Earnings Labs

Farmer Bros. Co. (FARM)

Q4 2015 Earnings Call· Wed, Sep 9, 2015

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Farmer Brothers Fourth Quarter and Fiscal 2015 Earnings Conference Call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will follow at that time. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Tom Mattei. Please go ahead sir.

Tom Mattei

Analyst

Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining Farmer Brothers’ fourth quarter and fiscal year 2015 earnings conference call. I'm the Company's General Counsel. With me today are Mike Keown, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Mark Nelson, Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer. Earlier today we issued a press release which is available on the Investor Relations section of our website at www.farmerbros.com. The press release is also included as an exhibit to our Form 8-K available on our website and on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at www.sec.gov. Please note that all of the financial information presented on this conference call today is unaudited. A replay of this audio only webcast will be available approximately 2 hours after the conclusion of this call. The link to the audio replay will also be available on our website. Before we begin the call, please note various remarks that we make during the call about our future expectations, plans and prospects may constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the Safe Harbor provisions under the Federal Securities Laws and Regulations. These forward-looking statements represent our views only as of today and should not be relied upon as representing our views as of subsequent date. Results could differ materially from those forward-looking statements. More information is available in the Company’s press release and in our public filings which are available on the Investor Relations section of our website. On today’s call, we use certain non-GAAP financial measures including non-GAAP net income, non-GAAP net income per diluted common share, adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin in assessing our operating performance. Reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to their most directly comparable GAAP measures is included in our earnings press release which is available on the Investor Relations section of our website. I will now turn the call over to Mike Keown, our President and Chief Executive Officer. Mike?

Mike Keown

Analyst

Thank you Tom, hello everyone, and thank you for joining us this afternoon, here is the agenda for this call. First, I will do a top line review of our total year and fourth quarter of fiscal 2015 results, then update you on our corporate relocation and several other strategic initiatives, and conclude with some commentary on the overall business. I will then turn the call over to Mark Nelson, our Treasurer and CFO, who will discuss our financial results in greater detail. First, a quick summary of the business. Overall, we continued to make progress improving our operating performance. To best understand the performance of the Company, I suggest you look at our non-GAAP presentation as it isolates the moving pieces of our turnaround. A reconciliation of each of these non-GAAP financial measures to the nearest GAAP financial measure is presented in our earnings release which we filed today and also posted on our website. If you look at non-GAAP net income, which is GAAP net income before restructuring and other transition expense from the corporate relocation and also gains or losses on the sale of assets, you will see $3.7 million for the quarter versus a net loss of $690,000 in the prior year period. And for the total year, non-GAAP net income at $11.5 million, up $3.2 million from fiscal ’14 and an improvement of $24.4 million from fiscal year ’13. Further if you look at adjusted EBITDA in the chart below the non-GAAP net income chart, you will see that in fiscal year ’15, we were up about $200,000 to $42.5 million. Of note, in the fourth quarter, we achieved adjusted EBITDA of $11.1 million or 8.3% of net sales. While this is our best annual and fourth quarter performance in over a decade, we aren’t…

Mark Nelson

Analyst

Thanks, Mike, and hello everyone. I'll spend the next few minutes discussing our financial performance for the fourth quarter and our full fiscal year 2015. As Mike mentioned, we continue to make significant progress towards our objective of driving improved operational and financial performance. So now let me get right into some of those details. On the income statement, net sales in our fourth quarter of fiscal '15 were $132.6 million, representing a 1.8% increase from net sales recorded in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2014. This increase was primarily due to increases in sales of our coffee and other beverage products, primarily driven by pricing actions through which we increased both prices to direct ship and direct store delivery customers. The increase in net sales of $2.4 million over the prior year period included approximately $3.8 million in price increases to customers utilizing commodity based pricing arrangements where the changes in the green coffee commodity costs are passed on to the customer. Most of our cost plus customers are covered under coffee-hedging contracts which helps insulate them from immediate changes in green coffee commodity prices. The duration of these hedging contracts creates a lag in how commodity price changes are ultimately reflected in our top line revenues. For our DST customers, we also implemented pricing increases as we saw green coffee commodity costs increase throughout the fiscal year. Gross margin for the fourth quarter was 37.1% or 220 basis points higher than the 34.9% recorded in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2014. Approximately 130 basis points or $1.7 million of this improvement was driven by the beneficial effect of liquidation of LIFO inventory quantities, primarily as a result of the reduction in inventories at the end of fiscal 2015. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2015, we reduced a…

Mike Keown

Analyst

Thanks, Mark. I would also like to thank those on the call for their continued interest on Farmer Brothers. I want to reiterate our commitment to ensuring continued and uninterrupted service to our thousands of customers nationwide as we accelerate our move to Northlake, Texas. And with that, I’d like to open up the call to a few questions.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from the line of Kara Anderson with B. Riley and Company. Your line is open.

Kara Anderson

Analyst

Hi. Good afternoon, guys. Just wondering if you can comment on the number of pounds sold for the quarter and the year?

Mark Nelson

Analyst

Sure. So, this is coffee pounds, roasted and ground sold in the quarter, 16.7 million pounds, and for the year of 70.1 million pounds.

Kara Anderson

Analyst

And then, can you comment on the general pricing environment for green coffee and how that deviates at all if that is if it does even, from sort of the average cost per pound you were seeing in the quarter?

Mark Nelson

Analyst

Yeah. Sure. So when we look across the year, the average price of coffee that we see in the sea [ph] market is down roughly 16%, 17%. That’s not exactly our hedged cost, but the sea market impact across the average of 12 months did come down in the year. We’ve seen different price points based on our cost plus customers who will take varying durations of how far they go in their hedging contracts versus our market-based DSD customers, but in general we did see a declining commodity environment, and as you know now, it still continues to stay quite low.

Kara Anderson

Analyst

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And I am showing no further questions at this time. I’d like to turn the call back to management for closing remarks.

Mike Keown

Analyst

Thank you. Once again, we appreciate your interest in our story, and we are really excited about the future. We look-forward to continuing the progress we have made over the past few years and updating you as we embark on the next chapter in the evolution of Farmer Bros. If you are planning to come to our Annual Shareholder Meeting, we will be in Texas in the Northlake area on December 3 with additional details to follow. With that, we will sign off and say thank you once again for your interest in Farmer Bros.