We did get good traction out of the Crossrail project. I think that’s over 107 escalators for that London Crossrail. But the rest of Europe is not a great story. We saw down markets in France and Spain and Italy, A little bit better in Germany, but on a whole a pretty tough year of market outside of the U.K.

Jeffrey Sprague – Vertical Research: Then when you look at China down too, our year end position given kind of the comps and trajectory to actually flip positive on orders in Q4 or when do you see that happening, if you can, in fact, crystalize the view?

Gregory J. Hayes – SVP and CFO: My crystal ball is not terribly clear, but I would tell you, we should be seeing order growth resume in Q4. As I said earlier, orders were down 2%, but that was off of a very tough compare last year, where orders were up 31% at constant currency. So we are seeing a recovery. Last year, you will recall, China only grew 7% in the fourth quarter. So, again, I think the trajectory that we saw coming out of the third quarter should continue into the fourth quarter. I think (Pedro) and team feel very confident. We are getting share back and they are on track for a full recovery there.

Jeffrey Sprague – Vertical Research: Just can you give us a little more granularity on China? Does it (highlight) resi as a bigger project, central countries, any other detail on what’s going on would be helpful?

Gregory J. Hayes – SVP and CFO: It’s actually really across the business where we are seeing a recovery there. The commercial HVAC business remains soft there. I think also some of the slowdowns that we’ve seen are actually playing out on the CCS. On the flip side, residential is getting a little bit better. We saw that at CCS on their GST business getting some traction and order rates. For Otis, again, I think the property market has started to stabilize and come back a little bit, still seeing good growth in the Tier 2 and 3 cities, Tier 1 is still pretty challenged, but – again, that’s not a surprise. It’s a very uneven recovery in China.

Jeffrey Sprague – Vertical Research: Just finally, just flipping over to Carrier. It looks like your resi business underperformed from what I can see from a couple of others who reported in the quarter. Can you just give us some color on how you thought you did relative to the broader market and what’s going on in the channels?

Gregory J. Hayes – SVP and CFO: Yeah, underperformance is a relative term, Jeff. I think and again, we saw, I think, one of the competitors report at the other day and they had a – what looked like kind of mid-teens growth in the resi business, but I think that was off of a very touch – very easy compare from 2011. The Carrier thinks they’ve held share here this year. They’ve done pretty well. Channel inventories are very, very light. I think nobody wants to get stuck with inventory this time of year, given all the uncertainty in the global economic situation of the fiscal cliff coming up. So channel inventories are probably at some of the lowest levels we have seen.

A Closer Look: United Technologies Earnings Cheat Sheet>>