FEI Company (NASDAQ:FEIC) Q4 2015 Earnings Conference Call - Final Transcript

Greetings and welcome to the FEI Company Fourth-Quarter Earnings Conference Call. (Operator Instructions) I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Jason Willey, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you operator, and good afternoon everyone. As the operator said, I am Jason Willey, FEI's Senior Director of Investor Relations. With me today at our headquarters today in Oregon are Don Kania, our President and CEO, and Tony Trunzo, EVP and CFO. We have again posted slides under Events and Presentations in the Investor Relations portion of our website.

(Forward-Looking Cautionary Statements)

This call is the property of FEI Company. It will be archived in the Investor Relations section of our corporate website at www.fei.com. I will now turn the call over to Tony to go through the financials. Don will then discuss our business and outlook. We will then be glad to take your questions.

Thank you Jason, and good afternoon everyone. We finished 2015 on a strong note with record bookings, revenue, operating margin, and earnings per share in the fourth quarter. Q4 revenue of $273 million included approximately $1 million of revenue from the DCG Systems acquisition that we completed in December. Q4 revenue grew 8.2% organically compared with Q4 last year, as backlog in our Science segment converted to revenue.

Earnings per share of $1.17 in Q4 included $5.3 million of transaction costs and operating expenses associated with the DCG acquisition. In overall, DCG reduced EPS for the quarter by $0.07. Q4 operating margin of 21.4%, which includes a negative 180 basis points impact from DCG also represented a quarterly record. Operating margin and EPS performance in Q4 highlight the earnings leverage inherent in our business.

For the full year 2015 revenue of $930 million was up 2.6% on an organic basis compared with 2014, and GAAP earnings per share grew by 20% to $2.96. GAAP EPS has been impacted by a number of unusual items over the past two years including restructuring costs, the reevaluation of intangible assets, tax benefits and acquisition costs that reduced EPS by $0.50 in 2014 and by $0.43 in 2015. Excluding these unusual items, earnings per share grew by 15% in 2015 and return on equity exceeded 15%.

Science segment, Q4 revenue was $163 million, up 12% on an organic basis compared with last year, driven by record life sciences revenue and improvements in material sciences following a slow start to the year. In the quarter, Science revenue accounted for 60% of total revenue compared with 52% for all of 2015. Our Industry segment reported revenue of $110 million, up 2.8% compared with last year's fourth quarter on an organic basis. Results in this segment were negatively impacted by the timing of migration to next-generation process nodes in our semiconductor business.

Revenue from our three largest semiconductor customers was under 30% of total semiconductor product revenue in Q4, well below the typical range of 40% to 50%. Our global service business performed well again in