Samsonite Group S A

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Samsonite Group 2026 First Quarter Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 and 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 and 1 again. Please note that this event is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Alvin Concepcion, Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. Welcome to the Samsonite Group first quarter conference call. On the call with us today are Carl Gendro, Chief Executive Officer, and Tom Pizzuti, Chief Financial Officer. Before starting today's call, we would like to remind you that any forward-looking statements made on the call involve risks and uncertainties that are subject to the company's provision, as stated in the disclaimers in the company's press release and earnings announcement, and that actual results can differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. I'll now turn the call over to Kyle. Okay.

Thanks, everyone. Thanks for joining. And I'm on slide five, ready to roll. So we're excited to report net sales growth continued into Q1, despite the conflict in the Middle East. Our net sales were up 4.1% on a reported basis, up 0.4% on a constant currency basis. Net sales growth across North America and Latin America improved sequentially relative to Q4. Europe remained positive, and Asia grew despite a challenging environment caused by the conflict in the Middle East. Importantly, excluding Middle East and India, the markets that were seeing the most effect from the conflict to date, consolidated net sales grew 5.9% on a reported basis or 1.6% on constant currency basis year over year with sequential improvement overall versus Q4. Net sales growth for Asia, excluding the Middle East and India, was up 8.4% on a reported basis and 5.1% on a constant currency basis year over year. We continue to see success in our D2C and our lifestyle bags category. Our D2C and lifestyle bags outperformed our performance. Our strong portfolio of new and innovative products supported growth in our direct-to-consumer business, and our lifestyle bags grew as well. Lifestyle bags grew almost 4.8%, close to 5%, and our D2C overall grew 4.2%, with our own directly-operated e-commerce channels growing over 11%. Our growth margin remains strong. 59%, reflecting disciplined execution across all of our brands, channels, and product categories. We're focused on elevating our iconic brands via world-class storytelling. We're increasing our marketing spend, as we've signaled in the past. We spent 5.7% of marketing spend in Q1, up 40 basis points from last year, as we invest in delivering sustainable growth. This supported successful new media campaigns such as Samsonite Nexus launch, covered later in the deck, and also 2D Mediterranean Escape, both very successful launches in the first part of the year. We generated very strong cash flow. We have a history of generating strong cash flow. We're up $68 million versus the prior year from a cash flow perspective in Q1. Tom will cover that in a bit more detail in his financial update. And we're poised for improved net sales growth in 2026 overall. We believe we've managed the business well through the current conditions. And as we execute our strategic roadmap and strategic pillars, we expect low single-digit growth net sales for the full year. This is important. This is since potential effects of the conflict in the Middle East do not maturely worsen. If we go to a look at the brands, all brands delivered positive growth adjusting for the Middle East. You can see Samsonite sequential improvement continuing Q3, Q4, and into Q1, 1.4% growth. That was supported by sequential improvements in North America, down 3.1 in Q1 versus down 6 in Q4, and positive growth in Asia and Europe and accelerating growth in Latin America helping the Samsonite story. Tumi continue to deliver positive growth, down a bit from what we saw in Q4, but still positive territory, up 1.1%. Asia is particularly strong, 6.2% growth. And if I adjust for Middle East and India, Asia, Tumi up 8.8%. Europe continues to grow, 5% growth. And Latin America, which we've seen accelerated growth with Tumi, up 14%. We saw North America down slightly, 4.6% down, largely due to the macroeconomic uncertainties impacting consumers in the U.S., particularly impacting retail traffic that we've seen across our U.S. business. A couple of reductions, and I would say a planned reduction in wholesale net sales to off-price retails within the brand as well. I'd like to, while I'm talking about tuning, take this time to acknowledge and welcome Luciano Roddenbush, who's joined our team. I mentioned him on the last call. He's been one month on the job, and I am confident he will help drive global to me sales to its full potential um as he settles in and so welcome aboard luciana uh an american tourister adjusted for conflict grew close to four percent sequential meaningful sequential improvements what we saw on q4 um in asia particularly where american tourist is a big driver if i adjust for india or middle east um up almost four percent um for the quarter as well If we go to regions, I think a similar story is what we see from a growth perspective across the board. Asia, as I said, up 5.1%. We saw meaningful growth within China. And sequential improvement in China, up close to 8% in Q1, from up 3% in Q4. A strong trend carrying into Q2 for China. And Korea, another important market for us, up 8.5% versus up 5.4% for Q4. And overall, Asia has terrific momentum. It's the one market where we're seeing the impacts largely because of the Middle East and India, where both of these are reported in our major. Even despite those, we're still delivering positive growth for Asia. You can see the sequential improvement in North America continuing to move. People are still moving and traveling in the U.S. I think they're more cautious in their spend. We feel that. The other thing I would point in our North America business is we saw a nice improvement from Q4. But within Q1, if I exclude our wholesale e-retailers, our net sales growth was 5.3% in Q1 versus negative 1.7. And that's largely impacted by one of our larger wholesale e-retailers changing their inventory position. And so if I adjust for just that one e-retailer or our e-retail business, our North American business trends are actually very strong, you know, almost matching what we're seeing in other regions in the business. Europe is steady. When I think about markets that are feeling the impact of conflict, India and Middle East, we can see it, but within Europe, you can see some of the impact of consumer sentiment, but still delivering positive growth in Q1, plus 0.8, and there's plenty of pressure there, but the consumers are still moving. What you see in Europe is maybe inbound traffic, not as much, inbound traffic from the Middle East, inbound traffic from Asia. We've seen some fall off there, but the underlying consumers within Europe are continuing to travel. And Latin America had a nice rebound, plus 4.5% growth in Q1 versus slightly down in Q4. Nice rebound in Mexico with business driven by larger wholesale customers that started to buy back in. And a meaningful shift there and a new leader in Latin America or in Mexico that's doing a great job as he starts sending the business. The next slide talks about, and I covered this on the last call, and I have a few slides to talk about what we're focused on as far as strategic pillars. These are the priorities as we think about how we push the business. Even in this environment, we continue to push the business against these pillars. They're the right things to be doing. The first one is around amplifying, elevating the awareness of our iconic and consumer-centric grants. This is enhanced storytelling. and leading in with advertising and spend to continue to drive all of our brands, and particularly our three core brands. Our second pillar is around being the clear winner in digital. I think the word the clear is important, not a leader, the leader in digital, across all of the portfolios that make up digital, all the channels that make up digital. I'll cover that in a second, too. We're very focused here in driving further support of not just our digital business, but the whole multi-channel effect that happens on the businesses. In Pillar 3, I think there's tremendous opportunities in this business in the lifestyle bag space. There's what we call white space opportunities. It's a huge market. I'll give you a view to how we view the market and what our market position is and why we think we can continue to deliver. As I just said, we are delivering here. This was close to 5% growth in the quarter and it's continued to outpace the growth in our business as we execute against this strategy. And the last one, and I think how I described it the last time on the call, is you would expect this from us. But importantly, to continue to win with products that resonate globally. Parallax is on the page here in the picture. We talked about that last time. I'll show you a little bit more update on Parallax. It's a good example of when we get behind global collections on a global basis and focus, we can move the needle. And we'll give you some examples of that and what we're doing as we roll into this year. Importantly, I'm on slide nine. Importantly, as we really advance our first two growth pillars, we created a GMEO, a Global Marketing and Ecom Office. That's off to a good start. I would say a running start and working really well across the organization. What is it focused on? It's around strengthening consistent global brand execution with local flexibility and driving high-impact storytelling to elevate brand awareness and perception. And as we lean into the advertising spin against this important aspect of what we're doing on the marketing side of the business, we're seeing early signs and really laying foundation for really tremendous forward growth. We're centralizing the digital marketing coordination to reduce duplication. That'll create efficiencies in business. But it'll also enable regions to respond faster and more effectively to local consumer needs against the backdrop of a well-supported global marketing and e-comm office. And lastly, as we lean and invest, we're embedding ROI-based decision-making performance, transparency, and stronger oversight, so increased marketing investments deployed with greater measurable impacts. The likes of MMM tools and the tools that we use around the business to properly evaluate and lean in in telling our stories. Mediterranean Escape on slide 10. This is a good example of, on the CUNY lens, around how do we tell this story. This was introduced in March of this year. It introduces meaningful newness that customers can feel for Grand Tumi, a color palette that's exciting. If you haven't seen it, take a look, but I'm guessing you've seen it if you're following this at all. Across luggage, women's bags, non-traveler lifestyle bags, really doing amazing work. It brings this sense of travel and joy, and this is around the storytelling. This is why it's under Pillar 1. There's a product piece to this, too, which I would say is part of Pillar 4, but it's around the storytelling that we're able to do in an elevated way, and I think the team's done a great job, and it continues, and it will start launching across the globe as we enter Q2. On page 10, this is an exciting campaign that we've just launched in North America. This is around elevating Grand Samsonite in North America with new media campaigns with Olivia Coppola. And it's Chocolate Mob is what it's called. If you really look online, you can't miss it. And this is part of our overall campaigns within the U.S. It's not just a bag. It's a Samsonite campaign. This is off to a great start. This is a colorway that we've matched across our three best-selling collections, Outline Pro, Elevation Plus, and Better Than Basics, which is effectively lifestyle bags that tie into these collections. It launched in April. Tremendous success for Loraleo across all methods of distribution, and it's a fan favorite of my house. My family loves the collection. Usually the temperature of something's off to a good run. So very excited about that. Lynn and team, great job. The second one is on D2C. Okay, and I covered this at the start, but D2C is our fastest-growing channel. D2C, directly operated D2C, up 11.3%. Our direct-to-consumer overall mix moved from 38% to 40%. Our overall D2C sales were up 4.2%. D2C e-commerce, 11.3%, but our retail increased by 1.4%. On the back of 11 well-placed company-operated retail stores over the last 12 months, and a slightly lower... same store sales growth, down 1.5%, but modest improvement. We're seeing improvement as we step out of Q4 into Q1 on the comp side as well. Overall, very happy with the direction that we're going on, not just our digital piece, but the overall direct consumer piece of the business. On slide 13, when I talk about digital, and we tend to point out in the last slide with focus on our direct consumer e-commerce, but when we talk about being the leader, it's around all of these platforms. Being the leader on not just our own sites, but mobile platforms that allow access from the go. Wholesale customers that have global reach and presence, that we're deeply involved in making sure that the way we show up matches the way we show up on our own sites. and we're properly supporting them, and importantly, across the globe, partnerships with leading retailers. And the scale of our business is we touch the entire globe from this footprint. Anywhere in the world where somebody is digesting digital, we can execute relevant to each one of those markets, but with some central coordination with the GMEO that I think is going to deliver amazing work. And so the teams are very focused there on the great results. On slide 14. significant white space opportunities in lifestyle bags. It's an industry that's sitting in 2025, around 67 billion, growing at a CAGR growth that's similar to luggage, 3.5% CAGR growth. Over the next five years, it'll be almost an $80 billion market. And we have a 3% share here. There's tremendous opportunity to move share here. And let me tell you what we're doing on that front on the next page. We're building a really market-leading strategy. We're focused on casual and duffels. That's kind of natural for us. We're expanding into women's lifestyle bags. You can see Voyager here in the middle. And American Tourister and all of our brands expanding beyond travel, traditional travel bags. You know, when you think about travel, you think about luggage, but the world and the consumers are moving. This is an under-seater picture here with American Tourister. It's a huge driver in Europe, and it has reached across the globe. And when you think about it and think about some of our most successful collections, the picture on the left is EcoDiver. That's a top-five collection for Europe, and we continue to invest in that. Next generation of that bag is coming out in the fall. Voyager, and you can see here the Mediterranean escape collections in the middle. And Voyager is a meaningful piece of business for us. You'll see a full relaunch of that as we go into next year. And as I said, Take to Cabin is what this is called for American Tourister. We're partnering with advisors. We have deep know-how in-house, but we're bringing advisors in to help us properly assess the market, assess what the opportunity is, assess what the playing field is, where is it distributed, where is it different than what we do today. Things we've been doing, but I know we can do better. So we're really leaning with advisors to make sure that we're executing against this. And we continue to evaluate acquisitions that will bolster our portfolio here. I think there are opportunities here. You've heard me say it on other calls. And as we lay more foundation here, I think we can continue to deliver outsized growth in this space. If you look at slide 16, you can see the growth. So we've gone from 36% lifestyle bags to 38%. As I covered, it's close to 5% growth across all of our brands. And we continue to be excited and push the needle here in the non-travel space or lifestyle bag space. You'll notice we've made a shift. For a long time, we called it non-travel. We've shifted to lifestyle bags, but I think it's a proper representation of what we're actually going after when we reassess the opportunity in this space. And then lastly, on the pillars, continue to win with products that have global resonance. We get scale benefits to the brand and to the products that we sell when we get products that touch the world, touch a couple of big regions, get behind it, support it properly with advertising. We lead the future in innovation and sustainability, building on our 150-year legacy. We're focused, as you know, on lighter, more flexible, durable, and sustainable materials. We centralized product and marketing coordination to enable global consistency. It's a little bit of a shift. We're really empowered decentralized organization, but we're putting our minds together to execute against this in a different way. And we're broadening the assortment in the adjacent categories, lifestyle bags. And here's just a few examples of products that fit that bill. On slide 18, this is Nexus. If you're in Europe, you've seen it. If you're in Asia, you're about to see it. In the U.S. as well. This is a collection that launched towards the end of Q1. It very quickly became a top seller collection in Europe. This is an amazing product built in our facilities in Belgium and Hungary. It's next generation hard side. Designed as the ultimate future-proof travel product. It's really an amazing product. It brings material leadership to life. showcase strength, lightness, and resilience that is bold and modern narrative. I think when you see the campaign and you get in front of the product, you'll feel exactly what I'm talking about. And just lastly beforehand to Tom, just another collection that's been tremendously successful. We talked about it at the end of last year. Parallax has been a home run. We continue to push it. We're back in stock across the globe. We sold through this very quickly at the end of last year when we launched it. We're launching new colors. Blue fog is really an amazing color. The coordination of color between travel and lifestyle bags, you can really start to feel it. So that's launching. And coffee and copper, another fan favorite at the Jendro House, launching in the fall. really an on-point color palette. And when you get in front of this project, the pictures on the screen doesn't do it justice. It's really an exciting product with technical features and packing features and sustainability features in this collection that's made it one of my favorite products to travel with. With that, I'll come back right after Tom for an outlook, and I'll turn it to Tom.

All right. Thank you, Kyle, and hello, everyone. We are on slide 21, and you already heard a brief recap of this from Kyle. I'll go into it a little bit more on the Q1 results. In Q1, reported sales grew 4.1%, and on a constant currency basis grew 0.4%, despite impacts from the Middle East conflict. Excluding the Middle East and India, which are the most impacted regions from the conflict, constant currency sales grew 1.6% in Q1, which would have been a sequential improvement from Q4. We saw improved sequential growth in North America and Latin America in Q1 relative to Q4, while Europe had stable growth, and Asia continued to grow year over year despite softness in the Middle East and India, as we mentioned. First margin was solid at 59%, reflecting disciplined execution across brands, channels, and product categories. As we looked forward, There are still some uncertainties in the cost environment due to the conflict in the Middle East, but we are well positioned to manage them. We have a highly experienced team and deep and longstanding relationships with our suppliers and have many levers we can pull, similar to how we managed tariff increases last year. This includes forward buying of inventory, reengineering products to reduce costs and focus on the margin we want to attain, and evaluating pricing actions that are appropriate. We're taking actions to navigate through this well and feel confident that we will maintain our strong gross margin profile in 2026. Marketing expenses as a percentage of sales were 5.7%, as you heard from Kyle, up 40 basis points from last year, same quarter, as we continue to invest in elevating our iconic brands to fuel future growth. G&A expenses improved as a percentage of sales, though our distribution expenses increased due in part to inflationary cost pressures. I'll provide more color on that in a minute. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 13.1% in the first quarter, down from last year due to the higher operational expenses, as I mentioned, as we made investments to drive long-term growth. So turning to slide 22, I want to provide a little bit more color on our operating expenses Overall, we are managing costs with discipline as we invest for future growth and operating leverage expansion. We remain focused on investments in marketing, digital, and selective store openings. As you heard Kyle mention, these are all very key to securing long-term brand growth opportunities. Our marketing expenses increase, which is consistent with our strategy to invest more in our brands to fuel future growth. G&A expenses As mentioned, we're 7.5% of net sales down 20 basis points from the prior year, reflecting this ongoing discipline in our expense management. Distribution expenses, on the other hand, as a percentage of net sales, we're 34.3%, up from 32.2% of net sales from the same time period last year. This increase was mainly due to inflation. Think of wages, rent, and other costs It was also due to selected new store openings and higher outbound freight costs, as e-commerce was a more significant portion of our mix, as Kyle had mentioned. Looking forward, we are working to offset cost pressures through productivity gains and tighter control of discretionary spend. Our efforts to mitigate operational expense increases, along with our ability to benefit from our scale and likely favorable channel mix shift allows us to invest in our key growth drivers as we mentioned. These investments position us to improve net sales growth as we enter seasonally stronger sales periods and drive improved operating leverage relative to Q1. As a result, we expect adjusted EBITDA margin levels to improve over the course of the year. That said, Q2 will be peak marketing spend for the year ahead of the important summer travel season, which should position us well for the back half of the year and beyond. So, relative to Q1, we expect a more modest sequential EBITDA margin improvement in Q2 and expect to be well positioned for significant sequential improvement in the back half of the year. So, moving to the next slide, 23, Our balance sheet remained healthy with a net debt position of about $1.07 billion at the end of Q1, which is an improvement of $29 million from the end of Q4. Our total net leverage ratio was 1.79 times, and we had strong liquidity of approximately $1.5 billion. We delivered strong adjusted free cash flow, as Kyle had mentioned, of $27 million in Q4, In Q1, an improvement of $68 million from the same period last year, which was mainly driven by favorable changes in net working capital. You'll recall that in Q1 of 2025, we were gearing up for the tariffs and Liberation Day, and so net working capital impacts the cash flow were a little bit less favorable then, so more favorable in Q1 of 2026. Our balance sheet is healthy, and it enables a return of cash to shareholders. A dividend of $140 million was recommended to shareholders on March 19th, representing a payout ratio of approximately 48% of 2025 adjusted net income. And today, we announced a $50 million share repurchase program, allowing us to repurchase shares opportunistically based on market conditions and capital allocation priorities. So in summary, we're happy that sales grew in a challenging macro environment. Our EBITDA margin was intentionally lower as we invested in future growth in a tough market. These investments will bear fruit in the back half of the year as we expect both sales growth and adjusted EBITDA margin to improve from the levels experienced in Q1. Adjusted pre-cash flow improves significantly, and our healthy balance sheet allows us to return a sizable amount of cash to shareholders. So there's a lot to be excited about as we look towards the future, both the near term and the long term. And I'll turn it back to Kyle for the 2026 outlook. Okay. Thanks, Tom.

Okay, outlook. Okay. We continue to be confident in the long-term tailwind supporting our business, including continued growth in travel demand, which we continue to see in much of the world, as well as our ability to execute our strategic priorities to accelerate growth, our pillars of growth. Further, as the industry leader, we expect to benefit significantly from renewed customer demand for luggage and travel over the next several years, following a recent period of more moderated growth after the revenge travel surge 2021-23. We talked about this in prior earnings calls. We're starting to see the benefits of that, and we can see it in the numbers today. Looking at the nearer term, in Q1, we performed as indicated in our last earnings call. Sales came in a little bit better than what we said due to our product innovation and our efforts to elevate the portfolio of our brands, the profile of our brands. Recall this includes increased spending on marketing, as Tom just covered and I covered earlier. Select opening of stores and investing in our business, particularly around the pillars. all of which we delivered on and, as expected, impacted our adjusted even margin relative to last year. As we look forward, we expect momentum from Q1 to continue, with a constant currency net sales growth in Q2 to be approximately similar to what we're seeing in Q1. And imagine Q2 is a quarter feeling the full impact of conflict, and we think we're going to deliver the same growth profile that you saw in Q1. We're off to a good start in April. We expect the full year numbers to be low single digit on a constant currency basis. a sequential improvement, as I said earlier, to 2025. These views assume the impact of the conflict in the Middle East do not materially worsen. We haven't assumed any sort of miraculous recovery, but we've assumed it does not get worse. There could be upside if it recovers sooner. As we indicated in our last earning call, we expect to maintain a strong gross margin profile in 26 and beyond. And you've seen us deliver that in Q1 as Tom covered in his earnings. And my sense is we're in a good position to manage this really well for the rest of the year. We're focused on investing in marketing to secure long-term brand growth opportunities across our core brands and all of our brands. We expect to spend marketing spend of approximately 6.5% this year. That'll be just shy of a 1% increase versus last year. And this will peak in Q2 as we invest in ahead of the summer travel season. That's our normal time to be leaning in. That will be about an 8% spend on marketing and advertising in Q2 as we support the summer travel season. Relative to Q1, we expect the adjusted EBITDA margin to improve over the course of the year, as Tom just indicated. And as we enter seasonally stronger net sales periods, and to improve our net sales. And as you heard from Tom in the back half of the year, we're expecting that off the actions. And the actions to mitigate costs, we feel that that will be a benefit to us on the margin as we progress through the year. As previously indicated, we'll continue to invest in our strategic pillars, the right thing to do, including marketing, while leveraging our scale advantages to drive sustainable growth, resulting in margin expansion in the future. Also, as Tom just covered, we remain committed to returning cash to shareholders. $140 million dividend we put to shareholders March. That'll be paid in July, 48% payout ratio. And earlier today, we announced a $50 million rare share repurchase program, allowing us to repurchase shares opportunistically based on current market conditions and our capital allocation priorities. And lastly, we're in a ready position for potential dual listing of the company's security in the United States. Our board of directors, myself, and our management team firmly believe a dual listing will enhance shareholder value and creation over time. We continue to monitor the macroeconomic and market conditions carefully so we get the timing right. And with a continued improvement in our business, we intend to complete this dual listing in 2026. So with that, those are our planned comments. We're very happy to shift to questions.

Thank you, Kyle and Tom. Before we move into Q&A, we do ask that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up in the interest of time. Operator, we can go into Q&A now.

Thank you. To ask a question, you will need to press star 1 and 1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. As a reminder, in the interest of time, please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Please rejoin the queue for any further questions. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 and 1 again. We will now go to our first question. One moment, please. And our first question comes from the line of Perry Young from UBS. Please go ahead.

Thank you for taking my question. My first question is really on the course. We understand if you are opening store, we are focusing on the expected growth. So is it legitimate to expect the FP&A expense to sort of accelerate just the growth rate? For this quarter, it seems that it is higher than expected. I'm not sure if you could provide some guidance for the rest of the year in terms of the FP&A expense. Thank you so much.

So, Perry, thank you for your question. This is Tom speaking. So, for the rest of the year, we're looking to take out a meaningful amount of costs. This is not a restructuring, but just think of it as very disciplined cost management. So, we entered the year with a budget that assumed a certain level of net sales growth. As the impact of the conflict has muted that sales growth, as you've heard. We are reacting to it, and we are clamping down on expenses we're taking out across all regions and corporate, and it covers every part of our expense base beneath gross margin.

I think importantly, too, just we're consciously leaning in. I think we guided at the year-end results that we'd be leaning in on advertising. So when we think about the full year, I think the biggest impact you'll see, the full-year margin, even a margin last year to this year, would be about a 0.8%, 0.9% increase in the advertising spend to what we had last year. So when you play out the full year, I think that'll be the biggest impact that you'll see on a full year basis from an EBITDA margin perspective. And that was by design. We intentionally are leaning into advertising. As Tom rightly says, we had good momentum going into the year, and the conflict has caused a ripple, and we're doing the right thing in just quickly assessing and being very disciplined on discretionary costs around the business, generating some meaningful opportunities on the SG&A side. And you'll see and feel that as the year progresses in the EBITDA margin.

I see. Thank you so much. And if time allows, can I also follow up another question, which you highlight that the bad is the white space opportunity. And you also mentioned that the company is evaluating acquisition. I'm not sure if you could share what types of companies or characters would you be interested in and what kind of scale of acquisitions should we expect, if any? Thank you.

I'll just give you kind of a high-level theme. There are plenty of bags that are just solely lifestyle bags. I think I've used backpack brands like Eastpac, Jansport, things that are interesting to us that would be well in our hands. We've talked about those in the past, but that could give an example of that. But there's other businesses that have some travel product but meaningful products. lifestyle bag component of what they're doing. And so those are the things that we're most interested in. I don't necessarily need another travel luggage brand, but something that's in this space in a meaningful way and has brand heat in this space. That's really important as we look. And we've done a lot of acquisitions. I've done a lot of acquisitions in here. Something with scale. You know, something north of $150, $200 million in revenue that's really strong in one or two regions that has opportunities to You know, we have inbounds all the time. We're just evaluating the marketplace. And as we work with advisors to really assess kind of what are the opportunities that we can really execute well, that will fit into kind of our arena. And the definition of lifestyle bags is everything but fashion handbags. That's not what we're looking at, just to give you a sense for that.

Thank you. Thank you. Your next question today. Okay. comes from the line of Justin Wei from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks for taking my question. First question regarding the U.S. market. So how would you describe the consumer demand or the competition in the U.S. market now? I think it's good to see the potential improvement quarter over quarter. But really, Samsonite brand and 2Me brands, they're kind of in the negative territory, while American Tourister grew strongly in first quarter. So how do you assess that kind of market situation? Especially, I think the macro backdrop seems to be fine, the travel market or GDP growth kind of thing. And also, you called out this impact from the e-tailer inventory reduction. Is that kind of one-off with just the first quarter, or it could impact on the second quarter as well? And my follow-up question is regarding the 2P margin. Like, you sound very confident about managing above 59% GDP margin. That's fantastic. But, you know, the backdrop is that the policy inflation is there. And also, I think the U.S. dollar is a sort of depreciation this year. That might traditionally hit the GDP margin a little bit. The good news is that you're still confident. So, could you elaborate a little more of the drivers? Thank you.

Sure. Let me talk about customer demand. And the reason I call it kind of picking out e-retailers, I think it gives some indication of underlying kind of demand. We do see U.S. consumers traveling. We see them spending a little bit more cautiously. Our business, and the reason you see the American Tourist Wing in North America, particularly in the Samsonite and American Tourist side, has a meaningful wholesale component, and these wholesale customers are buying a little bit lumpy. So you see this kind of American Tourist moment off of a low Q4 and then a big step up in Q1. That's the lumpiness that we talked about. But when you peel into brand Samsonite and you kind of adjust out what we're seeing in e-retailers, the underlying growth for Q1 looks to be closer to 5%. You know, there is good consumer momentum. They're buying more cautiously. I would say as you move into the upper price points where Tumi's playing, we've seen significant retail traffic down. And so when we're looking at what's going on in the Tumi business, that's really around the traffic into the store footprint. There's plenty of reasons in Q1 around weather. Let's not forget the TSA disruption in the U.S. That caused people to stutter step when traveled. We've seen some improving trends, but we're still kind of feeling some of that within the U.S. business. I think consumers are resilient, but they're cautious on their spend. And I think that continues. You know, it continues in Q2 in North America. But it's trending positive from where we were. You know, it's clear that consumers are moving. And then on the – I think on the e-retail side, that's a bit of timing as well. I can't quite predict, you know, kind of the inverse of that. But when somebody is making decisions around how they're managing inventory levels, that can cause disruptions that are timing-based. Our general sell-through at our wholesale customers generally has been good. A little softer than maybe what we started the year. I think in the midst of going into April and May, we can feel a little bit of softness. in sell-through, but it's still positive, and I think that's an indicator of what you're referring to, Dustin, which is the U.S. consumer continues to be pretty resilient. On the gross margin, gross profit side, we have a lot of confidence. Tom said it rightly. We have a long history of managing this really well. Just look at what we did last year with tariffs. We never missed a beat on gross margin, and we had tremendous tariffs on top of us. It's around the ability to manage with our suppliers. These are strong relationships. We work together. We buy forward a lot of inventory. So we're, you know, in many ways, we're brought forward, you know, six to nine months. You know, in the U.S., we're almost nine months forward. So we can manage. We have plenty of time to manage impact. We're watching the cost of plastic. We're watching kind of things that move. If there are movements, we'll be able to manage that. We'll be able to co-manage that with our suppliers. If we need to, we'll shift on price. We're not there yet because we have plenty of room to decide that. And this is what we do. We have a very good record of managing margin. And I think one of the pieces that will stick out is our ability to manage that, and we saw that last year for sure, is better than our competitors. Because of our scale, we can manage through this really well. And it's all in front of us. We're managing it well today. We're already in discussions for what the back half of the year looks like, but we have plenty of time to get that right. So, I have a lot of confidence. I actually think you'll see gross margin expansion during the year. 59 is kind of the low watermark for us, and that's often that Q1 season is that. When we go into the high selling season, the margins can creep up, and that's how we feel for the year.

Thank you. Your next question today comes from the line of from Hayden SVC. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking my question. So my first question is basically on the U.S. tariffs. If you can update us on the situation on the ground as to how much visibility you have around the timing and the magnitude of recoveries and what could be that upside. And second one, following up on the live cell backpacks, if you can talk about the margin profile of this category. Is it same below or higher compared to the luggage category? Thank you.

Yeah. From a tariff perspective, yes. You know, it's fluid situations. What I say, we started to see some stuff come in this week, small levels. We're navigating that. Well, there's a lot of work to do on what happens as that comes in. You know, there's plenty of noise in the U.S. Almost every morning headline is tariffs and leave the end consumer and the wholesale customer and the importer of records. So there's a lot of work to do on the tariff side. But the positive news is we started to see some of that come back in. The challenging part of that is kind of how does that navigate and what do we do? What I would say is there will be some net upside to us, obviously, but we're not in a position to really talk about what that is yet because we're still evaluating with our, I would say, our end customer or also customer kind of environment. So we're carefully navigating that, and it's early days. It's just started. It just started this week. It started yesterday. And, again, it's trickling, and it will take some time to see how this plays out. From a lifestyle backpack and just generally lifestyle bags perspective, for the lane that we want to operate in, those gross margins look very similar to our own margins of our business. There's plenty of low-end backpack business. That's not us. We're going to be looking for the backpack business lifestyle bag business, you know, there's a lot to this that matches the margin profiles of our business. And that's what we'll be focused on. And it looks, and it's healthy. You know, when you get out of kind of the entry-level pricing, you can, and with our scale abilities on the sourcing side, we can really deliver things that we've kind of half looked at. We know we can shift margin profiles, you know, just going backwards, way backwards in time. When we acquired Tuning, we grew their gross margin by 1,000 basis points just because of our sourcing capabilities. So if we look at things, we'll have opportunities to not just look at things that are in the right price zone, but to have margin expansion that can get it in line, if not better than some of our existing gross margins is how I think about it.

Thank you. Thank you. We will now take our final question for today. And our final question comes from the line of Simon Chung from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Hi, thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to get a bit more sense about the gross margin that you highlighted earlier that you feel very comfortable at 59%. Other than, I guess, the fact that you carry on or you afford buying a lot of the raw material costs, Any other initiatives, you know, that give you that sort of comfort? You know, the reason I'm asking is because we have been seeing quite significant increase in all the raw material costs across the board. And you at the presentation also highlighted that the shipping charges also gone up as well. So I wanted to get a bit more, you know, details as to how you feel so comfortable about the margins. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Yeah. Yeah, we're watching this closely. You know, these prices kind of moved up dramatically. They shifted a little. There's plenty of uncertainty is what I would say. I think there's three things to think about. One, the raw material component of our product, if I think about plastics, is 20% to 25% of our business. And that's really where we've seen the most meaningful shifts. Again, we have time to monitor that. We have time to react to that. but that percentage of kind of the overall product cost for us we can manage well. We have a lot of aluminum in our product. We've watched aluminum make some, you know, strange changes, and we're watching that. That'll be an impact to us. That's a smaller percentage. Our ability to kind of look at that, make reactions on how we're producing product, As we use more sustainable products, for example, we haven't seen those costs ripple through the sustainable product materials. If you remember, almost 40% of what I sell, maybe a bit more than that today, use recycled materials. Those aren't having as much of an impact. I'm not saying that it doesn't catch up and there's some challenges there, maybe next year and the year after, but there's a benefit there. Our ability to work with our suppliers to manage that cost, you know, and so a lot of suppliers probably dial into this call. We're in this together, so we manage that really well. And if we have to, we'll move on price, you know, in a careful way. We're conscious about it. We'll do everything we can to mitigate the impact, and then we'll manage price to get some origin in a careful way. And you saw that in the pandemic. I'm not in pandemic, but in tariffs last year. Really well managed, carefully managed. And because of our scale, we also can re-engineer products and get back to price points that deliver on the value that you'd expect from our brands. And so we can use all the kits in our – toolkit, all the levers that we have to be able to navigate this, and our teams are laid to focus on it. I've been so impressed with our sourcing teams, particularly our U.S. sourcing teams, but this will have impacts across the globe on how we mitigate against what we see from margin pressure. And I actually, with commission, I think you'll see it creep up. Mixed matters for our business. As Asia's moving at a faster clip, that can pull margin up. As soon as he gets back on a more normal course in North America, that brings gross margin up. You know, as we elevate our positioning, as we elevate the storytelling of our products, of our brands, that has benefits. And importantly, and this is what you really felt, you know, coming out of pandemic, the level of promotion and discount is dramatically transformed in this business. And we remain disciplined on that. Because often you can lose margin that you're kind of leaning in and you get more promotional and leaning to discount more than you should. And we reset that in the organization. We have tremendous discipline in managing that as well. So I think the combination of all of that is why we feel confident. And we're seeing good results. I can feel it even as we're into Q2, as we step into Q2. We're doing everything that I'd expect us to be doing. We've been watching freight, cross-inbound freight containers. We've seen some gyration there, but it's in line with what we budgeted. We're actually right in line with what we'd expect because we're conscious about that because freight's a big piece of our story. So we're watching freight carefully as well. But because we contract a lot of that out and we can manage that well, we'll manage that impact as well if that increases over time. Okay. Was there a second question or was that just that? Yeah. Good. Thank you very much. Thanks, everyone, for dialing in. Appreciate the questions. Appreciate your support.

Yeah. Well, that concludes our call today. Thank you very much for joining.

Thank you.

Have a good night. Good day. Thank you.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thanks for participating. You may now disconnect.

Bye-bye.