Welcome to Johnson Controls Second Quarter 2017 Earnings Call. Your lines have been placed on listen only until the question and answer session. This conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, please disconnect at this time. I will turn the call over to Antonella Franzen, Vice President of Investor Relations.
You may begin.
Good morning, and thank you for joining our conference call to discuss Johnson Controls' 2nd quarter 2017 results. The press release and all related tables issued earlier this morning as well as the conference call slide presentation can be found on the Investor Relations portion of our website at johnsoncontrols.com. With me today are Johnson Controls' Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Alex Molinaroli President and Chief Operating Officer, George Oliver and our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Brian Stief. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that during the course of today's call, we will be providing certain forward looking information. We ask that you view today's press release and read through the forward looking cautionary informational statements that we've included there.
In addition, we will use certain non GAAP measures in our discussions, and we ask that you read through the sections of our press release that address the use of these items. In discussing our results during the call, references to adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBIT margins exclude transaction, integration and separation costs as well as other special items. These metrics are non GAAP measures and are reconciled in the schedules attached to our press release. All comparisons to the prior year are on a combined basis, which excludes the results of Adient and includes the results of Tyco, net of conforming accounting adjustments and recurring purchase accounting. Now let me quickly recap this quarter's results.
Sales of $7,200,000,000 in the quarter increased 3% year over year on a reported basis. Excluding the net impact of FX, M and A and lead pass through pricing, sales grew 2% organically. GAAP loss per share from continuing operations attributable to Johnson Controls ordinary shareholders was $0.16 and included net charges of $0.66 related to special items. These special items were primarily composed of a non cash tax charge related to the announced divestiture of the ScottsafeTee business, transaction, integration and separation costs, as well as restructuring and impairment charges. Adjusting for these special items, non GAAP adjusted diluted earnings per share from continuing operations was $0.50 per share compared to $0.45 in the prior year quarter.
Now, let me turn the call over to Alex.
Thanks, Antonella. Good morning, everyone. So if we start on Slide 5, I'd like to talk about the overview of the results and some of the commitments we've made over the past few months, both at our annual meeting, our investor meeting and then also at our analyst call. So we had strong quarter earnings at 11% year over year growth and is at the top end of the range that we provided you at $0.48 to $0.50 And a lot of that came from our continued focus on our productivity and the integration efforts. If you go back and look at the commitments that we made as an organization, I think that we could be more proud of our employees.
And it both came from productivity driven through our Johnson Controls operating systems initiatives along with the merger synergies. And in fact, we've seen around a $70,000,000 benefit for the quarter, which is accelerating. So we're very pleased with what we're seeing. And I just want to thank our employees. It would be very easy for our employees with all that's going on to not stay focused on the task and we've been able to generate the synergies and the cost savings which will bode well for the future.
It leads me to the organic growth, particularly within buildings. We're starting to see the acceleration of our organic growth, particularly in our field businesses. And once again, that's where we're doing most of our integration efforts. So that's a strong signal to us that we're going to continue to see growth throughout the rest of the year and gives us confidence. I'd really like to also point out and George will go through this in a little more detail, we had really strong strength in our HVAC business, particularly in our light commercial and residential businesses.
We outpaced the market and most of that has to do with launches of new products and the investments that we've seen over the past few years. And we're seeing some stabilization within the legacy Tyco Fire Protection Products businesses and that bodes well for the future also. The other thing that happened within the quarter is some of our strategic portfolio actions. Specifically, we closed the sale of ADT South Africa and we announced the divestiture of Scotts Safety to 3 ms. Both of these are very important as it relates to those projects I mean, those businesses within the legacy Tyco organization.
Being able to sell those assets is important as it relates to the TESARL debt, which as you recall is a $4,000,000,000 debt that was put in place to facilitate the transaction between Johnson Controls and Tyco and accelerating that repayment of the debt is going to be good for us moving forward. Related to that is a share repurchase program of $500,000,000 which is an increase from the previously announced $200,000,000 to $250,000,000 share repurchase program that's already in place. So that takes us up to $750,000,000 for the year for the fiscal year. So the Scotts Safety transaction will not be dilutive. If you go to Page 6, I'll go a high overview of the numbers before I turn it over to George.
If you look at our net sales of 3% reported and organic of 2%, buildings was up 3%, I talked earlier about driven mostly by our field organization and power is off 1% and that was mostly a seasonal view, particularly because of some of the weather and restocking along with strong orders that we received a year ago in China when we first opened our new plant. And from a result standpoint, if you look at the impact of lead, it's pretty important because if you pull out lead, which was up significantly for the quarter, we had a 7% increase excluding both foreign exchange and lead. And it was a significant impact to our bottom line, I mean to our top line and also impacted our margin. So if you adjust for that, we had a 7% increase in earnings driven by real strong performance in our Power Solutions business. And that leads us to the 60 basis points improvements in overall margins.
The integration of our buildings business as it accelerates and we get more and more confidence, we're going to see the bottom line continue to improve. And now that we're starting to see the organic growth within our buildings business, it gives us an awful lot of confidence to tighten our guidance for the year, which Brian will talk about to 13% to 16% range later in the presentation. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to George. He'll talk about the merger activity and then also some more specifics around
the business performance. Thanks, Alex, and good morning, everyone. Before I get into a detailed review of the businesses, let me start with a quick integration update on Slide 7. Over the last few months, the Buildings organization has gone through an impressive amount of change and we've made a considerable amount of progress towards aligning the new leadership structure in the most optimal way possible with a focus on accountability for growth. We now have the management teams of our operational structure substantially in place and will now focus on building out the team structure over the next several months.
Another area we've discussed with you is the need to substantially pay down the merger related TSRO debt. And as Alex referred to earlier, with the announced divestiture of Scottsafety and sale of ADT South Africa, we will be able to make a considerable reduction to the $4,000,000,000 of debt. This will enable us to move more quickly on some of the heavier lifting restructuring and synergy actions. I wanted to take a minute to thank the team and the thousands of employees of both Scottsafety and ADT South Africa. I've had the pleasure of being involved with both of these businesses for over a decade, including my tenure as President of the Tyco Global Products segment.
It's never easy to part with such great leaders and colleagues, but I am confident they are in good hands and that both businesses will continue to be successful in the future. Before I get into the progress we made on the cost side, I thought I'd highlight a couple of key cross selling wins in the Q2. We had a major win in the New England region to supply an array of building solutions in a new distribution hub being built by 1 of our large airfreight delivery customers. In this situation, our legacy Simplex Granite sales team leveraged their strong relationships in the region to provide a lead to a legacy Johnson Controls team. Working together, the 2 teams were able to secure contracts for the fire alarm system, as well as the HVAC and building control system.
In the institutional space, a legacy Johnson Controls account team, in coordination with the sales teams across Simplex Grinnell and Tyco Integrated Security submitted a joint bid for a fully integrated solution, multi phase expansion project at a major university in Texas. As a result, we were awarded the contract for the first phase, providing our Amedisys building automation system, York Air Handling Units, Simplex fire alarm system, as well as access control and video surveillance. Not only is this phase a great win, we're well positioned for the next phases of the project. Both wins are great examples of how our teams are coming together to collaborate and provide integrated solutions that solve more complex customer problems. Turning now to the cost synergy side, we continue to run ahead of plan in Q2, delivering roughly $70,000,000 or about $0.06 in year over year savings.
This is roughly $20,000,000 in incremental savings over last quarter and is slightly ahead of our internal targets. Given the progress we've made year to date, we now expect to achieve synergy and productivity savings at the high end of the $250,000,000 to $300,000,000 range I provided to you in December. With roughly $0.11 achieved through the first half, we now expect $0.07 in the 3rd quarter and $0.09 in the 4th quarter, totaling around $0.27 in savings for the full year. As I mentioned last quarter, the integration of 2 large organizations requires a lot of heavy lifting, commitment and leadership. Not all decisions are easy, but we have a strong team leading the process, ensuring we execute on decisions made and we move forward to the next step.
Both the integration team and the businesses continue to be guided around 4 main objectives, grow, integrate, change and operate. We are making great progress and I couldn't be more proud of how the teams have come together and what they have accomplished over these past 8 months as a combined company. I look forward to keeping you updated on our continued success. Let's turn now to a review of the businesses, starting with Building Technologies and Solutions on Slide 8. On a reported basis, building sales grew 1% over the prior year to $5,500,000,000 in the quarter as 3% organic growth was partially offset by the impact of FX and net M and A activity.
The 3% organic growth was led by solid growth in our field businesses. When you look at the field side of the business, which represents about 65% to 70% of total building sales, organic growth was up 4% with underlying growth across most regions led by strong growth of over 3% in North America. When we look at the pieces within our field business, we saw another strong quarter of organic growth in our applied HVAC business, which continued to grow in the mid single digit range. Fire and Security, the legacy Tyco installation and service businesses grew in the low single digit range, led by mid single digit growth in North America. Some of the areas within our field businesses that put pressure on our organic growth rate in the Q1 stabilized in the Q2, including both performance contracting and industrial refrigeration.
Looking now at our products business, which represents the remaining 30% to 35% of buildings. Sales declined just under 1% organically year over year, a sequential improvement from the 3% decline we saw last quarter. We continue to see very strong growth in our residential and light commercial HVAC business, which grew at a high teens rate organically, benefiting by a significant amount of new product launches, something we expect will continue into 2018. The strength in U. S.
Residential and light commercial HVAC was more than offset by a mid single digit decline in our Hitachi business simply related to the timing of shipments, which we will see come through in the Q3. Additionally, our Fire and Security product businesses are stabilizing. The mid single digit year over year decline we saw in the Q1 has moderated to a 1% organic decline in the 2nd quarter. On a sequential basis, fire and security product sales are growing. We've seen encouraging signs that the short cycle industrial markets have bottomed and we would anticipate some inflection across the businesses in the second half.
Buildings EBITDA declined 1% year over year to $628,000,000 The segment margin decreased 30 basis points year over year to 11.3 percent as strong synergy and productivity savings were more than offset by planned incremental product and channel investments as well as mix during the quarter. Turning to orders and backlog on Slide 9. Total buildings orders increased 2% year over year organically, driven by a 3% increase in field orders, partially offset by a 1% decline in our quick turn product orders, which as I mentioned earlier was already felt within our product sales growth in the quarter given the book and ship nature of that business. In terms of order activity, we saw continued momentum in the U. S.
Market with stable growth in non residential construction verticals year over year. We had a strong quarter of order activity with solid growth in our commercial and institutional verticals. As we have discussed before, order growth in our field business is lumpy and can be impacted by the timing of large projects. The legacy Tyco business included a very large order in the prior year, which impacted the year over year comparison in Tyco orders by 3 percentage points. Backlog of $8,300,000,000 increased 6% year over year, excluding the impact of foreign exchange and M
and A.
In summary, we continue to make significant strides in improving the fundamentals of the business. We are streamlining the organization, investing in our product and service innovation, and driving commercial excellence. As a result of these initiatives, coupled with our order pipeline and backlog, we are well positioned for increased growth in the second half of this fiscal year as well as strong margin expansion. Turning to Power Solutions on Slide 10. Sales increased 7% year over year on a reported basis to $1,700,000,000 driven by the impact of lead pass through, which benefited Power's top line by roughly 8 percentage points.
Organic sales were down 1%, driven by warmer weather in both North America and China, which negatively impacted aftermarket demand. In addition, we had a tough prior year comparison in China associated with the timing of the initial volume build in our Chongqing plant. Overall, total global unit shipments decreased 3% year over year, driven by aftermarket shipments, which declined 3%. Global start stop shipments continued to expand with a 36% increase year over year, including another quarter of significant growth in China and the Americas. Power Solutions segment EBITDA of $303,000,000 increased 7% on a reported basis or 12% excluding foreign currency.
Power's margin expanded 10 basis points year over year on a reported basis, including a 220 basis point headwind from the impact of higher lead cost. Underlying margins, excluding the impact of lead, increased 230 basis points year over year, driven by productivity benefits as well as favorable product mix, primarily related to higher start stop battery shipments. Now let me turn the call over to Brian to walk through corporate and the consolidated financial details of the quarter as well as our outlook for the Q3 and remainder of the year.
Thanks, George, and good morning, everyone. Turning to Slide 11. As you know, beginning in the Q1, we're now reporting corporate as a standalone segment. And for the Q2, corporate expense was $2,000,000 lower than last year. And as expected, I think we talked during the Q1 call that there was going to be a sequentially higher Q2 corporate costs than Q1 and that really related primarily to some indirect tax items and some IT related costs.
Having said that, for the full year, we now expect corporate expenses will likely fall at the lower end of our $480,000,000 to $500,000,000 range that we provided at Analyst Day. Moving on to Slide 12, as you saw in our release and as Antonella mentioned, our Q2 results do include a number of large items again this quarter that we are treating as special non GAAP adjustments. And I would just like to touch on those for a second. The first item relates to our ongoing transaction and separation costs that was roughly $138,000,000 We had some restructuring and impairment charges in the quarter of $99,000,000 about 2 thirds of that related to severance We had some mark to market pension and some non recurring purchase accounting adjustments that aggregated $35,000,000 And then the large item in the quarter was about a $457,000,000 non cash tax charge related to the announced divestiture of Scotts Safety. And I would just give you a reminder here that that is a non cash book charge and the actual cash tax charge when that transaction closes later in 2017, we still believe that will be in the range of $50,000,000 I'll exclude those items as I go through my comments, but those items aggregated $0.66 a share for the quarter.
So turning to the highlights on Slide 12. Overall Q2 sales were up 3 percent to $7,200,000,000 And if you exclude the impact of FX, lead and M and A, organic sales were up 2% versus last year. And as George mentioned, backlog year over year is up 6% which bodes well for some momentum going into the second half here. If you look at gross margin of 31%, it was down 40 basis points for the year that was primarily or for the quarter that was primarily driven by higher lead prices and some unfavorable buildings mix that George referenced and that was offset by leverage on higher volumes as well as JCLS productivity savings we saw come through in Q2. SG and A levels were comparable to the prior year up about 1% as product channel and sales force investments were substantially offset by cost synergies.
Equity income of $53,000,000 was 33% higher than a year ago and that was primarily due to strong performance in our Hitachi and Power Solutions non consolidated JVs. For the quarter, EBIT was up 5% with the overall EBIT margins up to 9.8%, which is 20 basis points positive versus 2016, which is in line with our expectations. And if you exclude foreign exchange and lead, these margins were up 60 basis points year over year. Turning to Slide 13, net financing charges of $116,000,000 in the quarter were slightly higher than last year due to higher debt levels. And as I think most of you know, we did in the latter part of the second quarter issue $500,000,000 worth of U.
S. Notes and $1,000,000,000 of euro notes in connection with some of the other funding needs we have for the rest of the year. Excluding special items, our effective tax rate of 15% continues to compare favorably to our prior year rate of 17% and we did see a drop in income from attributable to non controlling interest down about $11,000,000 compared to last year And that really just relates to the timing of the Hitachi entities as well as some underlying tax rates in those entities. So overall, we had a solid second quarter, which was at the high end of our guidance at $0.50 which was up 11% versus the $0.45 a year ago. Turning to Slide 14, just a quick Q2 EPS waterfall.
Relative to last year, you can see we had a $0.06 benefit related to cost synergies and productivity savings in the quarter, which was slightly better than the $0.05 expectation we had on our call at the end of the Q1. Also, we saw the benefit of reduced intangible asset amortization associated with the sale of the Scott Safety business and treating that now as an asset held for sale and there was a $0.01 benefit related to our tax rate. Offsetting these items were incremental product and channel in our businesses of $0.02 and a $0.01 impact to foreign currency. Turning to Slide 15 on free cash flow, As we did at the end of the Q1, because of the significance of the one off items that we have and the choppiness in free cash flow during fiscal 'seventeen, we wanted to provide a reconciliation for you of the reported cash flow to adjusted cash flow. And you can see this quarter, we had some about $100,000,000 of tax payments and $100,000,000 of our ongoing integration and transaction costs.
Our 2nd quarter adjusted free cash flow was a solid $300,000,000 and we continue to target adjusted free cash flow conversion of around 80% for the year. Moving to our balance sheet on Slide 16. We saw net debt to capital ratio pretty consistent at around 40%. And as I mentioned earlier, during the quarter, we did issue about $1,600,000,000 of fixed rate long term debt, dollars 500,000,000 in the U. S.
At a rate of 4.5 percent €1,000,000,000 at 1%. These proceeds were used to repay outstanding debt, which is primarily commercial paper and the proceeds will also be used for general corporate purposes. The financing costs in the second half of the year will be higher than our first half given the increased debt levels as well as the generally higher interest rate environment as we move into the second half. In the Q2, as Alex mentioned, we also increased the original share repurchase program that we had of $200,000,000 to $250,000,000 dollars by $500,000,000 bringing the total for fiscal 'seventeen up to around $750,000,000 Turning to Slide 17, just touching on a couple of things here noteworthy as it relates to divestitures. We've talked already about the Scotts Safety sale to 3 ms and I've got a specific slide that I'll go through some of the specifics on that.
And additionally, we completed the sale of ADT South Africa for about 130,000,000 dollars 2nd in line with our expectations, we will continue to have certain special items in the second half of the year along the lines of those listed on the slide. And then the final thing I wanted to point out is we talked about in the Q1 call, the reorganization that was taking place at our buildings business, which will result in a new segment reporting structure for the company. And given some of the complexities associated with the IT requirements to get really the underlying plumbing, if you will, in place to report in our new segments. We will now be doing that in the Q4 and at the same time we announce our year end earnings, we will provide the quarterly results on the new reportable segment basis for fiscal 'seventeen. So you've got that information for comparability as you move into fiscal 'eighteen.
So let's talk a little bit on Slide 18 about the Scottsafe divestiture. $2,000,000,000 purchase price, I think as you know, is based on a 13 times trailing EBITDA multiple and we still believe the net proceeds will be in the $1,800,000,000 to $1,900,000,000 range. If you take that plus the $130,000,000 of proceeds from the ADT South Africa sale plus the cash flow that we expect from the Tyco business in fiscal 'seventeen, we will have paid down the $4,000,000,000 of TESARO related debt at probably the $2,400,000,000 to $2,500,000,000 level. So we're going to end up after we get the proceeds from the Scott sale. So by the end of calendar 'seventeen, say, we're going to probably be down to 1,500,000,000 dollars in TSRO debt outstanding.
So real positive development there. As it relates to the loss of the Scott EBIT, which is $0.07 dilutive, that is going to be more than offset by the interest savings and the pay down of the TESARL debt, as well as the share repurchases that we've talked about. Moving to Slide 19, we've got a waterfall again here of EPS guidance for Q3. And just as a reminder, and we've talked about this before, but we're really now entering the second half of this year, which is our seasonally higher earnings period. And I guess think in terms of probably 40% in the first half and 60% in the second half.
Our guidance for Q3 is $0.70 to $0.73 which represents a 15% to 20% improvement year over year. And again, that excludes some of the special items that we talked about previously. As far as compared to fiscal 'sixteen Q3, you can see in the waterfall that our growth will be driven by $0.07 of cost and productivity savings. Volume and mix will deliver $0.03 and the lower tax rate will deliver $0.02 year on year. And then the headwinds that we have going into Q3 would be the continued investments that we make in our business for $0.01 And we also have FX that's a bit of a headwind for us estimated at a cent as well.
So moving to Slide 20, full year guidance, a couple of highlights before we talk about full year guidance. We are taking our organic growth for the full year down from 2.5% to 4.5%, which is our original guidance. We are now taking that to approximately 3%. Having said that, we still are going to reconfirm our margins at 80 basis points to 110 basis points. And then the other thing I would just comment on is as we talk through the amortization benefit we're getting for the held for sale accounting for the Scott business, that is essentially being offset by an increase in net financing costs for the quarter.
So those 2 kind of neutralize each other. So with all of that, we've tightened the range for our full year EPS guidance from $2.60 to $2.75 down to 2 60 to 268 and that still represents a 13% to 16% increase year over year. So with that, Antonella, we can open it up for questions.
Great. Thanks, Brian. Operator, if you could please open up the line for questions.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session of today's conference. Our first question comes from Gautam Khane from Cowen and Company. Your line is now open.
Yes, thanks. Good morning, guys.
Good morning. Good morning. Good morning.
So just on the second half lock at Buildings, clearly we need fairly substantial margin improvement, certainly north of 100 basis points at Lux. Can you talk about some of the drivers? I mean, obviously, there's volume leverage. You have lower investment sequentially in Q3. But maybe comment on the profile of the backlog you've been booking.
Is that actually accretive to the mix or to the margins that you're currently showing? And maybe talk a little bit about some of these projects that you've been booking and whether those are coming in at above segment average margin or any color you can give on why we should have confidence in the second half margin ramp at Buildings? Thanks.
So I'm going to turn this over to George because he's into the details. But just to give you a sense for the back half of the year, particularly with legacy Johnson Controls, what I would tell you is that the leverage on the volume is going to be the biggest single thing, but you also have to remember particularly in legacy Johnson Controls, the HVAC business itself is the service business is high margin and the volumes there are much different than they are in the winter season. So you're going to get 2 things that are going to be incremental. George could talk about the backlog. I don't think there is anything significantly different about the backlog, but there is going to be a lot more volume running through there.
Yes, Gautam. I think to understand the 3rd Q4, I think we need to drill into the 2nd quarter and then I will walk you through what you can expect here in the 3rd Q4. So in the second quarter, the guidance we provided was for a modest increase in the margin rate in the 2nd quarter. And so what happened was, when you look at the margin that came through, we are getting tremendous productivity and cost savings as it relates with the synergies that's coming through, that's 50 basis points. The investments that we are making, about 30 basis points and when you drill into that, I would tell you across the board, we are getting great traction with those investments, whether it be in the applied space with our chiller investments, whether it be in the DX space with the work that we are doing in resi and small commercial, in the control space with our launch of Medisys 8.1 and the Verisys platform and then across the Fire and Security businesses with the new investments we are making where spite of the pressure that we've had with the heavy industrial high hazard, we will continue to make great progress there.
The second piece is that we had a project, a very large project that we took a significant charge here in the second quarter that has impacted our margin rate by about 20 basis points. And then the last, I think, is most important as we project during Q4 is the unfavorable mix, which is about 30 basis points. And when you think of that mix, our growth, the 3% growth that we achieved in the second quarter was driven by install. And as you know, the install revenues come through at a lower margin and at the same time when our product business was down about 1%. So as you project going forward and that was roughly 30 basis points, which drove the 30 basis point decline in total.
So as you project the 3rd Q4, we have inflection in our products. We see continued momentum in the legacy BE product businesses. We start to see sequentially, we are seeing growth in the Fire and Security product businesses and they will continue to accelerate in the 3rd Q4. And so that is good mix coming through. And then as Alex talked about, seasonally, we start to get our pickup in service revenues in the 3rd Q4, which is good mix.
And then with the just the nature of the business being higher volume in the 3rd and fourth quarter, we get nice leverage on that volume. And so as we look at now 3rd and 4th quarter, we were positioned to deliver about a 90 basis point improvement in margin rate and that ultimately supports the overall margin rate that we projected for the company for the year.
I'll just add one more thing. So I was just going to add one more thing that the Hitachi sales were down for the quarter. We have line of sight to some orders that are seasonal that last year we saw in 1 quarter and now what we see in the Q3. So I also think that we have some pretty good confidence around that Tachi business also.
Your next question comes from Nigel Coe from Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.
Thanks. Good morning, guys.
Good morning. Good morning.
So I
just want to kind of pick up where Gautam left off. So as we go into the second half of the year, I think you've threaded the bridge quite nicely, the down 30. So it looks like synergies will be picking up to maybe 60, 70 basis points, maybe 80 basis points in 3Q and 4Q. Hopefully no more charges, so that goes away. Is there enough growth in products to get us to a positive mix in the second half of the year?
And then on AltaGas' comments about Hitachi picking up in 3Q. My understanding is that Hitachi is a lower margin business. So why does that help margin?
Yes, Nigel. Let me start with Hitachi. So starting there, we do see from a second to third quarter last year, we had a timing of shipments that ultimately now this year has pushed the 3rd quarter. That's going to give us a nice lift within the legacy BE product portfolio. When you look at products in total, just pure volumes and that starts with the demand that we see in the order rates that we are seeing across all of our product businesses accelerate in the 3rd Q4.
And as we have been talking about in the legacy Tyco product businesses, we have seen sequential improvement continuing every quarter. And although we have been we went from mid down mid single digits in the 1st quarter, down low single digits in the 2nd quarter, we are going to inflect here in the 3rd Q4. We are seeing continued acceleration with the end markets recovering that we support. So that gives us a lot of confidence with that mix coming through, as well as service. When you look at the service businesses across both sets of businesses coming together, think about it this way.
We've got a tremendous field organization that now has come together that have a combination of customers that they are serving and now we can take our combined capabilities to be able to do a lot more for the customers that we serve. And we are already seeing some of that traction come through. And so we are very confident that we are going to see an uplift there with that mix in the 3rd Q4. Typically, it's a seasonal high for us, but above and beyond that, we believe that with some of the revenue synergies that we see, we are going to be able to capitalize that in the second half And that again would be very positive mix to the overall portfolio.
Great. Thanks, George. And a quick follow on on the product side, the down one you saw in 2Q, how did that look ex Scott's safety? Was Scott accretive to that number? And then is there anything non cyclical going on in terms of retail or in terms of residential where there might be some market share loss or some structural pressures in those markets?
Nigel, as we look at all of our product businesses, we've been performing and continuing to maintain and grow share across all of the segments. So there is no concern there as far as losing share. When you look at the Tyco product businesses, there was similar type pressure within the Scotts Safety as it relates to the heavy industrial high hazard business. Recall that we had bought the IST business, which gave us a bigger portfolio, bigger footprint into that end market. That has been somewhat pressured here short term.
But again, we are beginning to see a very nice pipeline of orders or activity and orders coming through and that will also inflect here in the second half of the year.
And Nigel, the only other thing I would point out is remember, our legacy Tycho retail business actually sits in the field and that is continuing to perform well.
Hey, Nigel, this is Alex. I thought I would use it since you asked about share, we talked about growth in products because one of the things that may not be clear is as we looked at how we put out our numbers and as we pull together the organization. And I mentioned it, but I just want to put a little finer point on it. Our light commercial and residential businesses are performing extremely well and outperforming the market. And as I look at what's happening with our peers, we're just I'm really proud of what the team is doing and we're seeing the same thing in our applied business.
So our HVAC businesses are really doing well and I think that as the volumes increase seasonally, that's going to drop to the bottom line. So I just wanted to make sure that they didn't get lost because of how we're reporting the numbers here.
Speakers, our next question comes from Jeffrey Sprague from Vertical Research. Your line is now open.
Thank you. Good morning or good afternoon. Just a couple of things. A lot of talk about comparisons as we work through all the moving pieces. I guess the seasonal lift H1 to H2, it does seem that the comparisons both legacy Tyco especially, but even JCI BE organically are a bit harder as we move into the back particularly the June quarter.
Do you just as we look at kind of the backlog conversion, just kind of wondering your confidence level really in that 3% organic growth number for the June quarter and maybe just give us some color on how that splits between EE and Power?
As far as the growth or the
The organic growth.
The organic growth. The organic growth.
You want to take it? Go ahead. So, Jeff, just to go through each of the segments. So when you look at buildings and what we are seeing not only in the we are building a very strong pipeline. We are beginning to convert at a higher rate that pipeline and that's positioned us to continue to accelerate the revenue that we achieved.
Now remember, we have there was a large shipment last year in Hitachi that moved from Q2 to this year, it's Q3. That's going to be a significant contributor to the pickup in organic growth this year. And then with what we see coming through based on what's been booked, we see continuing at or above the rate that we are currently at in the Q3 and being able to continue to accelerate in the Q4 on that conversion that gets us to roughly it's roughly 2.5% for the roughly kind of mid 2.5% to 3% for the year within the segment. So, we are feeling very good about our ability to be able to execute on that. In the power business, it really depends on how the lead fluctuates and how it's reported.
But at the end of the day, we are right now seeing roughly mid single digits in the 3rd quarter. We typically have our seasonal high in the 4th quarter and based on what we see today, that's going to be very strong in the 4th quarter. So as we look at the total year, we are still in the 4% to 6% range for the organic growth in powers. So overall, we are very we feel very good about the activity that we see, how we are converting, the market activity and ultimately the position that we are in to be able to deliver on the second half.
Yes. So just on power, for a lot of you, it might be your 1st cycle through power. So you live through this, but a lot of this seasonality is something that happens. It's not something to worry about. What you worry about is if we've lost any share and we haven't lost any share.
In fact, we've gained share and then when you think about the growth in the emerging products around AGM that's it's really going to bode well for the future. So I think our confidence level is high. We can't control sometimes the quarter to quarter seasonality, but I think the team there when we talk to them, they feel pretty good about the rest of the year. As it relates to buildings, I mean, I think George hit it right. I feel good about the progress we're making.
And I think that the fact that we're starting to see the orders come through certainly within the field and then this is going to come through in the products, I think we'll start seeing the leverage. So and I think that shows up in us tightening the range. And then I
would just add, Jeff, to summarize what George said, I mean, when we look at Q3, we've really got buildings around 3% as it relates to organic sales growth. And I think Power Solutions is probably in the 4.5% range to 5%. And when you put those together, we're in that approximate 3% organic growth Q3 and based upon what our teams have told us and us looking at opportunities, we think that's very doable at that 3% level for Q3.
Great. Thanks for all that color. And then separately, on just TESARL, obviously, you have stepped up now and done some share repurchase. But given that you've knocked that down so hard, is your urgency on further reductions somewhat diminished? And can we see maybe a stronger pivot to share repurchase in say 2018 whereas at least I was thinking maybe it was a 2019 story on share repurchase?
Yes. I mean, that's still something we're going to have to look at, Jeff. I mean, technically, the answer is until that entire $4,000,000,000 is paid off, you have to have pretty robust procedures and controls in place to ring fence that debt. There may be a practical level at which time you look at it and say if it's down at a certain level, you don't necessarily need to be as strict with the rules. But I would tell you that if we get it down to $1,500,000,000 to $1,700,000,000 at the end of next year, we've always kind of looked at $18,000,000 as being further pay down.
And once that gets down to less than $1,000,000,000 I think we probably have a little bit more flexibility relative to share repurchase. But I would just tell you that's something we haven't fully analyzed yet. But the good news is the pay down of the debt is coming at a much faster rate than we had anticipated quite honestly 6 months ago.
Speakers, our next question comes from Deane Dray from RBC. Your line is now open.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone.
Good morning, Deane.
Hey, I would like to get a little more color on this Texas So the idea of like with these separate bids or bundled bids, how many points of contact did you have during this process from the customer side? And what do you do with regarding any product subsidies, one business subsidizing the other in this process and how do you referee those?
Yes. So we are going through a major integration of our field force in North America and certainly we are going to be positioned as a leader across all of our domains. And what's been nice is, while we are going through that process, the teams are working within their current structures and how they are continuing to serve customers and while we are integrating all of our systems and processes have found ways to be able to leverage the customer base that we serve today and then as new opportunities are coming up, we are getting kind of first look on those opportunities with the other domains that we are not serving those customers with. And that's as simple as that. That's what this was.
We have strong relationship in one of the businesses working with this customer and then have gone forward to say, this is what our total capabilities are and what we can ultimately do. It came through 1 bid opportunity that we put all of our capabilities together and because of that, we can maintain our fundamentals while we are getting the additional growth by putting all of our capabilities together. So we are seeing this a lot of this activity across our entire field and that's what's building a pretty robust pipeline of opportunities that we are beginning to convert.
Hey, Gene, what I'd say is that this is going better than we thought. And just to put it in simple terms, you talked about one project because we talked we highlighted it. But this there we're tracking these things all the way here because it's an important part of why we did this. And things are happening quicker than we thought. And then George is a little bit modest because we've gone through an organizational change particularly in North America, we're bringing people together and so a lot of the kind of the underlying question about how hard is this to work together, a lot of those barriers are already broken down.
So I am really bullish on this. And in fact, it was a big strategic question a year ago, would we get the pull through and the cross selling that we expected and I tell you it's going to be better than we thought.
Got it. And then just as a follow-up on the Scottsafety divestiture, just give us a sense, are there more non core divestitures that you're looking at? I mean, when I look back at the South Africa decision, that makes complete sense. You did this several years ago with exiting South Korea. Those are special situations.
You really can't leverage the brand. It's a different set of security laws. But within the portfolio, are there more divestitures that you're looking at?
Well, Wadeem, we certainly aren't going to tell you everything that we're doing, but I would just say that we're looking across our portfolio as our strategy gets tighter and tighter around being a leader in buildings and energy, it helps us it helps us understand what are some of the opportunities there because what we want to make sure is we invest in the businesses that make sense for us. When you think about the Scott Safety business, what a great business that is. It's a fantastic business. But it's probably not at the right place when you think about where we want to invest going forward. So I guess the short answer is we're continuing to look.
I think that what we've done so far is right on point. And I know that legacy Tyco folks were looking at their portfolio. Certainly at Johnson Controls, we're doing the same thing. Now we have a different framework as we're a combined company and we certainly are taking a relook at some things that maybe we haven't thought about in a while. So I just kind of leave it at that.
You have something to add, George.
Our next question comes from Julian Mitchell from Credit Suisse. Your line is now open.
Hi, good morning.
Good morning.
Good morning. So you gave some good detail on the improving mix from here in buildings. I guess if we look at Power Solutions, you had double digit underlying profit growth again year on year, same rate as in Q1. So obviously, mix is a good tailwind there in the first half. Maybe clarify how confident you are that those mix tailwinds can persist in the second half?
And I just wondered related to that, if there's any kind of guidance now for the year on the ex led margin in that business?
Yes. So Julian, what I would say in Power Solutions, we have done a really nice job driving productivity, continued productivity as well as we are benefiting from the mix, with the higher mix of AGM. And so that has enabled us to offset the 220 basis points of headwind that we had on lead and being able to offset that for the quarter and deliver margin rates that were up 10 basis points. As you project the year, we are going to see continued mix there with continuing increase in AGM shipments and that will continue with all of the capacity we put into place and over the next few years that will continue and we are still getting very strong productivity. So overall, for the year, when we project the margins, I think it's we're going to be modestly down for the year, but overall, that's really a factor of the lead pricing.
Brian, I don't know if you want to comment?
Yes, Julien. I think it really is a function with the lead prices where they are now, there will be pressure on reported margins. But if you look at our margins ex lead, we should see positive improvement year over year there. So with the volatility in lead, you really need to look at those margins, as you know, ex lead and those should be up year over year.
Yes. So Julien, the last thing I'd just add to this, if you look at it on a long term basis, there's 2 things that are going to happening underlying. First is our AGM mix will continue to add as a positive to our margins. And then we're going to continue to launch capacity, particularly in China. And as we go through the launch of some of these China plants, it will be a little bit lumpy as that happens.
So those are the 2 things that I mean, there's obviously lots of other things as it relates to timing. But if you think about our business moving forward, overall margins will improve. But as we add capacity, there'll be some lumps in this as we go. Thanks.
And then just my second question would be maybe more for Brian. You gave a little bit of color on the sort of aggregate part of the gross debt at the end of this year, the calendar year. Maybe when we think about other factors like cash restructuring charges and the moving parts around cash taxes, is there any update you could provide on the net debt or net leverage level you expect 12 months from now at the company?
Well, I think the leverage that we've talked about historically has been 2% to 2.5%. And I think with the choppy cash flow we've had in 'seventeen, you really need to look to 'eighteen to see what type of balance sheet flexibility we're going to have. But I think once we get out of this year, as I mentioned, we still target 80% free cash flow conversion, but that's on an adjusted basis, right. So we're going to need to get into fiscal 2018, kind of get our feet underneath us a little bit relative to a year that's a bit more normal. And I think with the cash flow in fiscal 'eighteen, we're going to be in a position where we can further pay down debt and improve our leverage position.
Now, the one thing I'd point out is we look at fiscal 'eighteen 'nineteen, the term debt payments that we have coming due are pretty nominal. It's really into 2020 before we start seeing any term debt repayments of any significance. So we've got a lot of flexibility as we look at 2018 2019 and our cash flow gets to more normalized position.
Operator, we have time for one more question.
Next question comes from Steve Tusa from JPMorgan Chase. Your line is now open.
Hey guys, thanks for letting me in here. So you guys called out a penny of amortization in the Q2 bridge. Where is that in the Q3 bridge? Because I still think you got a it's probably a benefit year over year, bit of a benefit year over year still.
Yes, it fully offsets with the net financing charges in the Q3. That's why you don't see it on the bridge.
Okay. So it's not a discrete item like it was called out this quarter. And then just building efficiency, so you guys talked about I think 50 bps of productivity, but for the year or for the total co you had the productivity was higher than that. Was there what kind of can you just like maybe explain precisely more around what kind of offset that or is there just a little bit more around, I guess, the mix headwinds you had in the quarter more specifically, what types of what part of the business that was
in? So Steve, are you referring more to in buildings the mix headwinds that we were talking about?
Yes, I guess I'm just trying to figure out why productivity didn't read through more in building efficiency. Is there greater productivity somewhere else, maybe at corporate or in the battery business maybe? I would have thought the productivity would have been higher there?
Yes. So when you look at the productivity and you look and you see where that 6th sense of synergies and productivity is, you have a piece going through buildings that George had referenced early of about $30,000,000 and then the rest of it, remember, you have some going through power because they're having productivity as well because it's synergies and productivity and you also have a piece of that going through corporate. So it's going across all three of those.
Okay, got it. So it's a little more than just kind of the pure acquisition synergies, some of the base stuff that they were doing at Battery prior. And then just one last one.
Just for everyone's knowledge, if you remember, we are now talking about productivity and merger synergies as one bucket. It kind of goes all the way back to the EPG conference. That's really our if you want to go with the framework we're using, it goes back to EPG a year ago, the framework we put in place.
That makes a ton of sense. And then just lastly, this $10,000,000 hit on the contractor project this quarter, what precisely type of project was that? Was that in old JCI, old Tyco? I would assume it was an installed job? Yes.
So it's in the legacy B portfolio in North America, very large project that working with the customer, we had accelerated the execution of that project and took on some additional charges. And so with that, we'll continue to work with the customer and it's hard to predict ultimately what we recover, but at the end of the day, it's being positioned to deliver on what we've committed to the customer that we're serving and took some additional costs in the quarter.
Okay, great. Thanks a lot guys. Appreciate it.
Thanks. I'd like to turn the call over to Alex now for some closing comments.
Sure.
Thanks everyone for joining us. I just would like to recap a couple of things. One is, if you look at the business, if we're going to see growth this quarter, it's good to see that the buildings business getting on track. And I feel like we're going to gain some momentum. And underlying that, we've got some stabilization in our products business, the fire protection products business and some real strong growth in our HVAC businesses, particularly our light commercial, residential and even our applied equipment.
So we think that will continue. And then the other part around our merger cost synergies, we're more and more bullish. We've gotten through the corporate piece of this and now we're moving into the buildings part of it and it's going well. In the meantime, the sales synergies and I referred to that earlier, the secured that we're seeing through the cross sell opportunities is a real opportunity. I mean, this is not something that is an abstract.
If we see the projects, we see the excitement and our customers are really embracing this opportunity. So it's going to be a tailwind for us in the long run. And so we're pretty confident we have the right strategy. We look forward to talking about this over the next few months with everyone, but things are getting clearer and clearer and the teams are coming together. So I just wanted to leave it with that and then we'll talk to you soon.
Thanks. Operator, that concludes our call.
Thank you. That concludes today's conference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.