Morris Goldfarb
Analyst · KeyBanc Capital Markets. Your line is open
Good morning and thank you for joining us. Also joining me remotely today is Sammy Aaron our Vice Chairman and President; Wayne Miller, our Chief Operating Officer; Neal Nackman, our Chief Financial Officer; Jeff Goldfarb, Executive Vice President; and Priya Trivedi, Vice President of Investor Relations. I'd like to address the recent events and related protest throughout our country over the past 10 days. We at G-III maintained a zero tolerance position against racism, inequality and injustices of any kind. We strongly believe that we all need to do our part to make a difference both internally in our company and externally in our communities. We are committing our support to UNCF and other organizations and the effort to help eradicate social and racial injustices. Furthermore, the Coronavirus pandemic has sent shockwaves throughout the world. During these difficult times, the health and wealth well-being of our employees, customers, partners and communities remain our top priority. Let me take a moment to highlight and thank the heart and soul of our company and our greatest asset, a world-class global employee base. They have been working remotely and harder than ever with incredible dedication, drive, compassion and care through this crisis in order to keep us operational. As this pandemic as evolved we thought it's imperative to continue to assist our community in large. We are contributing money to where our philanthropic partners to ensure they continue their important work. We have our leveraged our supply chain to donate PPE to medical facilities, first responders and police departments in the United States. The challenges we face from this pandemic are significant. G-III is an adaptive and agile organization with an entrepreneurial culture that keeps us flexible in these difficult times has allowed us to add very quickly to address a multitude of issues. We had to make some difficult but necessary decisions in response to the disruption caused by this pandemic. As we announced in our prior Coronavirus update press release, we closed all of our retail stores in mid-March. Many of our employees have been working remotely. We implemented significant reductions in pay for our senior management and most of our other employees. And unfortunately, we furloughed a large portion of our employee base. We've also adjusted inventory receipts in response to store closures and have been forecasting about reforecasting the balance of the year. A strong collaborative vendor base will afford us the ability to make opportunistic purchases for the back half of this year. These actions combined with our solid balance sheet, strengthened our financial flexibility and liquidity. We are well positioned to weather the current challenges and to demonstrate our leadership position in the fashion industry as we emerge from this crisis. On that note, we continue to reopen our retail stores and are preparing to open our New York City corporate offices. We will do so in a responsible manner with the health of our employees and customers as our top priority. We are following CDC guidelines to ensure we provide a safe, socially distant workplace with ample PPE available for our associates. Our warehouses have remained operational with a reduced workforce, observing strict social distancing and safety precautions in order to receive inventory to sell orders for online consumers and ship product to our retail partners. We began to scale these operations as stores have reopened throughout the country. Now let's look at the first quarter fiscal 2021 results. Considering our retail partners stores and our own retail stores were closed for half of the quarter. Net sales were $405 million, 36% down from last year's $634 million. Non-GAAP net loss per share was $0.75, compared to net income per diluted share of $0.25. Now turning to our own retail segment, I'm pleased to report we finalized our plan to restructure our retail store operations. As we announced this morning, we are restructuring the retail segment and we'll be closing out Wilsons Leather and G.H. Bass stores enabling us to greatly reduce our retail losses. Accordingly, we've hired Hilco Global to assist in the liquidation of these stores. We've negotiated flexibility with our landlords to allow us to adjust our liquidation timeframes based on store openings. This was a difficult decision to make. And we're incredibly appreciative of all the members of the retail team for their hard work and dedication over the years. After completion of the restructuring, our retail stores will initially consist of 41 DKNY, and 13 Karl Lagerfeld Paris stores. We plan on returning these brick and mortar businesses to profitability. Additionally, our ecommerce sites, although small and profitable, will include DKNY, Donna Karan, Karl Lagerfeld Paris, Andrew Marc, Wilsons Leather and G.H. Bass. Neal will walk you through the financial details of the restructuring. As for wholesale, we're anchored by our five global power grid DKNY, Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger and Karl Lagerfeld. They'll continue to be the primary sales and profit engine for G-III. We remain focused on leveraging our wholesale expertise to drive long-term growth. Prior to the pandemic with half the quarter behind us, we were seeing good momentum in our wholesale business, validating our strategy and the strength of our product offerings. As stores close and our shipping dramatically decreased, we reacted decisively to reduce our inventory exposure. We're being conservative with respect to ordering future inventory and we'll continue to work closely with our retail partners and planning out the rest of the year. Over the last 40 years, we've earned the respect of our vendor base, our retailers and our licensed stores. We have a well-diversified distribution base across retail channels including department and specialty stores, off-price stores, warehouse clubs and ecommerce sites. We anticipate further closures in brick and mortar retail, but we believe we are well positioned to ultimately retain and increase their business, weather through their brick and mortar stores or their online sites. It is important to remember that we do a significant amount of business through our partners' online sites as well as through our own sites. In some categories, online penetration can reach over 40% of total product sales. We will be actively working with our retailers and dedicating additional resources to further drive sales in their online sites. We're also making significant investments in our own online business. As a matter of fact over the last couple of months for our own DKNY and Karl Lagerfeld online sites, we've seen a significant comp sales increase. We ended 2020 with a sizeable and growing wholesale business. Our Calvin Klein brand approached annual sales of $1.1 billion. Tommy Hilfiger was at nearly $500 million in annual sales, and our own DKNY and Donna Karan brands were over $450 million in annual sales. And Karl Lagerfeld was at just over $110 million in annual sale. Outside of North America, sales grew strong double-digit, significantly driven by the distribution of our DKNY brand. Overall, we have a great base to continue to build up. We will be patient and make prudent decisions preserve our liquidity as we get through these challenging times. I'm confident that our solid financial footing and our dedicated management team will enable us to successfully navigate through this crisis. We will exit and strengthen leadership position as a much needed supplier in our industry. I will now pass the call to Neal for a detailed discussion of our first quarter results. Neal?