Dorel Industries Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for signing by. Welcome to Durell Industries' fourth quarter 2025 results conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. To join the question queue, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the conference call, you may reach an operator by pressing star then zero. Before turning the meeting over to management, please be advised that this conference call will contain statements that are forward-looking and subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. I would like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded today, March 11, 2026. I would now like to turn the call over to Martin Shorts, President and CEO. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning and thank you for joining us for Darrell's fourth quarter earnings call for the period ended December 30th, 2025. With me today are Jeffrey Schwartz, CFO, and Jason Kwasnick, Vice President of Finance. We'll take your questions following our comments. Please note that all figures mentioned during this call are in U.S. dollars. Darrell Juvenile delivered strong performance in 2025, demonstrating resilience amid ongoing tariff-related pressure in the U.S. and mixed market conditions globally. While these external factors moderated revenue growth, improved margins and disciplined cost management contributed to an 84.7% increase in adjusted operating profit for the year. Fourth quarter results were marked by a return to growth in the U.S., coupled with exceptional results in Europe and across several international markets. Innovation across core categories, particularly rotating car seats and maxi-cosy products, continues to support the segment's competitive positioning. These results underscore the benefit of the REL Juvenile's diversified geographic footprint and the segment's ability to execute in a challenging operating environment. During the fourth quarter, the REL Home operated a lower sales environment, reflecting constraint product availability. deliberate SKU rationalization, and the final stages of its restructuring plan. Notwithstanding these pressures, the segment advanced its operational initiatives, including cost reductions associated with facility closures, workforce actions, and administrative consolidation. Adjusted operating loss improved year over year in the quarter, reflecting the benefit of a reduced cost base. With the conclusion of our major restructuring activities and a disposition of non-core inventory near complete, the REL Home enters 2026 with a streamlined operating footprint and a simplified business model intended to support improved execution and performance. As always, Jeffrey will walk you through our results, but first I want to add color to our press release, starting with the juvenile segment. At Juvenile, throughout 2025, our international footprint allowed us to offset challenges in the U.S., principally due to the uncertainty around tariffs and increasing retail price points. In prior conference calls, I articulated how well we were doing with our divisions in Australia and Canada and other export markets, and this continued into the fourth quarter. And in Chile, Peru, our operations were profitable in the fourth quarter for the first time since 2022, as the team adjusts the business model to full omnichannel capabilities. But in the fourth quarter, we are particularly pleased by the results of our U.S. operations. As previously disclosed, revenues in the U.S. until the end of the third quarter were actually down versus prior year. But this reversed in fourth quarter, and we posted a small single-digit increase. The increase came from our traditional retail partners as we successfully reset modular items and introduced new items and price points. We had strong e-commerce sales, including our own direct-to-consumer fulfillment. Traditional car seat models like the Scenera, the Grow & Go, and the Finale did well and did new introductions that hit key price points supported by targeted promotional activities. Our opening price points PricePoint strollers did well, and Maxi Cosi continued its growth path in the US. This all illustrates clearly how our multiple PricePoint brand strategy allows us to compete from opening to high-end categories, and we did so with improved margins. And finally, in Europe, despite a slight decline in revenue, we gained market share and delivered improved earnings in the quarter. We are taking business from our competitors our competitors, and our product line is as good as it has ever been in Europe. Fourth quarter in general is quiet in terms of customer events, but I do want to call out a few highlights in certain markets. In Chile, Infante was named number one juvenile retail brand for the third consecutive year, according to the Omnichannel Index 2025 by Altivo. This achievement reflects the team's continued commitment to omnichannel excellence and digital transformation, reinforcing Infante's leadership position in the Chilean market. In Brazil, we were prominently featured on Auto Esporte, a leading Sunday program on TV Global, as part of a special Children's Day edition focused on child car seat safety. The four-minute segment showcased the latest innovations from Maxi Cosi, Safety First, and Infante, including eye-sized technology 360-degree rotating seats, height-adjustable models, and lightweight foldable designs, along with guidance on keeping children rear-facing until at least 15 months. And finally, in Canada, we made a strong return to the Toronto Baby Show, engaging with attendees across two lively booths for Maxi-Cosi and Safety First. The event delivered excellent visibility and standout commercial results with strong sales in strollers, travel systems, especially the Zillia travel system and car seats like the new Maxi-Cosi Andy and other Maxi-Cosi products. The success reinforced the value of a direct consumer engagement in the Canadian market. And now for Dorel Home. We concluded 2025 with the majority of our restructuring complete. There remain certain legacy costs that we are working to eliminate in 2026. Fundamentally, our cost structure has been reduced to where a return to profitability is possible. I already elaborated at the end of the third quarter the extent of the changes in 2025, and we delivered on those changes. The most significant restructuring event in fourth quarter was the migration to our juvenile IT systems, a task that was delivered within nine months of concept, which is a great feat by our teams. I want to thank everyone involved in that project. I know it took a lot of work outside of the usual tasks. It was only made possible by the sheer effort and determination of our employees. And as of today, we still have some work to do, the main ones being the final liquidation of a not-go-forward SKU, the sublease of our lease commitment at our former manufacturing facility in Cornwall, Ontario. Recading space in Dowagiac, Michigan, with the major lease expiring in Q2 of 2026. And the sublease of excess space in our East Coast warehouse in Georgia. Unfortunately, we were unable to kickstart our supply chain despite our new borrowing facilities. This meant our product availability was lacking, and we did lose sales as a result. As of now, that is resolved, and product is flowing again. We are working with our supplier partners, and we are slowly reestablishing the right level of inventory needed to support sales. But for fourth quarter and even the start of 2026, we are not seeing the sales rebound that was expected. Our core Costco business remains strong, but getting our traditional everyday living furniture categories back to the sales level that we expect is taking a little longer than anticipated. I'll now ask Jeffrey to review the financials. Jeffrey.

Thank you, Martin. I'm going to be pretty brief here. You know, as far as the consolidated numbers for the fourth quarter, our revenue decreased 14.7% to $278 million. That decline, as we said, is all in the home area. and partially upset by some improvements in the juvenile. As we said in the home, you know, we reduced our skews significantly. We got out of a lot of lines of business. It's a new, we're building a new business. We also did not have a lot of inventory in the fourth quarter, and that, all of that lines up together to have the negative results there. On the juvenile side, we did see improvements in revenue and organic revenue in the fourth quarter. U.S., Australia, Chile, and Canada sort of led the growth while we had some declines in Brazil. And in Europe, we actually had some organic decline of only 2%, but a growth when you convert it over to the U.S. dollar. Where we did do quite well in our gross profit areas, we increased that by 10 million or 21% in the quarter. The margins increased by 600 basis points. That's coming from the juvenile segment. Obviously, there were declines in the home segment. The juvenile increases gross profit and gross margin in the fourth quarter was primarily driven by... improved volumes, improved mix and FX exchange as well, all contributed to get us there. At the end, we reported an operating loss of 8.7 million compared to 23 million in the previous year. Finance expenses increased by 5 million to 15 million during the quarter. The increase is mainly explained by the interest on the preferred shares that we issued at the end of the third quarter and higher debt balances and a higher interest rate as well. If we move over to juvenile in itself now, a little bit more detail, quarter revenue was $226 million or 6.6% above last year. You know, as I said before, we improved in the U.S., Australia, Chile, Canada. In the U.S., the improvement was market share gains, you know, car seat performing quite well. We do have, as everyone knows, a car seat manufacturing facility in Columbus, Indiana, which is growing and doing well there in this tariff environment. Or Australia, you know, we never really talked about Australia, but it's really becoming a key element to our business. The Australia-New Zealand group that we have is doing extremely well through brand growth of Maxi Cozy. Martin mentioned Chile and Peru turned around, and we're starting to see some positive results there and happy to see the momentum in Canada as well. The gross profit for the quarter increased by 13 million or 24%. Gross margin was 29.9, representing an increase of 440 basis points. As I mentioned, higher sales volumes, better mix, selling more higher-margin product, and a favorable FX all contributed towards that. Operating profit, 14.6 million compared to 1.6 million the year before. If we move over to home, the numbers, I mean, obviously the top line, a large decline there by 61 million or 54%. And again, we're getting out of the old business. We're getting into a smaller, more streamlined business, which is really the Costco business and an additional business. We like to call it the plus business. which is a limited number of SKUs on the furniture side. I'm not going to get into gross margins and gross profit. There's incredible amounts of noise here. None of those numbers really mean anything. We took down a lot of this inventory. We're clearing out inventory. We're closing warehouses and all of that. So a very, very noisy quarter. And, you know, it produced the results that you see, which is, you know, excluding restructuring costs, we still had a loss of 2.9 million. Sorry, the loss decreased by 2.9 million to 8.8 this year. With that, I'm going to pass it back to Martin for any questions, any other comments.

All right. Thanks, Jeffrey. For our outlook, as we enter 2026, we remain focused on building on Darrell's juvenile momentum while managing continued market uncertainty. Priorities include operational efficiency, strengthened supplier participation, and continued investment in product innovation. While volatility is expected to persist in the U.S. and in certain Latin American markets, the company's diversified international footprint and discipline execution provide important sources of resilience. We expect 2026 to continue the trend of year-over-year earnings improvement. At the REL Home, we remain focused on completing the final stages of our transformation and cementing the foundations of a more efficient operating model. With the principal restructuring actions mostly completed and the cost structure materially reduced, we are positioned to focus on stabilizing the business and improving execution. Key priorities include completing the sell-through of remaining non-core inventory, advancing integration with Juvenile's operational ecosystem, and reigniting our everyday living furniture business alongside our successful Costco folding furniture product line. As we start 2026, we continue to drive down legacy costs, and the ramp up is slow on our traditional furniture product portfolio. As such, earnings improvements are expected as 2026 progresses. With that, I'll ask the operator to open the lines for questions. And please limit your questions to two in the first round. Operator?

Thank you. To join the question queue, you may press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. You will hear a tone acknowledging your request. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing any keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then 2. The first question comes from Stephen McLeod with BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, guys. Just turning to the home business, you talked about completing the material parts of your restructuring in Q4. And so I assume when we turn the page to 2026, we should see an improved operations. But I'm just curious, given that now you have most of the restructuring in the rearview mirror, are you able to give some color around what the run rate sort of cost base is? in that business in 2026? And I guess a follow-up to that would be, do you expect to return to profitability on an adjusted EBIT basis in 2026?

So you're asking now about the home business in itself?

Yes, the home business, yeah.

The home business, okay. So the home business, you know, the cost base, I don't have that number for you because it's still... we're still creating this new business, to be honest with you. The Costco part is kind of okay as far as not a ton of changes there, but the other part, we're still doing that now. We're still seeing what works. To be honest, it's a bit of a work in progress. That's about a third of the business that we're still trying to figure out what the best costs and efficiencies are for that.

I don't have a

a go-forward run rate on that. We do expect to see some profitability by the second half of the year. As Martin mentioned, it was challenging. Once we finally got in a good position with our suppliers, you don't just press a button and they start shipping. They had their factory orders in. They had to start slotting us in with new orders, ordering the inventory. So it took a while to get the new inventory that we needed to start pushing the business forward. And we saw that in Q4 and Q1. So it's a bit of a process there. It's a lot murkier. You know, we see a fairly clear path on the juvenile side, but it is a little bit more of a work in progress. It's a very difficult marketplace. I mean... Just, you know, staying around is challenging. A lot of our competitors and a lot of the retailers are actually going out of business here. So we do believe there's an opportunity. And like I said, part of our business is doing well in home. And we're still building that second half of the business.

Okay, that's helpful. And then maybe just on the juvenile side, you cited in the outlook just some volatility that you expect to persist in the U.S., and Latin America. Is that just related to tariffs, or is there some other volatility that we should be aware of?

In the U.S., I mean, tariffs, yeah, for sure tariffs. You know, what's going on with the oil prices, with the war? I mean, people, you know, are they spending? It's just more volatile than it's been in a while in the U.S. The economy for consumer products is just tougher. Having said that, we do believe in our products. We do believe that we will pick up market share like we're doing around the world. So we have some good momentum, which we're pleased with. But the market challenges are much harder now. And Chile is just, you know, we're coming out of a difficult period. So, Chile is getting better, but it's still a challenging area.

Okay. That's helpful. Thanks, Jeffrey.

The next question comes from Derek Lessard with TD Cohen. Please go ahead.

Good morning, gentlemen. I'll ask the question a different way than Steve. Would you say, and this is more pertaining to home, that you guys are past the worst in the business?

Yeah, for sure. For sure. It's more of an analogy. I mean, the analogy is, you know, we ran out of gas, like, at the end of the third quarter in the business. on the home side. On the juvenile side, we still had momentum. There were still things that were slower, things where we didn't have all the inventory we wanted, but everything was moving. We stopped, you know, the business for a number of months. So there's a number of SKUs. I won't get into the SKUs of the customers, but that were lost because we didn't respond properly in the tariff environment. Since then, since, you know, Q4, we have responded. Responding means, you know, probably change the items so that, you know, the price points were different or added features or did what we had to do. And we've gotten those items placed again. But, you know, we have a couple of items that we lost for six months. So it's just, you know what I mean? It's just been really difficult because the business stopped. And again, I don't want to mean like we stopped shipping, but We couldn't move forward on a lot of things, and then, you know, you got to put some oil or gas in the tank and then start the process and start. So we're in that. The process is going. We're getting more listings. We're winning things back. We're getting in front and delivering to our customers. But all of that needed to be done in the home business, which ended up being more challenging. So, you know, I think that's the reason.

And I think Martin touched on it in his opening remarks, but could you just maybe, and I know you're close to the end of the restructuring process in home, but maybe just remind me of, or ask of the sort of the biggest components of that restructuring that you have left.

Yeah, we still have a couple of pieces of real estate that I don't think is technically restructuring, but it's, We call it legacy costs. There are some costs that we're still paying that we're getting no value for, so we're in the process of looking for subleases. So that's probably the single biggest area. It's not people anymore. You know, we've brought that down. We're just looking for the best and most efficient way to continue to operate. How do we call some costs out, maybe join costs with the juvenile group? increasingly doing that. You know, there's no major, other than some real estate, there's no major restructuring that we're facing.

Okay. And maybe turning to more of a positive story on the juvenile side. Jeffrey, in your prepared remarks, you alluded to volumes, mix, and forex as the drivers of the the improvements in the gross margin, were they all equally weighted?

I don't have the weighting for me. I do know that they're all important. Certainly, our FX is, you know, the winds are behind us for a change. Right. What you've got to look at is, you know, you've got an adjustment of FX, but in the following quarter, you're now – your margins are higher because you're paying, you know, like in Europe, you know, the Euros, we're collecting Euro dollars paying in US dollars for the product. So our margins going forward end up being higher as well, right? So it's hard. I don't have that adjustment to say, well, if it was a million dollars one time hit in Q4, does that affect Q1? It does. So I don't have those numbers, but You know what I mean? It's not just a one-time adjustment, even though it is an adjustment in Q4. But going forward, we're seeing some – and we've been hedging at some of the new rates. The impact of being a global company is probably coming to the forefront more than in the history of our business. While we have some challenges in the U.S., even though we're doing okay and we're making money and we're growing, if it was just a U.S. business like a bunch of our competitors, it wouldn't be as a rosy picture. But we're able to drive the rest of the world at a pace significantly faster than the U.S., which is allowing for, I'll say, better growth than most of the people in our industry.

Yes, I just wanted to and I just want to make sure that volume and mix was was a was a meaningful contributor. If that's a better way to ask the question. Okay. Yeah, thank you guys.

We have a follow up question from Stephen McLeod with BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Stephen, please go ahead.

Sorry, my bad. I was on mute there. I just had a follow-up question regarding the home business again and the outlook. And I know that there are still some moving parts with respect to some of the restructuring initiatives that haven't been done. But just again, trying to get a sense of the run rate on things, considering that's probably the business that has the most moving parts right now. In terms of DNA, you know, we saw DNA sort of take a pretty significant step down in Q4. And I'm just wondering if that's potentially a new run rate or is that maybe related to a Q4 full year true up or something like that?

I'm going to say on the home site, any number you see in Q4 is not a valid number for projecting forward. It doesn't matter what it is. It's it's about as noisy as you can get when you're taking things down, when you're restructuring, when you're, you know, running out of inventory, when you're like discontinuing stuff and you've got factories that are still operating, but they're not operating. It's just, it's a, it's a very messy quarter to do any analysis on. Yeah. The best thing I can just tell you is it's going to be a, again, it's going to be much better than last year, right? Last year we lost $40 million. I mean, we're, our, our, Our bad quarters are not going to be, you know, pro forma off of last year. But it's probably going to take to the second half before we see a turn in the profitability to a positive level.

Okay. Understood. Yeah. Thanks, Jeffrey. I appreciate it.

This concludes the question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Martin Schwartz for any closing remarks. Please go ahead.

Thank you. I just want to say to everybody, thanks for joining us here today, and I hope you all have a great rest of the week. Thank you.

This brings to a close today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating, and have a pleasant day.