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spk01: Advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your host today, TC Robillard, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
spk03: Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Haynes Brands Quarterly Investor Conference call-in webcast. We are pleased to be here today to provide an update on our progress after the third quarter of 2024. Hopefully everyone has had a chance to review the news release we issued earlier today. The news release, updated FAQ document, and the replay of this call can be found in the Investor section of our Haynes.com website. On the call today, we may make forward-looking statements, either in our prepared remarks or in the associated question and answer session. These statements are based on current expectations or beliefs and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially. These risks include those related to current macroeconomic conditions, consumer demand dynamics, our ability to successfully execute our strategic initiatives, including our restructuring and other action-related items, our ability to deleverage on the anticipated timeframe, and the inflationary environment. These risks also include those detailed in our various filings with the SEC, which may be found on our website as well as in our news releases. The company does not undertake to update or revise any forward-looking statements which speak only to the time at which they are made. Unless otherwise noted, today's references to our consolidated financial results and guidance exclude all restructuring and other action-related charges and speak to continuing operations. Additional information on the quarter's results and our guidance, including a reconciliation of these and other non-GAAP performance measures to GAAP, can be found in today's news release. With me on the call today are Steve Bratsby, our Chief Executive Officer, and Scott Lewis, our Chief Financial Officer. For today's call, Steve and Scott will provide some brief remarks, and then we'll open it up to your questions. I'll now turn the call over to Steve.
spk02: Thank you, TC. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our third quarter earnings call. Heng's brands delivered another quarter of strong results. Sales continued to improve around the globe, and we're at the midpoint of our guidance range. And we exceeded the high end of our range for gross margin, operating profit, and earnings per share. We generated cash and further strengthened our balance sheet as we continue to reduce our leverage. And with strong visibility to input costs, cost savings, and debt reduction, we also raised our fourth quarter and full year outlook for operating profit, earnings per share, and cash flow. I want to thank all the Heng's Brands associates around the world. Over the last several years, and the last 12 months in particular, we've undergone significant change. Through the team's dedication, hard work, and adaptability, we have significantly strengthened the operational and financial foundations of our business, delivered quarterly results for our stakeholders, delivered value to our consumers and our retail partners, and we have replatformed Heng's Brands for the future. As highlighted last quarter, we've taken a number of strategic actions to fundamentally strengthen the company and create a more focused, simplified business. One with more consistent top line growth, higher margins, strong cash generation, a wide competitive moat, and multiple levers to unlock shareholder value over the next several years. We're seeing the benefits of these actions in our results, and we have strong visibility to continue profit and cash flow improvement for this year and beyond. We're progressing on the top line as revenue trends continue to improve sequentially as expected. On an organic, constant currency basis, sales in the quarter were consistent with prior year. And we're well positioned to deliver revenue growth in the fourth quarter, driven by several factors. We're executing incremental holiday and global brand programs. We gained incremental distribution in the Americas. Our Australian wholesale business is rebounding. We have higher levels of brand investment, and we'll anniversary last year's challenging fourth quarter. We're increasing our competitive advantage. In 2024, we've launched innovation behind all of our major brands, Haynes, Bonds, Maidenform, and Bally. In the U.S., innovation shipments are up over 30% year to date, and we're on pace for another record year. Innovation is enabling permanent retail space gains, and it's driving market share gain, particularly with young consumers. We're delivering structurally higher margins while supporting increased levels of growth-related investment. In the quarter, we delivered a gross margin of .8% and an operating margin of 13%, while simultaneously increasing brand investments to more than 5% of sales. The structural improvement in our margins is sustainable as driven primarily by assortment management and permanent cost savings initiatives. With respect to assortment management, we're seeing the benefits to gross margin from our continued skew optimization and reduction efforts, as well as the addition and success of margin of creative innovation. In terms of our cost savings initiatives, this goes above and beyond simply removing champion stranded costs. This is about operating with simplicity and focus. It's about streamlining our processes, optimizing our supply chain assets, and fundamentally changing the way we work. In turn, this is driving a lower fixed cost structure, increased operating efficiencies and utilization, all while improving service levels and in-stocks with lower amounts of inventory. As we highlighted last quarter, we have detailed plans in place to deliver a step function change in our cost structure and drive to our operating margin target of more than 15%. Specifically in the quarter, we reduced headcount and corporate costs across the organization, and we continue to right-size and rebalance our manufacturing and distribution networks. We're also generating cash, paying down debt, and reducing balance sheet leverage. -to-date, as of the end of the third quarter, we've generated approximately $200 million of operating cash flow and lowered our leverage nearly a full turn. Since the end of the third quarter and with the closing of the champion divestiture, we paid down an additional $870 million of debt in the month of October, which puts us well on our way to delivering our goal of $1 billion of debt pay down in the second half of the year. So in closing, we delivered another quarter of strong results and my confidence and enthusiasm for the future of our change brands continues to grow. We're seeing the benefits of our strategic actions in our results, and we have visibility to continued margin improvement, cash generation, and debt pay down in 2025 and beyond. We are now even better positioned to accelerate the flywheel of increased earnings growth and faster de-leverage of our balance sheet to drive increased shareholder value over the next several years. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Scott.
spk08: Thanks, Steve. I want to add my thanks to the Global Haynes Brands team for their continued hard work, dedication, and results over the past several quarters. We've simplified our business, strengthened our financial foundation and our balance sheet, and unlocked cost savings that are funding increased investments to drive top-line growth. The actions we've taken and the changes we've made have accelerated the step function change and lowering our cost structure. These benefits are expected to build over the next several quarters, giving us further visibility into continued margin improvement, strong cash generation, and continued debt reduction. For today's call, I'll touch on the highlights from the quarter, provide details on the additional debt pay down in October, and then I'll provide some thoughts on our outlook, which include raising our profit and cash flow guidance. Overall, we've delivered strong third quarter results. We saw continued sequential improvement and top-line trends as expected. Operating profit increased 46% over prior year, and interest expense decreased due to lower levels of debt, all of which drove an 850% increase in EPS. For the quarter, net sales of $937 million was at the midpoint of our outlook. This represents a decrease of .5% versus prior year, with 180 basis points coming from the overlap of last year's US grocery divestiture and 75 basis points from FX headwinds. On our organic cost of currency basis, net sales were consistent with prior year, representing another quarter of sequential improvement in -over-year trends. Looking at our segments, in the US, net sales decreased 1% compared to last year, in line with our outlook. Despite the challenging environment, our strategy is working and we're continuing to win in the marketplace. Through increased brand investments, product innovation, and incremental retail programs, our point of sale trends have outperformed the market here today. In our international business, net sales increased 4% over prior year on a constant currency basis, driven by growth in the Americas and Asia. With respect to our Australian business, sales were essentially flat with last year, as we were mitigating the challenging consumer environment with our strategic actions to launch innovation, drive consumer engagement, and align our assortment with the current buying behavior of the consumer. Touching briefly on our other segment, all of our -over-year sales decrease in the quarter was due to the divestiture of our hosiery business, which was sold in the third quarter last year, as well as the completion of the transition service agreement between our supply chain and our previously owned European underwear business. During the margins, we saw significant -over-year improvement in our gross and operating margins, both of which came in above the high end of our guidance. While we continue to see a -over-year benefit from input costs as we anniversary the impact from peak inflation, we are also seeing the benefits from our permanent cost savings initiatives and assortment management. This is allowing us to drive structurally higher and sustainable margins while supporting increased levels of brand investment. And this was evident in our results. For the quarter, our gross margin increased 525 basis points to an all-time high of 41.8%. Our operating margin increased 435 basis points to 13%. With our visibility to input costs and our cost savings initiatives, we're confident we can continue to deliver -over- year margin expansion in our gross and operating margins for the fourth quarter and through 2025 and beyond. And with respect to EPS, our focus on paying down debt yielded a reduction of more than $8 million of interest expense in the quarter as compared to last year. The lower interest expense coupled with higher profit margins drove EPS to 15 cents from last year's loss of 2 cents. Turning to cash flow in the balance sheet, with better than expected profit performance and disciplined working capital management, we generated $92 million of operating cash flow in the quarter and nearly $200 million year to date. We also continued to strengthen our balance sheet. Leverage at the end of the quarter was 4.3 times on the net debt to adjust to the EBITDA basis, which was more than a full-term low for than last year's 5.5 times. And in October, we paid down $870 million of debt, giving us further confidence and visibility to deliver our goal of paying down $1 billion of debt in the second half of this year. And now turning to guidance, where all of my comments were referred to adjusted results. As we began the year, while our outlook disowned a community consumer environment around the globe, we expected progression in the -over-year sales trends each quarter, including a return to growth by the end of the year. And in terms of margins, we said we were well positioned for -over-year margin expansion and profit growth in each quarter, given our visibility to input costs and cost savings in our initiatives. Year continues to play out as we expected, which is evident in our results as well as our outlook. But we raised our profit and ETS guidance for the fourth quarter and full year. We raised our full-year cash flow guidance, and we expect net sales to come in at the midpoint of our prior guidance range for both fourth quarter and full year. Touching on the specifics, we expect net sales of approximately $900 million for the fourth quarter. On our organic constant currency basis, this represents a 3% growth over the last year. Turning to operating profit, we expect fourth quarter profit to increase 17% over last year to approximately $115 million, and operating margin to expand approximately 160 basis points to 12.8%. Looking at EPS, we expect fourth quarter EPS to increase more than 130% to approximately 14 cents. And with our commitment to pay down debt and our outlook for continued margin improvement, we believe we are well positioned for double-digit EPS growth next year. And with respect to our outlook on cash flow and leverage, we raised our operating cash flow outlook for the full year to approximately $250 million. With our debt payments to date and internal cash generation, we continue to expect our year-round labor ratio to decrease approximately 1.5 terms -to-year, and to end in 2025 at approximately three times on the net debt to adjust to the EBITDA basis. So in closing, the year is unfolding as expected, and I am confident in our strategy to unlock value creation opportunities in front of us. Sales trends are improving. We're driving structurally higher and sustainable margins, and we're aggressively paying down debt. We believe we are well positioned to increase shareholder returns over the next several years to a combination of double-digit earnings growth and continued debt reduction. And with that, I'll turn the call over to TC.
spk03: Thanks, Scott. That concludes our prepared remarks. We'll now begin taking your questions, and we'll continue as time allows. I'll turn the call back over to the operator to begin the question and answer session. Operator?
spk01: As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question at this time, please press star 1-1 on your touchtone telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from Paul Ojwe with Citi.
spk05: Hey, everyone. It's Brandon Chidamong for Paul. So your guidance would seem to imply a slightly lower gross margin rate in the fourth quarter than the third quarter. I think historically, you know, fourth quarter is typically higher than three-queue, but obviously a lot of things have changed. You know, were there some factors that allowed three-queue to overachieve versus like what you think might be normal going forward? And then you also had some comments that you think that, you know, you can expand the gross margin in 2025 and beyond. So just trying to get a sense of in the context of what was a record high gross margin in the third quarter, how should we expect that to trend over the next quarter in a couple years?
spk08: Yeah, thanks for your question, Brandon. I appreciate you joining the call. So on gross margins, very pleased with how our margin performance we've had this year. We began the year, we knew we'd have margin growth and expansion over the year, and that's exactly what we're seeing. And in fact, the third quarter was an all-time high that we mentioned in our prepared mark, the 41.8%. As you look at Q4, we're actually guiding Q4 to be roughly similar to where we were for Q3, so around that 41.8%, so pretty flat. And as you think about our margins going forward, let me actually step back and help frame up how we're thinking about it and how we're approaching our gross margin and operating margin over the rest of this year and 25 and beyond. So as you look at going forward, the way we're thinking about this is more of a structural expansion and sustainable margins going forward. It's really, we think about it in two phases about how we were driving margins. The first, and you've already been seeing this over the last year, the first phase was getting our gross margins back to that pre-pandemic gross margin level and that high 30% range, right? And we achieved that actually at the fourth quarter of last year. Now, we're past the hyperinflation, the input costs have now stabilized, and we're at levels that we expected and we priced for, and recall that we never priced for the peak of inflation. And so as you move forward into this year, and we talked about this on the last call, we anticipate that we will be growing our gross margin to that low 40% range. And we're doing that primarily in two different areas of driving benefit. One is in assortment management. As you think about the skew reduction that we've been talking about, and life cycle management, we've actually taken out 50% of our skews since we've been focused around this. And we're targeting and really attacking, eliminating the underperforming skews, the margin dilutive skews, and that's really driving a benefit to our margins. We're also scaling innovation. As you think about the innovations that we've been talking about, there are margin and creative innovations, so that's also driving a favorable mix from a product standpoint. And then the second part is the cost savings program. We have detailed plans in place that are really driving a step function change as you think about what we can do from a margin performance standpoint. And that spans not only cost of sale, but also SG&A. And as Steve mentioned in the earlier remarks, this goes above and beyond the champion stranded cost. So we are streamlining processes, we're optimizing our supply chain, really changing the way we're doing the work. And we're really focused on moving with pace. We've accelerated a lot of the actions into 2024, and we expect the vast majority of those initiatives to be completed in 2025. So again, it goes back to, this is a structural change about how we're thinking about the margins, it's sustainable going forward. And so, you're getting these savings faster. As you see this play out next year, just like we said this year, we have great visibility to our costs. We have great confidence that we know we can deliver year over year margin expansion next year and in the years to come.
spk05: Thanks, that's super helpful. And just one follow up, now that the champion sales is officially behind you,
spk04: are there
spk05: any synergies maybe from separating that manufacturing capacity that you've uncovered? Is that fully contemplated and getting to that EBIT margin of 15%?
spk02: Good morning, Brandon and Steve. When you start to back out champion out of this business, there are some areas where there were dedicated champion facilities, and obviously
spk03: those are margin sales, but there's
spk02: other facilities where champion was a portion of the capacity. We have all that really clearly identified and are taking that cost directly out. In addition to a lot of other costs that Scott talked to you about. So think of this as an opportunity for us, not only to take out what you would define as potentially stranded costs. We have plans to get those out. Those will be out by the middle of next year, but we're also going further than that. And Scott talked about that structural change. That's all underway and actually it's playing out faster than we originally anticipated. So we're accelerating those actions as we go forward. And as Scott just said, you're seeing it in our gross margin. So pretty holistic view. We don't expect any hangover and actually we expect to improve coming out of this.
spk05: That's great. Thank you very much and good luck. Thank you.
spk01: Our next question comes from David Swartz. Good morning, Star.
spk06: Morning, thanks for taking my question. You mentioned your expectations for improving sales trends. I'm wondering if that's based on the point of sale data that you're seeing and discussions with your wholesale partners or both. What gives you some confidence that we are seeing maybe some improving trends there?
spk02: Good morning, David. Thanks for your question. There's a number of things that are leading into it. And I think I'd go back and remind everybody that at the beginning of the year, we anticipated that sales would continue to improve sequentially and we're certainly seeing that throughout the year and then we'll flip to positive in Q4. When you look at the drivers of that, there's a number of things that get us there. Collection in Q4. Some of it is the actions that we're taking and that we're seeing, we've got incremental holiday and the brand programs that we didn't have last year that I think are gonna make a difference. The space game, our Australia wholesale business is starting to rebound a little bit and our brand investments working. So you've put all those together and with quite frankly, overlapping a challenge Q4 last year, you see us pivoting to growth. In terms of POS directly, it's starting to improve slightly or on trend there, it's getting better but we have not come out of a challenging consumer environment and we've been talking about that throughout the year. I think that'll continue for a while as we go forward but we factored all that into our guide and think that we're set up to continue to improve like we showed in throughout the year in the Q4 performance and continue to take market share.
spk06: Thanks a lot.
spk01: Thank you. Our next question comes from Paul Kearney with Barclays.
spk04: Morning, thanks for taking my question. You mentioned the increased brand investments to more than 5% of sales. I'm just curious, what do you view as the right level of brand investments longer term in order to drive growth above the market rate on the top line? Thank you.
spk02: Yeah, thank you, Paul. We've been targeting roughly a 5% investment level which is where we were this quarter. As we look at our business, the different segments, the global footprint, all our different brands, we roll all that up and we think 5% is the right number. Now, it will be 5% every single quarter. No, it might be a little lower, it might be a little higher but we're kind of locked into that number right now and as you think about where we are from a profit and a margin perspective, all those cost savings are gonna now be incremental because we're already at that 5% level. So we don't have to save money to get to that level. So we feel pretty good about where we are and the returns that we're getting on that investment.
spk04: Thank you. If I could just follow up, could you just brief a comment on inventory levels at your retail partners and the replenishment order into holiday and your visibility on that? Thank you.
spk02: Sure, we feel pretty good about inventory levels. There's always puts and takes across different retailers. All of our programs for holiday have been shipped and are loaded in with our retail partners. So we think that inventory is in pretty good shape. Retail inventory is up slightly year over year and particularly for holiday, our shipments are up. We've got incremental space, we've got incremental programming, our share of the space is up. So while we're reducing our inventory and we're down 13% year over year in the quarter, we are rebalancing with retailers and feel really good about our holiday load in.
spk07: Thank you, plus a lot.
spk01: Our next question comes from William Reuter with Bank of America.
spk07: Hey, good morning. This is Rob Brighby on for Bill Reuter. I just wanted to double-click into costs for next year. I was wondering if you could discuss maybe your outlook for ocean freight costs as well as cotton costs. I think that you mentioned on the last call that you had hedged 60% of your 2025 purchases. I was just wondering if you had any update on that. Thank you.
spk02: Sure, when you think about ocean freight and obviously there's a lot of discussion about that, we're really well positioned for the next several quarters on ocean freight. The vast majority of our moves are inside of our contracts and in total, when you think about a little bit of pressure in the Eastern hemisphere versus the Western hemisphere, we're actually running freight rates below our plans in what we expected for the year and it's one of the real benefits we have of our supply chain with having Eastern-Western hemisphere benefit. Western hemisphere is actually running lower right now, so we're offsetting that and feel pretty good about freight and all of our input costs to next year because we've got really good visibility and we're basically bought up for cotton for almost a whole year next year, so we don't expect to see any fluctuation there. So you step back, we feel really good about our gross margin. You've seen that improvement throughout the year. You've seen us hit an all-time high this quarter and we expect to see really strong gross margin improvement as we go into next year.
spk07: Great, that's super helpful, I appreciate it. And then the second one from us, what debt did you repay in October? I was wondering if you could comment on that and then maybe any thoughts around the pacing or magnitude of future debt repayment. That would be super helpful, thank you.
spk08: Yes, thanks for your question. So the debt pay down, we paid $170 million in October of debt and it was a combination of the champion proceeds, which is a vast majority, and we also had some internal cash generation. As far as what we paid, it was a mix of the term A and term B loans, a little heavier on the term B loan payment of the mix. And then as you think about the rest of the year, we've talked about the billion dollars, that really puts us in a really good place and we're really on track for that billion dollar debt pay down. And when you factor that in and the margin growth, profit growth, we're gonna be kind of down about a turn and a half a year over year with our leverage. Then going into next year, we talked about the margin improvement, cashflow. By the end of next year, we're gonna be around three times leverage. So really good progress, you can feel really good about it.
spk01: That concludes today's question and answer session. I'd like to turn the call back to TC Robillard for closing remarks.
spk03: We'd like to thank everyone for attending our call today and we look forward to speaking with you soon. Have a great day.
spk01: This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.
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