Dollar Thrifty Achieves Most Profitable Year, 4Q

Counting a healthy used-car market as one of the factors helping its success in 2011, Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group notched its most profitable full-year and fourth-quarter ever.

Commenting on the latest yearly and quarterly earnings report released Tuesday, Dollar Thrifty chairman, president and chief executive officer Scott Thompson said: “We are pleased to announce that for the second consecutive year  the company is reporting record earnings.

“During 2011, we benefitted from a robust used vehicle market, a recovering travel market with increasing demand for value-oriented product offerings, and our ongoing focus on expense control and productivity initiatives,” he added.

Delving into the specifics, Dollar Thrifty pulled in $159.6 million in net income last year, up from $131.2 million in 2010.

Officials noted that net income in 2010 was positively impacted by $0.54 per diluted share due to favorable changes in fair value of derivatives and long-lived asset impairments. Meanwhile, the same favorable impact boosted 2011 net income by $0.06 per diluted share.

Additionally, there was a $2.7 million negative impact on 2011 net income from after-tax merger-related costs. The same factors negatively affected 2010 net income by $13.2 million.

Non-GAAP net income for 2011 came in at $157.7 million, up from $115 million a year ago. With merger-related expenses taken out of the equation, non-GAAP net income was $160.4 million in 2011 and $128.2 million for 2010.

Corporate adjusted EBITDA (with merger-related expenses off the table) totaled $303.2 million, up around $45 million year-over-year.

Revenues came in at $1.55 billion, up from $1.54 billion the year before. There was roughly a 1-percent gain in rental revenue, which came in at  $1.48 billion. Pushing the rental hike was the 3.8-percent rental day gain, with the 2.9-percent drop in revenue per day holding the increase back a bit. 

Fourth Quarter

Moving along to share quarterly results, DTAG generated net income of $33.9 million during the period, up more than $21 million from the fourth quarter of 2010.

Net income totals in both periods were impacted by changes in the fair value of derivatives. The fourth quarter of 2011 was negatively affected by $0.01 per diluted share, while the year-ago period was positively impacted by $0.14 per diluted share.

As for non-GAAP net income, it totaled $34.1 million in the latest quarter, more than four times as high as the $8.3 million generated a year earlier.

The fourth-quarter corporate adjusted EBITDA reached $63.5 million, more than double the $30.2 million from a year ago. There was a negative impact of $2.1 million to the 2010 period from merger-related expenses, while the 2011 period did not incur any.

Liquidity, Other Financial Metrics

Officials noted that DTAG paid down all of its $143 million in outstanding corporate debt  last year while also fully funding a forward stock repurchase agreement of $100 million.

At the end of the year, DTAG’s unrestricted cash was at $509 million and the company had no corporate leverage. Moreover, there was also restricted cash and investments of $353 million for DTAG to use mostly to buy vehicles or repay vehicle financing obligations.

DTAG added or renewed $1.5 billion worth of fleet financing capacity last year, as well.