Miller Industries, Inc.

Good day everyone and welcome to the Miller Industries first quarter 2021 results conference. Please note that today's call is being recorded and now I'd like to turn the call over to Brendan Dunlap at FTI Consulting. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning everyone. I'd like to welcome you to the Miller Industries conference call. We are here to discuss the company's 2021 first quarter results which were released after the close of market yesterday. With us from the management team today are Bill Miller, chairman of the board, Will Miller, president and co-CEO, Jeff Badgley, co-CEO, Debbie Whitmire, executive vice president and CFO, and Frank Madonia, executive vice president, secretary, and general counsel. Today's call will begin with formal remarks from management, followed by a question and answer period. Please note in this morning's conference call, management may make forward-looking statements in accordance with the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. I'd like to call your attention to the risks related to these statements, which are more fully described in the company's annual report file on Form 10-K and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Jeff. Please go ahead, Jeff.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. When we begin the year, we are glad to put 2020 behind us and look forward to 2021. While the beginning of 2021 has had its own challenges, Will and I are pleased to say that we have put those challenges behind us as our business steadily improved as we progressed through the quarter. Additionally, the normalization of our business that we experienced towards the end of the first quarter has persisted into our second quarter. More specifically, in January, our operational performance was materially impacted by the rollout of our new enterprise software system, as well as ongoing disruptions throughout our supply chain and limited availability of freight transportation, all of which resulted in delivery delays throughout our network. However, Will and I are pleased to report that we have completed the first phase of our enterprise software upgrades and we are already beginning to benefit from enhanced operational efficiencies as we exited the first quarter. Our sales for the first quarter fell 3.5% from the prior year period to $169.9 million due to the delays caused by the software rollout and supply chain challenges in the first half of the quarter. Gross profit for the first quarter decreased 14.6% year-over-year to $15.8 million compared to $18.5 million a year ago, and gross margin contracted approximately 120 basis points compared to the prior year period due to the decline in top-line sales as well as increased costs associated with transportation and product shipments. In our international business, ongoing pandemic-related restrictions in Europe and global shipping constraints primarily related to export sales weighed on performance. Despite those challenges, underlying demand trends in the region remain favorable. Domestically, customer demand continues to improve, as evidenced by our strong backlog and increasing order rate. However, transportation and freight availability were challenged, which increased the cost of shipping our products. We are aggressively working through those challenges to ensure that we can meet customer demand. Now I'll turn the call over to Debbie, who will review the first quarter financial results. Then I will provide some commentary about the current market environment and some closing remarks. Debbie?