Aaron LoCascio
Analyst · Cowen and Company. Please proceed
Thanks, Scott, and good afternoon, everyone. I will briefly review our second quarter sales highlights and business development activities, and then turn the call over to Ethan to review our financial results in more detail. After that we will open up the call for your questions. We had a record second quarter at Greenlane, generating $53 million in revenue representing 31% revenue growth year-over-year and continue to expand our portfolio of leading brands and customer network. We experienced growth during the quarter across each of the cannabis, hemp-derived CBD, and liquid nicotine categories and have an aggressive pipeline of additional partnership in each segment. Gains in both the U.S. and Canada drove the growth, particularly in the vaporizer category. We also advanced international development adding key talent in Europe and Asia while continuing to invest in the expansion of our sales team. Our goal of being the employer of choice is proving out well as we have attracted and hired top talent from leading consumer product, retail, cannabis, and global tobacco organization. We will continue to search for and hire a world-class workforce to create, grow, and nurture the best cannabis brands across the globe. We've also been reviewing strategic opportunities globally to accelerate our growth. We remain disciplined with the potential acquisition targets we are evaluating, as well as in our opportunity selection process. We have significant confidence in our pipeline to continue to grow through acquisitions and M&A remains a key strategic reason we decided to go public. In the rapidly growing CBD category, last week Gallup survey found that one in seven Americans is using some form of CBD, and we are positioning ourselves as a category captain, building a portfolio of the most respected brands in the sector through exclusive distribution agreements. Over the past several months, we signed new distribution agreements to expand our portfolio of CBD offerings, including exclusive deals with Bloom Farms, Cookies, and Pax Era CBD products. These new relationships are in addition to existing exclusive relationships with Select, Mary's Nutritionals, and SLANG. The pace of these particular partnerships illustrate that Greenlane continues to be the partner of choice for Canada's brand that seek to build global brands with hemp-derived CBD products. In an effort to expand our closed system vaporizer offerings for licensed cannabis cultivators and processors, we have signed distribution agreements with Hanu Labs and AVD PRO. These particular agreements with companies that are more focused on liquid vaporization for strider vaporization allow us to better capitalize on consumption trends. We also launched distribution of Futurola pre-rolled products which also helps us expand our relationship with license cultivators and processors. Finally, we extended our agreement with Canopy Growth for exclusive distribution of their iconic Storz & Bickel's vaporizers including their next-generation Volcano Hybrid. These additions, along with continued growth of our premium child resistant packaging brand Pollen Gear allows to capture to an increasing share of the opportunity in our channels of distribution. JUUL sales were very strong this quarter led by incredibly robust demand in Canada and continued strong growth in the U.S. We increased net sales of JUUL products nearly 70%. Additional promotions, including a large program that began in the month of June were among drivers of the growth. We also supported a promotion of lower nicotine concentration product during the quarter. Strong sales growth of JUUL products overall has more than offset the impact of JUUL’s voluntary suspension of flavored product sales to retailers in the U.S. at the end of last year, and our growth reflects the ongoing consumer demand and brand loyalties for JUUL despite recent media attention to the regulatory environment. Regulatory scrutiny around e-cigarettes has been a topic of interest for investors. Specifically, recent news of the City of San Francisco has established a temporary ban on e-cigarette sales has gained significant attention, so let me note a few points. First, we are in full support of responsible legislation such as raising the minimum age of purchase with the objective of transitioning adult smokers off of combustible cigarettes and JUUL has demonstrated strong evidence of success toward achieving this goal. Second, we are also in support of any efforts to limit sales of flavored products to age-gated retail location such as vape, shops, and smoke shops. Former FDA Commissioner Gottlieb issued draft guided to this effect while at the FDA. Third, our exposure to San Francisco is insignificant representing approximately 0.1% of our year-to-date sale and we would expect minimal impact from any enduring change in San Francisco. Our Greenlane house brand continue to deliver high margin growth opportunities which we aim to invest in heavily with incremental spend on marketing and headcount. In the second quarter of 2019, we grew our house brand 61% comprising 6.3% of our total net sales up from 5.1% a year ago. In addition to diversifying our revenue stream, house brands are also accretive to boosting our overall gross margin delivering nearly 35% gross margins on average in the second quarter, and we have plans to further improve them through higher-margin house brands like Vibes and new house brands that we either develop in-house or acquire. While we have cultivated a strong foundation of house brands to-date, we continue to focus on expanding our portfolio. We began shipping Vibes rolling papers this quarter into strong demand and expect our available inventory to build as the year progresses. We have quickly sold out of everything we get in and anything with the Vibes brand seeing strong demand. We're also seeing growth in Aerospaced and Groove, both of which are exceeding our supply. We have now built good supply of our Marley Natural line and are expanding our sales efforts and broadening availability. As we announced last month, Pollen Gear was awarded its second patent on its child-resistant SnapTech Bags. As the leading and often imitated packaging brand, the value of the patent portfolio cannot be underestimated. On the higher-standards front, we recently signed an LOI for a new store in Malibu, California located next door to the landmark retailer, Fred Segal. Turning to e-commerce, net sales increased 13.6% during the second quarter of 2019. Unique visitors increased by approximately 8% to over 380,000, and transactions are up approximately 13% to over 7,600 for the quarter. In July of 2019, we completed the consolidation of the VaporNation and VapeWorld.com to Vapor.com enabling all e-commerce customers to visit a single platform. We are developing a focused advertising strategy to further build awareness and traffic to drive our e-commerce growth. Returning to the second quarter; as a whole, we delivered growth across brands and markets and are well-positioned to continue to drive growth in the cannabis, hemp-derived CBD, and liquid nicotine categories. Favorable regulatory changes such as recent cannabis legalization in Illinois or the passage of the hemp-derived CBD legislation in Texas and Ohio are examples of the favorable tailwinds we look to capitalize on. We continue to build upon our strong customer and supplier relationships to drive organic growth, expand our world-class portfolio of proprietary brands, and expand our network of more than 11,000 retail locations. In closing, we're building a highly efficient global infrastructure that we believe will create an unrivaled supply chain to support the long-term growth of the cannabis, nicotine and CBD industry. We are aggressively expanding our portfolio of house brands and developing new innovative brands in categories. Along with our focus on growing our B2C efforts to vapor.com we are focused on driving a greater mix of our sales towards our highest margin proprietary brands and channels. Now I'll turn the call over to Ethan to run you through the second quarter financial results. Ethan?