Westwood Holdings Group Inc (WHG) 2016 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Westwood Holdings Group First Quarter 2016 Earnings Release Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we'll conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will be given at that time. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded.

I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference, Ms. Sylvia Fry, Senior Vice President and Chief Compliance Officer. Ma'am, you may begin.

Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to our first quarter 2016 conference call. I would like to begin by reading our forward-looking statements disclaimer. The following discussion will include forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause actual results to be materially different from those contemplated by the forward-looking statements.

Additional information concerning the factors that could cause such a difference is included in our press release issued earlier today, as well as in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2015 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as result of new information, future events or otherwise. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.

In addition, in accordance with the SEC rules concerning non-GAAP financial measures, a reconciliation of our economic earnings and economic earnings per share to the most comparable GAAP measures is included at the end of our press release issued earlier today.

On our call today, we will have Brian Casey, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Tiffany Kice, our Chief Financial Officer.

I will now turn the call over to Brian Casey, our CEO.

Thanks Sylvia, and good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for taking the time to join for Westwood Holdings Group first quarter 2016 earnings call. Tiffany and I have the opportunity to meet with many of you last month at Investor Relations meetings we held in various locations around the country. And it was great to see you and we truly appreciate your being a shareholder and for your ongoing support of our Company.

As you all know, the first quarter of 2016 was defined by extreme volatility with large daily swings in asset prices then a sharp reversal and return. US equity markets began the year on an extremely weak note, with the S&P 500 posting its worst start in history, with a decline of almost 11% at the February 11 low. From this low, equities and commodities moved sharply higher over the remainder of the first quarter, resulting in most industries registering modestly positive returns for the period. Central Bank policymakers were once again the major catalyst behind the market's recovery with the European Central Bank, Bank of Japan, and the People's Bank of China providing additional stimulus, while the Federal Reserve did its part by once again delaying any additional rate hike.

As we've seen with previous Central Bank driven rallies, low quality, high [data names] were the top performers over the second half of the quarter. The market volatility, along with an increase in correlations, created a challenging environment for active management in the first quarter. By one industry estimate, only 19% of active large cap managers outperformed the S&P 500 during the first quarter. We were pleased to see that our flagship large cap value product within this Group was again ahead of both the S&P 500 and the Russell 1000 value indices.

On other end of the market cap range, our mid and small cap strategies underperformed their respective indices. The first quarter of 2016 marked the first full quarter for one of our new equity strategies, the US low volatility equity. The strategy managed by members of our US value and global convertibles team takes a fundamental approach combining equities and convertible with the objective of outperforming the Russell 1000 Index with lower volatility. We were encouraged by the return profile in the first quarter with the strategy delivering on its objective during an extreme environment and finishing the quarter over 300 basis points ahead of its index.

In terms of the other strategies managed by the US value team, our multi-asset strategy, Income Opportunity, performed well over the quarter, delivering a positive return of 1.6%, [but were] sharply lower volatility than the broader equity markets. Westwood's MLP strategies outperformed on a relative basis with the MLP infrastructure renewal strategy ranking in the top quartile of the peer group, despite continued pressure on the MLP asset class. For all of our strategies, we remain focused on downside protection and we believe our approach to active investor management will continue to serve our clients well as that has over 33-year history.

The market conditions discussed earlier were also a prominent factor for the strategies managed by our global and emerging markets equity team. Similar to the US market, the broad global markets seem to find a bottom in early February, with emerging markets leading the subsequent rally bouncing over 20% from its lows and ending up over 5% for the quarter. Apart from the ongoing concerns by investors surrounding global growth and lack of inflation, political uncertainly was front and center in non-US markets, particularly in Brazil, Germany and the UK. Despite this, Westwood's Global and EM strategies performed well, particularly strong performance across all three emerging market strategies that the team manages. All three strategies were in the top decile of their respective peer groups for the quarter. The team continues to focus on executing their long-term core investment process, looking for mid-priced companies with a history of creating economic value in both tough times and prosperous times. The team has recently conducted over 100 research meetings in Latin America, Europe and elsewhere during the first part of the year.

The convertibles assets class held up well during the market fell off in the first part of the quarter providing reasonable downside protection versus equity markets. However, the ensuing bounce in risk assets in our underweighted and commodity related exposure resulted in a slight lag to the index. As we enter the second quarter, we believe convertibles valuations present a very attractive entry point for investors. In fact, by certain measures, the asset class is the cheapest it has been since the global financial crisis. We are actively communicating this to clients and prospects, as well as taking advantage of the situation from an investment perspective, particularly in the absolute return focused market neutral income strategy.

On the distribution side, the institutional team enjoyed a strong start for the year with new client mandates and small cap value income opportunity in our emerging market strategies. As we've discussed previously, we've been disappointed by our asset raising efforts in our small cap value strategy given its strong track record. We've begun to see some reward for achieving high consult ratings with wins across corporate and public funds during the first quarter. We also brought on board a new UK based emerging markets client into our UCITS fund during the period, as well as seeing additions by existing clients in our income opportunity strategy.

As we look forward, we see investors at a crossroads from an asset allocation perspective. Many have been disappointed by their allocation of the hedge funds, they are concerned over their fixed income valuations and are looking for where they can source returns to achieve their required rates of return. Given the significant investment we've made in new investment teams and new strategies, we believe we're well positioned to offer relevant solutions to existing and prospective clients.

The Westwood Fund's mutual fund family experienced modest net outflows of $71 million during the quarter, a much slower pace than the outflows we experienced in the previous two quarters. Over 80% of the redemptions were from our largest fund, our Income Opportunity Fund, despite the fund performing very well and posting positive absolute and peer group relative performance. We believe that significant level of redemptions was a reaction to investor uncertainty during the stock market downdraft in the early part of the quarter.

Some of the other highlights for the quarter included the Large Cap Value Fund seeing an inflow of $40 million from a high net worth advisory firm with whom we've had a longstanding relationship and our SMidCap Fund receiving a contribution from an institutional qualified plan client, resulting in net flows to that fund of $22 million.

Finally, we continue to see interest in our emerging markets mutual fund, primarily driven by institutional investment consultants and we're pleased to be a top performer year-to-date in the Morningstar Universe for Ian Managers. We remain active and soliciting for new sub-advisory partners and working to ensure we're positioned well with our existing partners in the US and Canada, where we sub-advise a series of global and emerging market equity funds for the National Bank of Canada. Our objective there is to be well positioned for attracting new assets when favorable investor sentiment returns to emerging markets within the Canadian market.

Total assets of Westwood Trust declined by approximately 1% to $4.9 billion during the first quarter. Net flows were slightly negative for the period, primarily because we were able to accommodate the needs of a large client and transfer assets from an account at Westwood Trust or Private Wealth platform to a separately managed institutional account at Westwood Management. While this is reflected as a loss in assets for Westwood Trust, the client relationship was maintained by Westwood as an organization.

Distributions for tax payments were also higher this year for individuals as gains were realized in taxable portfolios in 2015 as a result of markets being up over 200% since the March 2009 loss. New business development slowed from the fourth quarter's phase as market volatility typically slows the pace of money in transition. The best thing we can do in terms of volatility is to reach out to our clients to reassure them and help them in any way we can.

We've made a significant investment in new systems to deliver a better online experience and improved customer statement. We intend to roll out additional features in the year ahead. In terms of corporate development, we've continued to actively evaluate opportunities to expand our Company through the acquisition of private wealth companies in strong geographic markets. We feel that we're an ideal partner for a strong and growing business, we have a publicly traded stock to incent long-term employees, we have scale in our overall business and robust suite of investment strategies to offer clients.

With over two decades of experience serving private wealth clients across multiple markets, we know the business inside and out and remain committed to growing this important segment of our business. To conclude my prepared comments, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank our shareholders again for your support of our various proposals and for your confidence in Westwood. We are unwavering and are focused on delivering the performance our clients expect, finding new clients to grow the firm in a measured, thoughtful manner and investing in our business for the future. I'll now turn the call over Tiffany Kice, our CFO.

Thanks, Brian and good afternoon, everyone. For the first quarter of 2016, we are reporting total revenues of $29.1 million compared to $29.6 million in the same period of 2015. Asset based advisory fees decreased $2.1 million due to lower average assets under management, primarily related to asset depreciation while trust fees increased $2.3 million related to revenue generated by Woodway, which we acquired on April 1, 2015.

Net income was $3.5 million compared to $5.6 million in the first quarter of 2015, primarily due to the decrease in advisory fees and included one-time implementation cost for information technology improvements of approximately $500,000 net of tax. Diluted earnings per share was $0.44 compared to $0.71 the prior year quarter.

Economic earnings in non-GAAP metrics decreased to $8.1 million from $9.4 million in the first quarter of 2015. In turn, economic earnings per share fell to $1.01 in the first quarter of 2016 compared to $1.20 per share in the prior year quarter.

Firm-wide assets under management totaled $21.1 billion at quarter end and consisted of institutional assets of 12.2 billion or 58% of the total, private wealth assets of $5.3 million or 25% of the total and mutual fund assets of $3.6 billion or 17% of the total. Our assets experienced market appreciation of $410 million for the quarter, partially offset by net outflows of $650 million. Our financial position continues to be very solid with cash and investments at quarter end totaling $71.2 million and a debt-free balance sheet.

Our Board of Directors approved the quarterly cash dividend of $0.50 per share payable on July 1,2016 to stockholders of record on June 10, 2016. This represents an annualized dividend yield of 3.8% at yesterday's closing price.

We encourage you to review the presentation we posted on our website reflecting first quarter highlights as well as longer-term trends in the growth of our assets under management revenues, earnings and dividend.

I'll now turn the call back over to Brian to conclude.

Thanks, Tiffany. We'd be happy to take anybody's questions, if you have questions.

(Operator instructions) John Fox, Fenimore Asset Management.

Hello, everyone. A few questions, I think for Tiffany, well, actually for both of you, the technology expense, why do you consider that to be one-time?

They were implementation cost to move up to the cloud, so they won't be a recurring cost though we will have some recurring cost relating to licensing fees.

Okay. And should I assume that's in the information technology line?

Yes.

Okay, great. And can you talk about, I don't remember you're buying the stock back before although you may have, can you talk about the decision to buying the stock in the amount than what you paid?

We bought back 93,000 shares at average price of $4.4 million, and that was basically average price of $47.41.

Right, I guess, that I can see in the release, I'm just -- why did you purchase the stock, what was the thinking around that for capital allocation?

Well, we did an authorization to buy back up to $10 million worth of stock -- I can't remember the date.

Back in 2012.

2012. And when the market sold off, we felt that got down to levels that were really unreasonable and we made a decision to buy back.

Okay. Great. And could you talk about the decline in the investments, which I think was $72 million at the end of the year, and $45 million today, and I saw on the cash flow, you did sell some, but were there any your investment losses or anything else unusual going on there?

No, nothing unusual going on there. If you remember from a timing perspective, first quarter is when we pay out our incentive comp bonus, so you've got that money going out. So that's the biggest piece of it. There was a little bit of a change from when we moved to a neutral system where our receivables were built by about $5 million, about to see a one quarter type thing, so that's really just timing.

Mac Sykes, Gabelli & Company.

My first is on the DOL changes there, does that impact your Trust business at all, or do you see that affecting it at all?

Yes. I mean, I think when the rules are more explicit, we'll have to comply with those rules as to how it will affect us. I don't think it will affect us as negatively as it would affect others. We already use outside sub-advisors for a number of the asset classes that we don't offer here and so we are set up, I think very well to deal with it.

Could you be provide an update in your relationship with Russell? I think you've been working with them, just how long you have that track record with them and the opportunity there?

Sure. Well. The Russell organization hired us in 2012, I believe or it could have been in early 2013, to manage a couple of their UCITS Funds and commingled funds within their Trust company. And they funded us in an emerging markets SMid product that will be coming up on a three-year record and that record, I think will be pretty good, so we're excited about that and in fact in the first quarter, the SMid product was top decile relative to peers, of which there are not a ton of peers in SMid, but it's off to a great start and we are excited about it. Go ahead.

And so, my last question is given the turnaround we've seen, March, April now, just in terms of the leverage on your platform, if we continued sort of a more positive trend for rest of the year, where could we expect perhaps the best growth in terms your products?

Well, I mean I think we had -- if we look at emerging markets, well since we were just talking about that, if you look at our performance, we had liked our performance the year before last, we didn't have a great year last year, we've had a great first quarter, had a good April, you know if we can continue to deliver a good year for emerging markets, we'll have a three-year number that's pretty terrific.

We still have capacity in the product and I think you'll see -- we have the potential for large growth there. As I mentioned in my prepared comments, we've seen some success in small cap, as we all know there is a lot of small cap managers to choose from, so it's been more difficult than I would have ever thought given the track record that we put together for us to bring in assets, but we've had some success lately. And I would expect, if history repeats itself, that that will snowball and we'll continue to have success in gathering small cap assets.

Income opportunity, it remains, it's a multi-strategy asset class type of fund and we are on airplanes doing finals for that product, the fund itself is doing great, as I said in the first quarter, it was surprising after having delivered a positive return with low volatility that we saw outflows in the mutual funds. If history repeats itself, usually some of that will reverse itself, because there is still a desire by the investing public to have somebody else make the decision on what asset classes to be in and if the objective is to deliver yield and low volatility, there's a lot of appeal to that type of product. And as I mentioned, with our lower equity strategy that we started in the first quarter, that too we think will be a nice complement to that type of product sale.

(operator instructions) And I'm not showing any further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Brian Casey.

Okay. Thank you and we appreciate everybody's time, if you have any questions, feel free to call myself or Tiffany or visit our website at www.westwoodgroup.com. Thanks for being a shareholder and we appreciate your time.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude today's program. You may now disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.