Irwin David Simon
Analyst · Bill Chappell
Thank you, Mary, and good afternoon and thank you for joining us today on this beautiful sunny day. Hopefully, you had a chance to review 2 press releases that we issued this afternoon after the market closed. I will begin with a brief overview of our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2013 results, as well as an update on our strategic initiatives. We continue to benefit from positive trends across the organic and natural food and personal care industry. We're very pleased with our record fourth quarter and fiscal year 2013 financial results, and these trends continue to perform. Our momentum throughout the year helped us wrap up a strong fourth quarter, our largest sales quarter in the company's history, with $463.5 million of sales -- of net sales, up 32.1%, the 10th consecutive quarter of double-digit adjusted EPS growth. Well, thanks to John and his team, Hain Celestial U.S. sales were up a record 17.6% to $285.2 million. Hain Daniels also generated record results, with net sales of $121 million. Now I'll briefly discuss the key drivers that led us to our impressive sales performance. Our organic growth from our brands was up high single digits x currency. The fourth quarter was driven by new distribution, new products and consumer demand. Our consumption, measured by Nielsen, in the U.S. was strong, up 7.7% in the latest 4-week period and up 24% on a 2-year stack basis. Natural and organic products are helping to drive growth in AOC. The total channel grew 1.6% in the latest 4 weeks, with natural organic products outpacing the growth at nearly 5x what conventional products are growing at and that conventional products are growing at 1.1%. In the U.K., we continue to execute on our strategy to drive higher margin-branded growth, the integration of our grocery brands and the elimination of certain nonprofitable private label and branded products that we've discussed earlier. I'm pleased to report that Rob and his team in the U.K. did a great job in the quarter to end the year in a strong operational position. We've done a lot to integrate our grocery business and worked hard to pick up a lot of new business opportunities in the U.K. Hartley's, Robertson's, Sun-Pat and Gale's have now been part of our portfolio for 8 months. There is a lot of positive momentum around these brands, which Rob will take you through very shortly. The U.K. has become our second-largest business, where we now have 10 brands that are #1 or #2 in their respective categories, brands with a tremendous amount of brand equity. Walk a store with me in the U.K. today and see the number of products that we have at retail in these stores. In addition, we're expanding some of our U.S. brands like Rice Dream, Celestial Seasonings, Greek Gods, introducing gluten-free products along like brands like Terra and Garden of Eatin' to capitalize on the infrastructure that we now have in the U.K. We now have the #1 organic baby food in pouches in the U.K. Stay tuned for a lot of new products -- new fresh products that will be -- that we will be introducing soon. Importantly, in the U.K., we have regained a soup listing of New Covent Garden at Tesco beginning in October 2013. And together with Tesco, we've agreed on a business plan to grow our soup category in the retailer. The Rest of the World segment also contribute to our growth. Beena and our team had a lot -- has done a lot in Canada with mid single-digit growth. We have tremendous opportunities with one of our largest customers up -- our largest customer, Loblaws, that is now buying Shoppers Drug Mart. And Sobeys is consolidating Safeway along with Target entering the market. There's a lot we'll do in the Canadian market. Europe was up mid-single digits, with good growth coming from our Lima brand, our nondairy brand Rice Dream and Natumi. We're in the midst of consolidating our business in Europe, creating 2 sales teams, similar to what we've done in the U.S., which will be headed by Bart Dobbelaere. One sales force will focus on our natural food category, the other will focus on our grocery. The sales force will sell all our major brands throughout Europe. Our Hain Pure Protein joint venture increased net sales 17% versus the fourth quarter last year, as consumers are looking for more organic and antibiotic-free protein as they look to reduce their red meat intake. They concluded a profitable year on our protein business in the face of high feed costs. Overall, our brand performance in the quarter was strong. We have numerous $100 million brands and $50 million brands that are positioned to double in size. Our record sales increased combined with an improvement in gross margin and tight management of our SG&A, which enabled us to report adjusted earnings per share of $0.65 versus $0.47 in the fourth quarter last year. Touching on those specifics, gross margin adjusted 27%, up 40 basis points. We managed our SG&A to a low 16.3% in net sales, which shows you how we've integrated acquisitions and taken out costs, as we've said all along. Operating income adjusted $49.7 million or up 10.7%, up 40 basis points. Adjusted EBITDA of $63 million or 37% increased over last year in the fourth quarter. Keep in mind, we accomplished these results despite facing commodity headwinds and, boy, have they been a lot, and having not yet fully integrated our recent acquisition of Ella's Kitchen. So we believe we should see an improvement in the consensus in fiscal 2014 as we further integrate these businesses. Now let me discuss our fiscal year 2013 consolidated performance in a little more detail. We generated $1.7 billion in net sales, the highest in the company's history and a 26% increase versus the prior year. For the first time, we've exceeded over $1 billion in net sales in Hain U.S.A. Adjusted earnings per diluted share increased 35% to $2.53 versus $1.88 last year, and adjusted EBITDA reached a new high of $236 million for the year. We completed 3 exciting acquisitions since last year, our U.K. grocery brands BluePrint and Ella's Kitchen. As I said before, I'm very excited about BluePrint, a nationally recognized leader in the cold-pressed juice category and one of the first brands in the juicing category. This is a hot category where we can gain tremendous distribution. The founders, Zoë and Erica, continue to drive innovation, while Jim drives operation and distribution. Jim DePietro, not Jim Meiers. He drives distribution, too. I'm also excited about Ella's Kitchen, where we've created a global infant, toddler and kids division headed by Paul Lindley, who is on the call with us today. We see global expansion opportunities for these brands. As I said before, I am thrilled we acquired this brand, and it's exciting what we can do around the world in this category. It seems also a lot of other companies followed us in this category after we bought Ella's. As I mentioned, we're still in early stages integrating these businesses, realizing the expected synergies, savings accretion and future growth. So we believe there's tremendous opportunities just with the acquisitions that we've done this year. And there's still plenty of acquisition opportunities that we will continue to look at. Our balance sheet continues to be strong and provide us with financial flexibility to pursue strategic opportunities as they present themselves. Over the course of the year, you've heard us talk about productivity savings. We've generated in excess $30 million for fiscal 2013, and Jim Meiers will talk more about these initiatives in a few minutes. Looking ahead, we've given Jim and the team another task: we're looking for $40 million to $50 million in productivity savings in fiscal '14. We've had the worldwide productivity team in New York a few weeks ago. And number one was how can we look at savings from procuring, but the other thing is more important, how are we out there sourcing organic fruits and vegetables around the world to keep up with supply and demand? One of the biggest challenges in this industry today is supply, and that will separate us from our competitors. We have a great global supply team and our procurement team will allow us to go out there and source on a global basis with wider access to new markets so we do not suffer from out of stocks and have the opportunity to procure other fruits and vegetables around the world. As I've said on previous calls, we've invested in our infrastructure and we'll continue to do that. In fiscal 2013, we built 2 new plants. We retrofitted 3 plants in the U.S., in U.K. and Europe and built a new headquarters where we have plenty of room to consolidate and move in many back offices. We'll continue to invest to support our growth organic and natural products and have plenty of capacity to support our brands around the world. We continue to be optimistic about the organic and natural industry trends. When you look at the entire food industry, our organic and natural products outpace conventional products by 3x. Overall, food consumption is not growing. Consumers are seeking out more and more organic and natural products versus conventional products. Organic and natural is growing. It's a major part of growth within the food and personal care industry today. You see this growth in companies like Whole Foods, Sprouts Farmers Market, Fairway continue to add new stores with natural organic product offerings. Organic and natural products are also growing with mass, specialty and Internet retailers. We believe these trends, combined with the consistent strength of our core Hain U.S. businesses as well as our prospects in Canada, U.K. and Europe and Asia, support our outlook for future long-term growth. Before I turn the call over to Maureen Putman and Jim Meiers to discuss Hain U.S.A., I want to take a moment from all of us at Hain to thank Ira Lamel for his numerous contributions to the growth of our business over the last 12 years, including his financial acumen and sound judgment, and there are some times I didn't always agree with that. But there was always sound judgment. I'm pleased that Ira will continue to work with us as a special advisor on various business development opportunities. It will not be the same at Hain with Ira not around. We've announced Ira's planned retirement last September, and after an extensive global search, we welcome Stephen Smith as EVP and CFO. Stephen brings more than 30 years of financial leadership to the company, having most recently been EVP and CFO of Elizabeth Arden since 2001, a NASDAQ-listed company. Steve has an extensive background in working with consumer products companies on a global basis, brings a demonstrated ability to implement business analytics for high performance strategic growth. Steve is the right fit with our management team to help us achieve our next level of growth. We will continue to add strategic talent to support our growth initiatives and innovations long term. And with that overview, I will now turn the call over to Maureen and Jim, and then Rob will provide you with highlights on Hain Daniels activities. And Ira then, for his final time, it's almost like Johnny Carson in The Tonight Show, will take you through our financial metrics guidance before we'll take questions, and then I will provide you with brief closing remarks. Maureen?