Axalta Coating Systems Ltd. has announced its financial results for the fourth quarter and full year ended Dec. 31, 2015.
“Axalta finished the year with a strong fourth quarter performance, highlighted by 4.5 percent net sales growth year-over-year excluding currency and continued margin improvement,” said Charles Shaver, Axalta’s chairman and CEO. “Our team executed well on our core goal of delivering consistent and profitable growth throughout the quarter and the year despite headwinds from unfavorable currency exchange rates and economic pressures in emerging economies. We are proud of this progress, and expect to continue to build on this in 2016.”
Shaver added, “We continued to make substantial progress towards optimizing our cost structure in 2015, nearly completing our ‘Fit-For-Growth’ initiative while beginning to realize productivity savings from ‘The Axalta Way.’ We also largely completed four major capital projects, each of which has been executed on time and on-budget. We remain confident in our ability to exceed end-market growth and drive further improvements to our operating model despite uneven global macro demand and exchange rate pressures. We are encouraged that our end-markets remain stable in the aggregate, and our commercial progress has been strong as we grow market share with our existing customers and win new customers with our industry leading coatings solutions.”
Fourth Quarter Consolidated Financial Results
Net sales of $1 billion for the fourth quarter of 2015 increased 4.5 percent year-over-year excluding unfavorable foreign currency translation (decreased 7 percent as reported). Axalta said net sales growth was driven by 3.9 percent volume increases, indicating continued underlying strength in the company’s global coatings end-markets. Higher average selling prices in the quarter added 0.6 percent to net sales, while unfavorable foreign currency translation more than offset the volume and price gains.
“We achieved our financial goals for 2015 in spite of the challenging emerging market economic environment,” said Robert Bryant, Axalta’s executive vice president and chief financial officer. “In our first full year as a publicly held company, Axalta produced solid volume growth well above end-market rates, strong ongoing margin expansion and solid free cash flow generation, which allowed us to reduce our financial leverage and to make two high-ROI bolt-on acquisitions in the U.S. and Europe. We look forward to more progress on each of these fronts in 2016.”
Axalta’s outlook for the full year 2016 includes net sales growth of 4 to 6 percent in constant currency – flat to slightly down as reported.
