Bill Boor
Analyst · CJS Securities. Your line is open
Welcome and thank you for joining us today to review our second quarter results. I thought, I’d jump right in with some perspective on what we are seeing in the market. As we previously reported, the dealer inventories that created a big drag on wholesale orders through the first half of the year are now generally under control and our company-owned stores and broadly throughout our independent dealer network, homebuyer interest as reflected in online leads and store traffic is healthy. However, as everyone knows the macroeconomic environment is not providing any relief for those prospective buyers. Having said that, we continue to see quarter-to-quarter order improvement, that trend is largely coming from street dealers with community still lagging as expected and discussed last quarter. Looking forward, as those community operators work through their inventories, that would be another positive for wholesale manufactured housing orders. Against that backdrop, we continue to operate at a reduced level. Production was down from last quarter as certain plants dealt with the lack of orders and continued to slow production. In line with production capacity utilization was down slightly, but still in the range of 60%, with the already mentioned order improvement, we hit a balanced point at the current overall production rate. As a result, our backlogs were consistent with last quarter. We ended the period at $170 million, which equates to five weeks to seven weeks of production. Clearly, we are anxious and prepared to move plants back to full schedules, as soon as the market supports. In the meantime, our plants have done an outstanding job in maintaining healthy profitability and cash flow through the market challenges. In the second quarter, our housing gross margin was 23.2%, down 1.6% from last quarter and 3.6% from a year ago, when we were running full schedules and 80% utilization. Allison will go into the gross margin shifts, but the point here is that reducing shipments about 17% year-over-year to match lower demand and still maintaining margin to that extent only happens through discipline and operational excellence. Our retail business has performed exceptionally well. They adjusted quickly to the changing market conditions last year and stayed committed to their winning processes. On a same-store basis, excluding the added volume from Solitaire retail, homes sold through our company-owned stores were up slightly from the previous period. More importantly, the manufacturing and retail teams are working cohesively on product decisions and selling strategies to produce optimal results across the operations. This teamwork has demonstrated itself as we brought the Solitaire stores into the retail operation and filled out product offerings to improve inventory turns. Overall, our revenues were down sequentially from $476 million to $452 million and pretax income was $52 million, compared to $61 million last quarter. We generated strong cash flow, returned $47 million through share repurchases and added $25 million to our cash balance. We remain convinced of the dire need for our homes over time and our strong balance sheet enables us to pursue investments in organic and external opportunities, despite the near-term conditions. With that, I’d like to turn it over to Allison to discuss the financial results in more detail.