Fireside chat with Waste Connections. Very happy to have with us today Mary Anne Whitney, the CFO of Waste Connections, a position she's held for the last two years, and she'll certainly correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe all in all has been the finance department of Waste Connections for almost 15 years at this point, so she's well-versed. I'm sure many of you on this call would've met Mary Anne at some point over the last few years, as she's often been the face of Waste Connections with investors pretty consistently. Before we get into the Q&A, just to let people know who've joined through the website, there should be a functionality that you see on there to ask questions.
I'll get it started with the first few in conversation, and over the course of the 40 minutes, if you submit questions, I will try to get to them as time permits. With that, Mary Anne, thank you very much for being here.
Well, thank you very much, John, and on behalf of Waste Connections, thank you for the opportunity to participate in the conference, and we're delighted to be here.
Perfect. I got the 15 years right then.
You did, yes. Thank you.
Okay. Perfect. Maybe let's just sort of starting off before we sort of get into too many specific questions, I'll give you this, an opportunity to sort of level set around, obviously you gave a lot of information during the 1Q results on the impacts of coronavirus. Now, as we sort of move into this next phase of opening up, just wonder if you could help level set people on where Waste Connections is, and updates on more recent trends and how Waste Connections is dealing with the business volatility.
Sure. That's a great place to start, and it's amazing how long ago one month ago feels. That is when we reported and we talked about our Q1 earnings call from a business standpoint, where we've seen the revenue impact from COVID-19 and how it's impacted our business. We described the fact that it's primarily related to the decreased demand for collection and disposal services resulting from the closure restrictions or the shelter-in-place orders, which of course have varied by geography, by market, by our mix of business.
We talked about the fact that those impacts began in March as commercial, primarily commercial activity slowed down due to service reductions or in some cases, outright suspensions of business, and that the slowdown was most pronounced for us in our model in the Northeast of the U.S., in markets like New York City and also in Canada, where you had province-wide closures. We then also on that call provided our April results, given that April was what we saw as the first full month of impact, and we talked about revenue being down about 6% year-over-year and went further to break out to say it was about a 1.5% down excluding those most impacted markets.
Really what that suggested is that volumes were as low as -20% in those most impacted markets as compared to down about 6%-8% in other regions of ours where we were less affected, and those would be the more suburban and rural markets, which didn't see that same kind of closure activity. On that call, we talked about the trends that were encouraging to us, where we had been tracking for the past several weeks going into that call, and now we have another four weeks of incremental information. What I'd say is the trends that we found encouraging as of a month ago have all continued. We're seeing nice momentum.
For instance, the commercial business where we track competitive markets and we had said customers were starting to come back, I think about 11% of customers with the business was back when we talked a month ago. We now have about a third, about 32% of accounts representing about 25% of revenue has come back. Meaning in markets where they had suspended or reduced their service, they've now increased or brought back some of the business. About 25% is back. Then the two real-time indicators of the business, roll-off loads and landfill tons, we gave folks the peak-to-trough activity. Roll-off loads were down 17% at the trough, and they've since recovered about 11%, and therefore they're still off 7%-8% from the peak. Landfill tons, which were down about 13% at the trough, have recovered about 12%.
It says mostly back, down still 2%-3% from the peak. Again, encouraged by the continued recovery we're seeing in each of those areas, and also by the breadth of the recovery, as we said on our call, about 70% of our locations, and the number's slightly higher than that now, have shown improvement off of those troughs.
Okay, great. Maybe just to dive into it a little more, I want to sort of talk through how investors should be thinking about first the revenue side, then we'll get to the cost side in a moment. On the revenue side, I think a lot of people, at least in their minds, have this idea that there's going to be a significant pause in terms of price increases on the commercial side. At least one of the other large firms within the industry is actually giving one month of no-fee service to specific commercial customers that were heavily impacted.
How should we be thinking about commercial pricing on one side in terms of as we get back to normal, assuming we are, and then two, with the increase in residential volumes, is there not an opportunity to maybe push harder as contracts roll on the residential side? I just wonder if you could talk a little bit about those two things on the revenue side.
Sure. Maybe I'll take them in reverse order. You mentioned the residential side, what people have talked about in the industry is the fact that on the residential side, you're typically paying a fixed monthly amount for the service, it's not volume dependent. What you've seen, given the number of people working from home and the dynamics of less activity at commercial establishments and more coming out of residential, you have more higher weights on containers on the residential side. Interestingly, other companies have put more of a focus on this than we have.
We have seen those container weights up, perhaps not to the same degree they have, or perhaps that wasn't a line of business where, I know at least one of our competitors had already earmarked it as a place they wanted to focus on price increases for a variety of reasons, including recycling and just poor quality of revenue in that particular line of business. Again, from our perspective, we've seen slightly higher rates. Interestingly, you have offsets from lower rates on commercial, it's not as though disposal is that much of an issue. I think to your point, John, which is can you recover any of those costs? Or to the extent there are any change in the dynamics, how do you go about recovering it?
I would say, first of all, in our model, we have a couple of levers that we can pull. One is that there's a portion of that business which is subscription, meaning we're not limited by a contract, therefore, when we deem it appropriate, we have the flexibility to impose incremental prices there. Then the other mechanism would be that there's a portion of our residential business, which is on the West Coast in return-driven markets. As you may recall, a portion of our franchise or exclusive business has a return component. In the aggregate, between those two pieces, there's about 40% of our residential revenue where we have the flexibility, either in the current environment or next year in those exclusive markets, where we're entitled to higher pricing when we have cost pressures that we absorb this year.
Next year, we could see slightly higher pricing in those West Coast markets to the extent we're hit with higher costs. That's the residential piece. On the commercial side, what you're seeing there in terms of pricing is sort of to take a step back, just recall that most of our pricing was already done coming into the year. That's because of the way we approach pricing. Just to take a step back, we guided to pricing of around 5%, and we typically think about it in the aggregate as opposed to by line of business. We traditionally have a price-driven organic growth strategy, and that's no different this year. In fact, we've been coming to a period of arguably outsized pricing, given the headwinds from recycling and labor pressures and other cost pressures that we've talked about in the past two years.
The reason I mention those prior headwinds is because about 40% of the pricing you see in 2020 is rollover contribution from last year. The next biggest bucket is the price increases we do in January and in Q1, which basically takes you to about 85% of our PIs, our price increases, being done by the time we exit Q1. I mention all of that because you asked, John, if the environment changes on commercial pricing given what's going on, and I would just point out that most of the pricing is already in place. To the extent we had some price increases scheduled, arguably for Q2, what we've said is that in the depths of a pandemic, in all likelihood, we wouldn't be putting through those same level of price increases.
We might push them out to later in the year or forego them in this environment. For that reason, we said, rather than think in terms of 5% total price increase in 2020, we were thinking more in terms of 4.5%. In terms of your thinking high level in terms of revenue contribution this year, I would encourage people to think of 4.5% pricing, we leave potential full year numbers of $5.25 billion, which implies that the negative volumes we're seeing in Q2, that we talked about on our call, that we put April at around negative 12%. We're suggesting that as the economy opens up and the shutdown orders are decreased, we would see increase in activity to mitigate some of those negative volumes, meaning they would become less negative in Q3 as compared to Q2, and further in Q4.
Some improvement, but certainly not a snap back, which leaves our revenue still down to the 3% year-over-year by the numbers we described on our Q1 call.
Got it. Thanks. Maybe moving a little bit to the cost side specifically around people. I think the industry sort of proved out, certainly in how people talked about what happened in April and the impact to margins, that there was a lot of natural flex in the cost base. Right? Less traffic on the roads, so got higher asset efficiency and less time doing stops. As well as, we had been dealing with for a number of years as an industry, very high demands on labor, difficulty getting labor, and I think there was a fair amount of overtime being worked by both drivers and mechanics. The natural flex for some of the players in the industry was to take down that overtime.
I was hoping you could talk to a little bit about how Waste Connections dealt with this sort of flexing in demand on labor's time. Was there a substantial amount of layoffs, or was it more done by flexing people's hours? How do you then start to ramp that up, or do you see challenges in ramping that back up?
Sure. Well, even back on our call a month ago, we said we've actually seen the ramp up starting again because we felt like we had seen the trough already. By the numbers I've just also provided earlier on this call, it tells you we've continued to ramp up. We had already, like other companies, we had tracked, of course, labor hours, of course, it's overtime, which is where you start. We had seen those numbers come down 25%, 30%, and they were on their way back up again, given that the business was coming back, which is a good thing, right?
To answer your question, there are only a few cases where we had markets where we did furloughs or layoffs, given the dramatic decline in the business, and an example would be New York City, where you saw volumes down about 50%, on the commercial side, that is. For the most part, what we've seen is not only holding onto people and yes, cutting overtime as you're running routes faster, as you point out, which is where the costs naturally go away, right? Because you have shorter route hours as you're doing that, and less wear and tear on your trucks. Certainly consumables go down. Anything that is on a per-ton basis, like third-party disposal, goes down. Your brokerage costs, your franchise fees. They're costs that naturally or dynamically come out of the business.
Labor is part of that as you're reducing the hours, as I said, you certainly start with overtime. The other focus we've had in this environment is taking care of our employees. We've been very clear about the fact that we have incremental costs associated with things like supplemental pay, which we had added for all of our frontline employees and contract laborers, by the way. Also steps that we had taken very early on to provide arguably a safety net for our employees and providing for sick employees to stay home and not having their PTO, for instance, be impacted. We took a number of steps which arguably increased costs. Yes, to your question, you certainly dynamically take costs out of the system as your business slows down, you'll see costs come back as the business returns.
Got it. Thank you, Mary Anne. I want to pivot now to sort of a different topic maybe I think longer term, a much more important topic, certainly one that I encourage investors to really think through when they're thinking about investing in individual municipal solid waste names. That is how capital gets redeployed. I know you've heard me say this before, Mary Anne, I would say, being the CFO of Waste Connections, you have challenges. They're good challenges, but there's challenges, that's mainly how to redeploy what is routinely more than $900 million a year in free cash flow. The dividend only eats up about $200, $220 million of that a year. I like to remind people that it's actually more cash flow than that.
Waste Connections right now is a little bit less than 2.5x net debt to EBITDA. If you sort of keep a constant leverage ratio, there's another $300 or $350 a year in balance sheet capacity. It's really even post-dividend, how do you redeploy $1 billion of capital, what are the sort of priorities in terms of how management's approaching that over the next, not just 12 months, but thinking longer term, 3 to 5 years?
Sure. You're right, admittedly, it's a high-class problem to have. I would say we're thankful to have such a high-class problem in an environment like this where understandably, people's first question is about liquidity. We think that's an appropriate question to ask, we feel good about having $2 billion in liquidity and think that it's prudent in a period like we've come through arguably, certainly before you know how much stimulus money and how much of a safety net will be out there, it's good, I think, to take those steps to conserve cash.
That being said, you're asking a longer-term question, which is how do we think about this free cash flow generation, which we're fortunate to have, and the high conversion of EBITDA to free cash flow, and the fact that, for starters, we have a dividend that consumes about 20% of free cash flow. Let's all start there. Our dividends, which we've grown double-digit per share percentages every year since initiating it in 2010, I would expect that to continue. I can see that 20% growing to 25%-30% over time. Acquisitions, what we would describe as kind of our typical or average year of deals would consume, arguably, maybe another 30%-40% of our free cash flow.
Arguably, that leaves another 30%-40% available for either the episodic outsized year of acquisitions, or we'll put it towards share repurchases, which I remind folks who've known us for a long time, we routinely did prior to 2015. We were buying back 3%-4% of shares. In spite of also doing deals. We certainly came into this year with a mindset that everything was on the table, and we expected another busy year of acquisitions, but we also said we'd be back in the market buying back shares opportunistically. You saw us do that in Q1, really pre the depths of COVID, when we made the decision to take our foot off that particular lever at that point in time. We still maintain the optionality to look at that as part of the overall strategy this year.
We still maintain that acquisitions are our highest and best use of cash, but that we don't dictate the timing of deals, and that as we have this high cash generation rate, you will see us doing more share repurchases as part of the overall mix. What we've said about deals for this year is that thinking about it as sort of a typical year, that $125 million-$150 million in acquired annualized revenue is the right way to think about it. What we also know is that events like this can create more opportunities for M&A to the extent that brings more sellers off the sidelines. We've certainly seen that in prior downturns.
During the Great Recession, for instance, we did outsized M&A, and we like the fact that, to your point, John, we are very well positioned, relatively low leverage and a lot of running room to execute on our terms. We look forward to that opportunity if and when it's presented.
I believe it was the first quarter of this year was one of the largest share repurchases you guys have probably done, even proportionally to the size of the company since the Progressive deal. It seems like really since Progressive, that safety valve is what I always call it, and the share repurchase, that if there's M&A there to be done, fantastic. That seems to be the best use of cash, as you said. The share repurchase is kind of the safety valve, if you would. It's typically a very good redeployment of capital. Not always the best, but it might be the best available in some time.
When we're sort of thinking of it as the company grows, it's fair then for investors to think that maybe the last three or four years and the pace of share buybacks is probably a little lower than you could expect over a longer period of time in the future?
Yes. That's consistent with what we said coming into this year, which is that you could expect us to get back to that 3%-4%, that as you know, since pre Progressive, since 2015, when in Q3 we sort of turned the buyback off because we had that deal on the horizon, we arguably had this period of outsized activity. We would expect to get back to that 3%-4%, again, when deal activity slows down. I guess the question remains, what does this year end up looking like? We'll know more as the year unfolds.
Yep. Maybe on a related topic, maybe if you could spend a little time talking about the leverage, which there's another sort of act, let's call it pool of capital, if you would, to be deployed over the next 12 or 18 months, and that is taking the leverage perhaps back to more in line with the peers, which is closer to three times. How do you think about running the leverage below 2.5? What's sort of the optimal area you'd like to be in? How long would you be willing, or do you think management and the board's willing to run at sub 2.5?
I think in terms of the range being 2.5 to 3, I'm very comfortable being there. To the extent we're running below that, as we've said, we've been in a period of outsized activity, and arguably given COVID, it feels good to be at the low end of the range or arguably below it in this environment. As you said, a 2.3 on a net debt basis, 2.9 because we've been holding higher cash balances. Again, we thought that was appropriate given the uncertainty of the environment. We like the fact that we came into this period with that flexibility. I don't think it's a question of how long the board will be comfortable. They understand the different drivers that would put us at the low or high end of that range or episodically being below it.
Again, that could be an expectation of outsized deal activity or some conservatism around our balance sheet, given the environment we're just coming through. Again, the message is we certainly, again, believe that M&A is the highest and best use. We don't dictate the timing of deals, and people will ask, "Well, would you look outside of your core?" It was about $3.5 billion-$4 billion that we've said fits our market model right down the center here of the fairway, and we don't see any need to deviate, and we're better off returning that capital to shareholders and let them go buy some other company that's investing in a different business.
Got it. When you say $3.5 billion-$4 billion, just so I'm clear, you're referring to revenue there?
That's right. I'm referring to the fact that there's about $3.5 billion-$4 billion in revenue that fits our market model or strategy of the $18 billion or so of private company revenue in the solid waste industry between the U.S. and Canada. We take a look at that and say, "Not all $18 billion fits our model." There's a subset, $3.5 billion-$4 billion, that we're focused on, and in many cases, have relationships with the owner, and in some cases are giving indications of value episodically, and we'll have an expectation that at least we'll have a chance to participate when that seller is ready to sell.
Right. Just to do some math off the top of my head for the people listening, let's use some rough numbers. If you're talking $4 billion of potential revenue, that fits the model two and a half, three times sales as a purchase price is not a bad sort of bogey that you can have in your head. That's $12 billion of spend, if you would. Given the numbers where we were talking about four, even with the growth, even if you're spending $500 million, $600 million, $700 million a year, you can see that the sort of runway is well into 15 or 16 years of sustaining this sort of outsized growth that Connections has experienced over the last 15 years. It certainly seems right in the middle of that M&A cycle, rather than sort of getting anywhere close to the end.
Is that a fair point, Mary Anne?
I think it's a fair point. I would add that in a normalized environment, that $3.5 billion to $4 billion is growing arguably at some organic growth rate. If we're 4%-6%, even put 3%-4% on that, because in any given year, if we buy $125 million to $150 million, we're essentially buying the growth rate on the underlying business.
Exactly. Thank you for that. Maybe just pivoting a little bit to a different topic. It's obviously a smaller segment of the business in the municipal solid waste, but maybe if you could spend a couple minutes just talking through the E&P related assets, how they've dealt with the volatility in drilling rates and oil prices, and if you've been able to take cost out of that business as there's been a decline in activity.
Sure. For folks listening who aren't familiar, our E&P business is a E&P waste disposal business, meaning we take drill cuttings and mud at landfills including our solid waste landfills. About a dozen of them take E&P waste. Then we have dedicated assets in the major basins. Primarily, the activity over the past few years has been in the Permian and Louisiana onshore and offshore, so the Gulf of Mexico. That business for us is highly correlated to drilling activity or linear feet drilled specifically, but it rises and falls with the CapEx spend of drillers and therefore the amount of drilling they're doing, because about 85% of the waste generated is from the initial drill. I mention all that because you see drillers cutting their CapEx spend for 2020 on the order of 45%, and you've seen our business decline similarly.
We've been on a run rate the past few quarters of about $20 million per month. We said as rig count declined, we were expecting the business to slow down, and we were wrong for a few quarters because the business held up. As we expected, it finally has slowed down. We said on our call that $20 million run rate from each month in Q1 was decreasing to about $14 million in April, and we expected it to continue to fall to be down to about $10 million-$11 million in revenue by now. That would line up nicely with that 45%-50% reduction, and sure enough, that's the way I expect it to play out here in Q2. I could see that business barring any change, settling in the high single digit monthly revenue at breakeven or a little better margin.
To your question about taking costs out, it's a high fixed cost business because it's a landfill business. You certainly cut back where you can. You certainly mothball facilities where your business has really dried up. To the extent you're still running the site, you don't have that many levers on the operating side, you have greater flexibilities on the capital side. You've seen us cut the CapEx as part of our overall 20% CapEx reduction that we communicated that for 2020 off of our initial estimate or our initial guide. You certainly see us doing that and really, you run the business for cash. You try to maximize the returns there even as the business comes down.
Certainly we've done that, and at this point, I certainly read these projections that some people are putting out where they think things get better, in 2021 or 2022. Certainly, that's great if that's the way it plays out. None of that changes 2020 as far as we're concerned because drillers have made their commitments or not to their activity. I would encourage people to think about this as a very, it's obviously a very small piece of the overall mix, and it's actually like the way our peers communicated, it's more like special waste. It's energy driven special waste activity. I could see it ultimately looking that way in our business because right now we've had it as a dedicated, a segregated segment, and we have dedicated regional infrastructure associated with that.
You could see more costs come out if it's folded into a solid waste region, for instance, if the expectation is the business isn't coming back.
Perfect. Thank you for that, Mary Anne. In the last sort of eight or nine minutes we have left here, I'll pivot to some of the questions that have gotten through the website. Thank you to the participants that have submitted questions. Sort of fire off a couple here. Can you talk a little bit about Waste Connections' exposure to RINs, the renewable fuel credits, and if there's an impact from the refining industries granted the requested renewable fuel blending waiver?
Sure. RINs or renewable energy credits are a subset of our landfill gas, which by the way shows up in other revenue for people who are trying to track these things, and that's about 1% in the aggregate. RINs are a subset of that, 1% of revenue. We qualify a certain of our landfill gas facilities for the renewable energy credits as part of the overall mix. To the question of how would we be impacted if there's an industry-wide waiver, for instance, you actually saw that last year when waivers were granted. You saw RINs, which had averaged around $2.25 in 2018, you saw them drop to an average of about $1.15, for instance, in 2019, and they got as low as about $0.50.
RINs, which, when on our call for Q1, we said they were around $1.00, a little higher than that. They're now around $1.45. There's certainly been some elevation. If they were to go back down, the way to think about the sensitivity in our numbers is every $0.10 in RINs is about $3 million, $2.5 million-$3 million for the full year.
Perfect. Thank you. Moving on to the sort of the next question, this will be a little bit of a potpourri, jumping around a little bit, but I always like to hear Mary Anne's perspectives. Trends in equipment pricing. Can Waste Connections capitalize on lower demand, potentially lower demand, I should say, to negotiate more attractive prices on particularly trucks, I would think this question's trying to get to?
Sure. Well, I think we mentioned on our call, I mentioned earlier that we've cut our CapEx by about 20%. We've said to the extent there are opportunities to be opportunistic, if you will, about things like truck purchases, we absolutely will take advantage of them. I think there were 1,600 truck orders canceled between just Waste Management or Republic Services according to some of the larger truck dealers in Q1. There could be a nice opportunity out there, and we absolutely would retain the flexibility to do that. At this point, I don't know the magnitude of that, but I do know that we have the flexibility to jump on it if that opportunity presents itself. Yes, is the short answer.
Similarly, as we look at CapEx, if there are opportunities to purchase land for future landfill development or expansion, we absolutely are looking at that as well and would seize that opportunity. This is an environment where we want to be ready to get those things done and have the firepower, have the cash on hand to do it.
Great. Just another question from the audience. How do you position Waste Connections to ESG investors?
Great question. The way we position ourselves to ESG investors is, first of all, I'd say we've tried to do a better job of communicating the things we do in running our business every day, which we think does position us well with ESG investors. We remind folks that we're in the business of being an environmental services company, and it's a highly regulated industry with landfills, which while some people may think that's the part of the business that makes them uncomfortable, that's actually the part of the business that's where we and every other company in this industry are incentivized to maximize the value of what's in the ground. Which means that not only are they highly regulated sites, which is why in the U.S., the number of landfills decreased from about 8,000 to about 2,500 with the regulations about 40 years ago.
Power generation gives us an opportunity to monetize the value of what's already been landfilled. We have every incentive in the world to not only capture the gas, but then sell it and maximize the value as we do, for instance, in getting those renewable energy credits we talked about earlier. We certainly, I think, have done a better job communicating what we do on the environmental side, as I said, in the ordinary course of our business. We also talk about tracking and providing the statistics on a year-over-year basis to give people the opportunity to see the trends. I think as an industry, we've sort of all migrated to provide a SASB disclosure, which is, we think, a good place to start in terms of the right metrics to be looking at. That, in my mind, is the E side.
On S and G, the way that we communicate where we are in the industry is we focus on things like safety, where you see us having the best record in the industry and an IR rate and other modifier rates, which are half of the industry averages. You look at that and you look at our company and our approach to the business and the culture, which the emphasis on people, which has been integral to our strategy, and we think a differentiator, which in a year like this is no more important.
I've already talked about the kinds of things we did with respect to taking care of our employees, and the fact that we're more focused on adding costs to protect our employees and take care of them in this difficult time than we are on touting the impact of costs going away, which of course they went away given the slowdown of activity. Finally on governance, I think that as we've grown and evolved and you've seen the complexion and makeup of our board change. Some changes there most recently with respect to diversity and establishing targets there. I think that resonates well with investors, and I think it shows that we deliver on the commitments that we mention, because that had been actually a plan and was in the works, before we had some changes in our directors last year.
I like to think that the way we present ourselves is by communicating what it is that we do, how we think, how we run the company, and how our leadership team has used the importance of people in protecting and supporting communities where we all live and work. That final piece is the way we give back to our communities, which is another aspect of what we're doing during this period as we talk about, whether it's at a local level with food banks and assistance or our employee relief fund, or at a corporate level, where we do annual fundraisers where we're generating over $1 million every year that we're giving back to local charities.
Thank you for that, Mary Anne. Maybe one more quick one, as we only have a couple minutes left. Someone's asking about any update on franchise markets in New York City, and maybe just some context for people on the line. In the Progressive deal, Waste Connections got some New York City operations of which, correct me if I'm wrong, but that you're still running. It's obviously a much more urban market. There's been some talk in New York City about converting some of the city into franchise exclusive zones, which would seem to fit in the broader Connections strategies. Just any update? Thank you.
Everything you described is exactly right about the situation in New York. Prior to COVID, the expectation was that the RFP would go out sometime this year with an expectation that there could be a change by 2024, meaning that's when it would be implemented. What you've seen during this period is the dates are getting pushed out given the environment we're all dealing with.
Perfect. With that, we've reached just about the end of our time. Mary Anne, thank you so much for being here. Your thoughts and insights are always much appreciated by me. Thank you to all the participants for their questions. Mary Anne, I'll turn it back over to you for any final thoughts, and then close it.
Again, I just want to say thank you, John, to you for the coverage, at UBS for including us in this conference, and to everyone on the call for their interest in listening. We appreciate it, and I'm happy to take any follow-up questions if a question wasn't answered. I look forward to seeing you and everyone else at some point in the future, but appreciate the virtual conference in the meantime. Thanks.
Great. Enjoy the rest of your day