Waste Management, Inc. (WM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

So this is Michael Hoffman, I'm Group Head of Diversified Industrial Research. I cover the environmental services space. It's my pleasure to have Waste Management on stage with us. And from my right -- or my right all across the stage, we have Jim Fish, who is the Chief Executive Officer; Devina Rankin, who is the Chief Financial Officer; and Rafa Carrasco, who is the SVP of Strategy; in the back of the room is Ed Egl, who is Vice President of Finance and Investor Relations. So all the tough questions go to him. These are all the layup questions up here.

So I have a couple of housekeeping questions I'd like to get out of the way just so we check these boxes around this. Did everybody actually see the news on Monday? They did a little deal. HSR filing, has it been done?

10 days.

In 10 days.

The process from sign to when we'll do the filing is about a 10-day period.

Okay. So when that hits, say it's at the end of the 10 days. When people look out on a calendar, typically, either if Justice is swamped, they'll come back and say, pull it, refile it because they don't want to trigger weird things. When is that date, of either they pull it or they ask for a second request? How far out are we looking at? What's that date look like?

So we're not specifically looking at that because things are uncertain in that regard. But what we're thinking about is that if there's no second request, that you could see close somewhere in the ballpark of 4 to 5 months. If there's a second request, it will take longer.

Right. Okay. But we're somewhere in the summer, as either they tell you to pull it, refile it because they're busy and they can't get to it. It's -- we'll hear something maybe even before the second quarter reporting on that, right, from that?

Yes. I think we can anticipate that. We'll definitely keep everyone posted.

Okay. Where would this reside inside your segment structure?

So I would say the regulated waste piece is easy because it will be its own segment. The secure information destruction piece of the business, figuring out how that gets parsed, part of it recycling, part of it, kind of our other category we have yet to determine, but that will probably be the most likely...

So it's not going into the sustainability segment, for instance? This would be a stand-alone -- you'd have a stand-alone reporting segment?

That's right.

Okay. I assume you had a meeting with the credit agencies and got them all calm and collected of the leverage that's going here, here's the path to get it down?

Our treasurer met with them over the last couple of days. We didn't get preclearance on this because we view it, based on the size of the company, to be a large tuck-in type deal for us, albeit a different space and adjacency, something that we do and know pretty well. And so we gave them a pathway to returning to our target leverage of 2.75 to 3, and we think that, that looks like about 18 months post close. And so all of their releases are out and only slight negative outlook for the transition period is what we're talking about. No fundamental change in...

But they're not put on a watch list or anything? They're just going, we're aware of it, blah, blah, blah?

There's -- S&P, I think, gave a negative watch and Moody's retained. But what I would say is still the strongest ratings in the industry.

Got it. Okay. And then last one. On the synergies, my perception -- people said, how are they possibly going to get -- I said, this isn't actually that hard, I think. There's duplicate public company costs, $60 million. There's two IT systems in Stericycle at the moment that you would get the benefit of closing one of them, that's [ 25 to 30 ]. And then you're the champion of lean SG&A, you, Devina Rankin, and therefore, picking up $45 million off of the base of their $400 million of SG&A is not that hard.

Yes. So you've outlined the good pieces. I would say that we were less focused on duplicate IT systems in the short term with this synergy target for us. It's more about our expectations for internalization. That's the third lever. So I would take out the duplicate IT and replace it with some internalization benefits we expect on the disposal side of the business.

All right. And I'll get to that. But there is a duplicate IT. So theoretically, you would accrue that benefit?

In time. In the diligence processes, what we learned is Cindy, Janet and team have done a great job in this ERP journey, and they've done a whole lot of hard work in a 5-year period. But there's still some work that needs to be done. And so I think it would be premature to be able to predict how much of the duplicate system we could take out, and we'd rather see where we should be making incremental investments in IT in order to stabilize the environment across now the broad organization.

So why don't I talk a little bit about -- because I feel like there's going to be some overlapping synergies. So your next question, I think I'm going to probably touch on that piece that she is touching on. But why don't we -- because I think there's going to be a lot of interest in what the strategic...

Great. That was going to be the next piece...

I'm going to direct the...

Yes, no, I know. You walked up to me at WasteExpo and you said, can we throw these questions and start all over? So I had to basically wing it.

So I think -- let me kind of say this about the strategic perspective of this deal. First of all, we've been interested in this, Michael, since probably a decade ago. But a decade ago, it was a bet-the-company type deal, right? I mean, $13 billion was, I think, their market cap, ours was $18 billion. So today, when we looked at it, it's basically the size of -- we have [ 16 ] geographic areas, it's the size of one of our biggest geographic areas. And we look at it as a collection and disposal business. That's what it is at its core, it's a collect and disposal business discrete that. They collect material, we collect material. They dispose of material, we dispose of material. They dispatch a truck in the morning, we dispatch trucks in the morning. And when we looked at what we are really good at, we're really good at collection and disposal. You mentioned that Devina is really good at running a big business in a lean way. So we looked at their operations and said, okay, their operating cost as a percent of revenue and again, not a hugely dissimilar business here, is 64-ish percent. Ours is now 60%. And you've heard us talk about it for the last couple of quarters, John Morris, really doing a great job of squeezing efficiencies out. We spent $300 million on technology, working on how do we become more efficient. And so it's all been a routing and logistics exercise. They are -- they have a huge routing and logistics network, 5,200 routes, I think. At the same time, their SG&A, when you look at the forecast for 2024, it is 22%; ours is approaching 9%. So there's -- so when you think about synergies, there's a pretty big opportunity for synergies there to bring what we do well, which is operations, efficiencies, routing and logistics and then running the business in a lean manner at the SG&A line. So a lot of opportunity there. And then I look at the growth trajectory over a 10-year period. And the medical services business, and this is not us saying, this, this is a third-party saying this, is projected to grow at somewhere in the neighborhood of 5% to 6%. That's the volume side of medical services. Not a surprise to anybody in the room. The U.S. average American has aged 10 years in the last 40. We're getting older, and the replacement rate is like 1.7% or 1.7 right now. So we're not replacing, we're getting older. If you were to ask me what business do I want to be in right now, I want to be in a medical business of some kind because it's only getting bigger. And our business, by the way, solid waste, if I think about volume over the next decade is going to grow at probably 1% to 2%.

And what percent of your solid waste business services the health care industry? I mean...

What percent of our solid waste services in health care -- it's small. I mean...

You're under -- my statement would be you're under represented...

I can give you a little color there. When we look at the opportunity, we thought about it in terms of actually getting our presence in the medical solid waste space up to par with what we have as far as share in some of the other segments like retail, like commercial property and so forth. And we were maybe at half of -- in the medical waste businesses, in the health care business that we are in some of those other segments. So we can just actually jump up halfway there. We can create a tremendous amount of cross-selling synergies.

And I think cross-selling is an important aspect of this because...

This is a bundling conversation...

Well, look, yes, I don't really like the word bundling. I mean, I think cross-selling is a better -- it's semantics, I guess. So -- but I'll give you an example. I was getting my annual physical a couple of weeks ago, and there's a Stericycle can at this doctor's office, and there's a gray solid waste can that's not us. And so there are a number of large hospitals -- by the way, Rob can talk about the national accounts side of this, but there's a number of large hospitals where they are, and we're not. There's also some places where we are and they aren't. So there's certainly an opportunity there to cross-sell. But I think the trajectory was important to us. The fact that they are running a collection and disposal business, I don't know how many sites, for example, in Houston, they have. We're building a brand-new hauling company that will have lots of extra capacity. There's no reason we couldn't run Stericycle trucks out of that hauling company. I mean, it's...

So in Stericycle's $1.5 billion domestic revenues, there's $200 million of it is the solid waste recycling revenue, health care hazardous waste and regulated medical waste. Cross-sell, acquiesce to the cross-sell. That's -- that to me is the potential. And then it's back to how many customers do you have that's a solid waste hospital. It's more probably hospitals because the doctor's office is probably -- unless it's stand-alone, it's an office building, and that's a different...

I think it's two handfuls of things. It certainly is cross-selling. That's an opportunity. It's taking operating costs down significantly. I mean they're 400...

Which is their story anyway, you bought into their story, that you had got this in a position...

I mean, in SG&A, I mean, they're going to spend, according to their projection for 2024, almost $600 million in SG&A. And we're going to spend $1.9 billion. I mean, there are [ 22 or 9 ]. There's a huge opportunity there. We only put 300 basis points in the synergy projection. So the growth trajectory, the fact that their capital dependency is much lower than ours...

5%, 6%...

5%, we're 10%. Landfills are expensive. And similarly, on the maintenance and repair side, it is a lot more expensive to maintain a front loader with all the hydraulics on it, the complexity of it, than it is to maintain a box truck.

So they lease everything. I would think that's another synergy eventually, is as you get to you own it, it's a slow process. You can't do it overnight...

Exactly. There will be a time line. It will be diligent but at the end of the day, their balance sheet management was one of the things that played into that decision for them. And we have the opportunity with the strength of our balance sheet to use our own capital dollars more efficiently.

The other thing, Michael, that I think Cindy and Janet have done a really nice job with over the last few years is I mentioned that we've been interested in them for 10 years. Part of the problem was the size. But part of the problem was they had some things that we didn't want. We didn't want Romania or Brazil or Argentina. Nothing wrong with those countries, but we didn't want to operate there. And so they've cleaned that all up. I mean when Cindy came in 5 years ago, she was charged with in part, doing that and in part, rolling out the RP. And they're right at the finish line on the RP. And Cindy has done a nice job of moving out a lot of the portfolio that they did...

Michael, one element on the cross-selling before we depart too far afield from there that we didn't mention explicitly, but it's an important thing for everybody to consider, is that what that will allow is broadening our suite of services. Entering that space is going to allow us to provide obviously more services, but also from one service provider, one that is in our national accounts, for example, which strategic accounts, sustainability and environmental services. We enjoy a very good reputation of actually providing not only the service itself, but sustainability services, how to reduce your waste, the platform in which we report is very well regarded. And so there's a desire from the customer base to actually receive that. I would point you to the fact that our strategic accounts business has grown at a CAGR of double digits over the last 3 years. And there's a lot of similarities between that and what a large hospital network, for example, is going to want see.

Yes. Well, going back to there's solid waste, there's health recycling, there's health care, hazardous waste, there's the medical waste. And then you give them all kinds of documentation on what am I doing with all this so that they can stand up in front of a board of trustees and go blah-blah-blah, right? I mean that to me is -- I get the underlying strategy thing. So I do -- I want to pull back one second because this is a you and you kind of thing. I think of the white board room, wherever it is in Houston, this is my words, there's a deployment of capital sort of conversation and you're going above average returns. Whatever going to do, we want above average returns, sustainable recurring growth at good IRRs, and you want to sustain a compounded at a -- high-quality compounded free cash flow growth. But that's a high-level driver of choices. A few years ago, you made choices about that and went accelerate MRF spending to capture those values, accelerated through R&D spending for all the obvious reasons. Have to ask the question, are you in fact monetizing part of that?

Monetizing part of RNG?

Yes.

What we've said 10 times is it's an option for us. I mean, right now...

You've seen the articles I assume...

Well, sure, I've seen the articles. I would tell you this, one of the articles had a $3 billion number in there for $500 million in EBITDA. I was kind of offended that they would think I would sell the business for $3 billion. So look, it's an option for us, but right now, we're focused on building the 20 plants out, 80% of the CapEx will be spent on those by the end of the year. We'll have 5 plants opening this year. One has already opened, 4 more will open. So right now, the focus is let's build out these 20 plants. If somebody beat me over the head with a checkbook enough, look, I would listen. But for now, we're focused on building out the plants. We think it's a great business.

So Michael, it's not an either-or there, right?

But you could own part of it. I mean you can still piece -- you take out some of your equity, things like that. It's -- that's the way to think about...

Potentially. There's a whole slate of probabilities and possibilities there. But what I'll say too is that it's not an either-or there. It's also not an either-or with respect to the growth of our solid waste business, right? I mean, we can -- we're committed to that. It's good business. We have a long runway to go in extracting costs there. All our investments on technology are beginning to seep through. You can see what our forecasted margins for the year are, and that's all a result of that. So we're going to continue to grow not only organically but inorganically in the solid core waste...

Well, I think too, Michael, it's important to -- for everybody to hear this. We're not changing what we're doing on the solid waste side or the sustainability -- this acquisition doesn't -- isn't an either-or. It's an and basically. We're still doing the RNG business. We're still investing in tuck-in acquisitions. So we said, I think, $100 million to $200 million, and we'll still be there. So I mean, it doesn't change what we're doing. I think there was some concern that, uh-oh, is this -- are you changing directions? This is adding a line of business, just like the industrial line of business or the commercial line of business. And now this is the medical waste...

And that's where I was going with us. So there's this capital allocation aspect of our strategy, and then there's areas where we are going and we talked about that. We've talked about MRF sustainability. This is a natural extension. I think there's potentially a natural extension towards the industrial waste market as well. You have huge...

So really good points. That's a really good point. We've talked about that, and nothing is built in about this, and -- but there is the potential to use these incinerators. As you know, we've been in the incinerator business in the past. And so there is the potential to use this in the industrial space as well, not just the medical waste space.

Right. And/or I've got to believe you've got, I don't know, $3 billion of solid waste revenue that's a manufacturing customer that has a nonsolid waste stream as well, and they've got to be coming at you going, I'd really like to consolidate service providers. And therefore, that's another one of these optionalities, Rafa, on your whiteboard as you stepped into this strategy role. I would assume that's a way to think about it?

Yes. Absolutely. And we -- look, it's important to call out that we already have one of the top industrial and hazardous waste businesses in the country, right? So this is additive to that. We have 4 hazardous waste landfills. We have deep well injection. So it just broadens the suite of services that we are able...

It's such a tiny little business inside $22 billion, and it's hard to -- but you do. Alabama and Kettleman Hills are extraordinarily well positioned geographically. You just -- if you added infrastructure around it, it's amazing what you might redirect at you. So you're not buying just a medical waste business, you're also getting a document destruction business. And Jim, I went looking for when -- because you said it in a public forum a long time ago. And I'm not holding you accountable to it, I'm just saying you said it, it was you didn't necessarily understand the shredding business 7, 8 years ago. What's changed? How did you get comfortable about that business?

8 years into the job, I guess, actually. No, I mean, look, I think the way we view it, and Rafa, you can probably touch on this more than I can, but I mean it's a sustainability business. 8 years ago, we really weren't -- while we were in the recycling business, we really hadn't kind of separated out sustainability as being a strategic imperative. And in the last 4 years, we've put Tara Hemmer into a role over sustainability. And so we've really -- and obviously, the RNG business is a relatively new development in that space as well. So I think as we look at the shredded business, it is -- it does dovetail nicely with our recycling business. It's essentially a high-grade paper recycling business with a few more kind of customer requirements. But I think we have the ability to -- when we think about synergies, to squeeze synergies there as well. I would tell you, when we talk to Brent Bell, and you know Brent, our Head of our Recycling. And Brent -- we said, Brent, what do you think about this? Brent, by the way, is the right guy to ask, not me, because he knows a lot more about it than I do. And Brent was very excited about it. It felt like this has real opportunity inside of his business. As you know, we're spending over $1 billion, not just on R&D, but also on rebuilding these recycled -- which gives us the ability to potentially run shredded material through there. It also has the same opportunities on the collection and disposal side or particularly the collection side of consolidating facilities. I don't know how many facilities they have in certain cities, and we'll have to look at that. But running a shredded truck out of a WM facility makes a lot of sense.

Well, they're all box trucks.

A little more on that point. So the volumes associated with high-grade office paper and so forth, have seen a reduction over time over the last kind of 5 years. Actually, what we're seeing now is that they've stabilized post pandemic. And so now it's a good moment to actually continue the journey that Stericycle has begun on fee-for-service as opposed to being heavily dependent on the commodity price. They've done a great job there. We feel like we actually have a lot of experience having taken our own recycling business. into a fee-for-service model, so there's opportunity there. It's also a really good opportunity to continue to actually cross-sell there because there's opportunities for cardboard and other recyclable materials that we can leverage.

Well, so just to be clear, so it's domestically about $800 million revenues, international is about $100 million. And only 10% or 12% of that is actually the paper sale. It is -- they do get a -- but it's transaction-based. So is it -- is your analysis of this slowing over time? But can you flip that to a service-based model like your commercial collection? So it doesn't matter whether I pick you up on Tuesday or I pick you up on Thursday, I'm getting paid?

That's exactly the goal, Michael.

Okay. And then it's a $4 billion industry, they're roughly 20%, Iron Mountain is probably about 15%. So there's a lot of independence that's never really been consolidated. So is that an option as well as there's the density aspect of stops just like in commercial...

Certainly, an opportunity to consolidate. But I would tell you that our first order of business is really to sort of optimize. And just as a reminder, that doesn't just mean that we come in and we take out routes because our routes are compatible. That's actually not the case. We just talked about the difference in the trucks and so forth. But the technology that we're deploying across our own organization is transferable very nicely to the routing and logistics platforms that Stericycle has. And then with that, we can continue -- we can begin to optimize dynamically the efficiency of those routes. And so there's a lot of lowering the cost to serve that has to happen. That enables the conversation about fee-for-service to develop.

Right. And then when they bought it, that 25% of their doctor, dentist, veterinary clinic side of the model, you shred it for their shredding, and they never changed that. I mean that was supposed to be part of it. So there's -- that's the cross-sell opportunity of that. And I'm not saying it's going to be 100%, but it ought to move. And then -- they sell like 6 services into a medical waste customer and they're at 1.2 average services. So that's another opportunity.

Well, I do think you're touching on a really important point, which is that cross-selling piece, whatever you want to call it. Republic talked a lot about that with their acquisition of US Ecology. And rightly so, I mean, it was a really important part of that acquisition. This is a really important part of this acquisition for us. And Rafa's talked about it, we've all talked about it. I think it was lost a little bit maybe in the press release. It's hard to communicate on a piece of paper. So -- but that is a very important part. In addition to all the other things we've talked about, the cross-selling opportunity between these businesses is really critical. I gave the example of being in a hospital, that there's places where we are and they aren't. And I gave the example of a place where they are and we are, but there's places where we are, they aren't. And all of that enables cross-selling opportunities. And then with the industrial piece that Rafa mentioned, you mentioned, I mean, there's an opportunity there as well to cross-sell, not just to grow the...

And if Stericycle, which is a medical waste company, can manage to get $200 million of revenues out of the $1.5 billion is the -- my word, bundling, bundling solid waste, recycling, health care, hazardous waste, I can't imagine what your machine could do around that. And therefore, against your $22 billion, I get you're not putting a number out there, and it would be guesstimating, but I've got to believe it's better than $200 million incrementally. So it would be a pretty interesting opportunity.

I think the thing for us when we looked at this opportunity, we've always talked about and you framed it on our capital allocation priorities. We think about things in terms of return on invested capital and the IRR that we see on this business outpaces that of the ADS acquisition that we did. And we all know the success that WM created with ADS acquisition. So what we're excited about is that this is a growth platform, a growth industry, a growth space. And we think there's momentum with all of the hard work that the existing leadership team has done in being able to capture that and move it forward with our expertise. And as a result, the IRR on this will exceed the IRR on the ADS acquisition by probably 150 basis points.

And ADS now sits at what type of an IRR?

We're -- I would say our final view of the IRR of that was high single digits.

Okay. So this is going to be low double digits...

Low double digits...

All right. February 23, you all shared with the market, you thought you could compound free cash flow at 5% to 7%. You've been doing better than that because of these incremental investments in the MRFs and the recycling and the RNG and the like in your own -- and then the self-help. You've got that pop from that digital utilization story. But that does have a runway and it anniversaries and thus, those things settle. My impression of this, if we're really going to buy into -- they were going to have a compound EBITDA at 15% a year for 5 or 6 years, their model and convert that at 50% to 60% free cash, that this helps lengthen you're -- better than your 5% to 7%. Is that the right conclusion?

I think Jim also made the point on their capital efficiency. It's a more capital-efficient business than our business. So whether it's driving more of their revenue dollars to operating cash or the capital efficiency gains, we do think that our fundamental commitment to 5% to 7% annual growth in free cash flow should be extended with this acquisition, particularly when you think about the fact that our expectations for synergy realization and projecting our returns on this business, they're not a traditional 12-month synergy capture. It's going to take us longer to get these synergies than a traditional solid waste acquisition. So that's one of the things that, for us, speaks to that longer time horizon of being able to capture 5% to 7%.

To that point, Michael, you used the word probably for expedience's sake, bought into their long-range plan. We actually diligenced their long-range plan. And there's some confidence there, right, if they can obtain it, and we can help accelerate potentially what they're doing.

Right. Yes. I wasn't being pejorative. I meant they had a plan and you've come away going, we believe the plan through your own due diligence, I get that. But it's compounding at a rate of growth that's better than the garbage is compounding. And therefore, it should support sustaining -- you're actually outpacing your own target of 5% to 7% at the moment. And my -- our quick modeling is it will help lengthen you continue to outpace 5% to 7%.

Well, to Rafa's point, yes, we did diligence that. And we like the fact that they have that, and we don't disagree with it. But it doesn't factor in a lot of what we bring to the table. So that's part of the beauty this. Revenue and cost. I mean their number for SG&A, as I mentioned, 22% is their 2024 number. And they had a reduction in, I think, in March and -- yes. So they've been going through this process. So I think there's some opportunity beyond what we diligenced. We like the process that they've been going through. They have not -- because they've been -- they've had a finite bucket of dollars to spend on technology, for example, they've been spending it on the ERP, which they should be. But they haven't had the ability to spend $300 million on routing and logistics systems that we have. So we bring that to them.

Yes. Do you keep the SAP for continuity purposes? It just seems like that would be just a...

Yes. Yes.

I don't think we try and convert that over to ours...

Yes, yes. That much is...

There's a reason we didn't try and implement SAP in our own -- yes. Exactly. So we're impressed with the work that they've done, and we'll keep the platform they've built.

Right. Yes. And plus, why disrupt the culture at this point?

Absolutely.

So they have $450 million that's outside of the United States, not in Canada, so outside of North America. Thoughts about what you would do with that?

I think that the way to think about that is that was not core to the strategic significance of the acquisition, but it certainly doesn't hurt to have a nice conservative perch from which to look at the Western European market and see what that might yield in the future.

So just to be very clear, so everybody, run out of here and go, oh my goodness, Waste Management is going to go buying garbage businesses in Europe. That's not your message. It's just you'll take -- you'll look at it and figure out whether you're the right owner?

Yes, absolutely. Michael, I think one of the things that I heard the final comments with Waste Connections, and you brought up circular economy and sustainability. We all know that the circular economy and sustainability front in Europe is, in some respects, ahead of what we've done in North America. And our recycling team has been exceptionally well connected intentionally with what's happening in the part of Europe that Stericycle is operating within. And so if there's anything that just continues our presence in that market in order to accelerate our focus on being the best recycler and the best solid waste company that can take the waste and the recycled content that we all generate and create maximum value for that in a circular economy, I think it could be a nice synergy that we're not even considering in terms of what brought value from a Stericycle transaction.

Yes. Well, I will confess in my new role starting on Monday, I hope to change the narrative towards more circular because I think it's a narrative that you all as an industry and as the leader in size, you control a feedstock, and we ought to -- and you're in a position to influence behavior around like-for-like, and circular to me is like-for-like.

And I think on the international piece, Rafa said it well. I mean it gives us a nice place to kind of view Western Europe. But I would also say what they would -- what they'll have left when this deal eventually closes doesn't scare us. There were a couple that would have scared us.

Brazil is pretty frightening.

And I suspect there's about $100 million of shredded that's just in like 9 countries that probably is a better owner. But the U.K., Ireland business, it's a nice business. It's about $300 million in revenues. And Spain and Portugal is a little -- maybe you keep it, maybe you don't, but it's -- the U.K., Ireland is a nice business. And they've made that investment in the incinerator, so it's fully modernized to address what's happening...

That's our as well.

Yes...

We're at the end of our time. I want to thank you very much for sharing...

I hope it was helpful.