David Jones
Analyst · Guggenheim. Your line is open
Thanks, John, and good morning, everybody. With today's results and the announced sale of Entertainment segment, we are updating our financial reporting and associated metrics and would like to note the following. Beginning this quarter, we are now reporting results from the Entertainment segment as a discontinued operation. With the planned reduction in debt, we expect to realize interest savings of approximately $30 million on an annualized basis. And today we also introduced a new adjusted non-GAAP metric to account for the significant cash tax advantages of our business model. Importantly, even with pressures from the retail environment and the elimination of approximately 30% of our revenue with the sale of the Entertainment business, we've been able to hold our bottom line for the full-year and we reported Q1 earnings in line with our expectations. The following discussions related to continuing operations unless otherwise noted. For the first quarter of 2017 revenue was $58.7 million and 11% decline as compared to comparable revenue of $66.1 million in the prior year quarter. While comparable revenue was down 11% in the quarter this was offset by SG&A which was down 22%. The largest driver of the SG&A decline was related to lower compensation expense. Special charges in the quarter were $2.2 million as compared to $5.5 million in the prior year quarter. Excluding special charges SG&A expenses were $23.3 million, a 14% decline as compared to $27.1 million in the prior year. Operating income was $33.6 million in the first quarter of 2017 as compared to $46.3 million in the first quarter of 2016. However, in the prior year operating income included $11 million from gains on sale of trademarks and $1.3 million from income related to divest brands. Excluding these items, operating income was down 2% in the first quarter. Based on these numbers, our operating margin in the first quarter of 2017 was approximately 57%, a five percentage point improvement as compared to approximately 52% in the first quarter of 2016. non-GAAP earnings per share from continuing ops was approximately $0.21 in the first quarter of 2017 and non-GAAP earnings per share from discontinued operations was approximately $0.02. This compares to non-GAAP earnings per share from continuing operations of approximately $0.47 in the first quarter of 2016 and non-GAAP earnings per share from discontinued operations of approximately $0.07. Continuing operations in the first quarter of 2016 includes approximately $0.14 from gains and sale of trademarks. Going forward, as I mentioned, the Company will also report non-GAAP net income and non-GAAP EPS adjusted for non-cash taxes related to the amortization of wholly-owned intangible assets that are amortizable for U.S. income tax purposes obviously a tax effective at 35%. So similar to adjusting for non-cash interest expense, we will now also adjust for the most significant component of our non-cash taxes. In the first quarter of 2017, the cash benefit from the tax amortization was $7.3 million or $0.13 per diluted share, as compared to $7.5 million or $0.15 per diluted share in the first quarter of 2016. Including this tax adjustment, non-GAAP earnings per share for the first quarter of 2017 was $0.34 compared to $0.62 in the first quarter of 2016. The cash benefit of amortizing our intangible assets for tax purposes is a unique attribute of our business model that we have found is often unknown or misunderstood, after presenting at multiple conferences and speaking with numerous and investors this year, we've determined that highlighting this advantage will be useful for investors in evaluating the business. For the remainder of this year, we will report non-GAAP metrics, so including and excluding the benefit. Moving on to the balance sheet, following the sale of the Entertainment segment and the planned reduction of debt, we expect our debt balance to be approximately $840 million, a $650 million reduction from less than a year-ago. We anticipate paying off our 11.5% term loan eliminating a number of restrictions that we have on cash and transactions. Following this transaction as John mentioned, we expect our gross leverage to be approximately 6.5 times and our net leverage to be in the high-5s. This represents a significant improvement of approximately two churns from the beginning of 2016, which brings us closer to our target net leverage of under five times by 2019. Historically, with significant restrictions on our cash, we had reported leverage on a gross basis. However, with the majority of our restrictions about to be listed, we believe net leverage is a more appropriate metric. As for the 2018 convertible notes, we are talking to multiple lenders and we have received indications of interest including one preliminary offer that gives us confidence that we will have a reasonable solution for the refinancing. Regarding the VFNs that mature in 2018, we have also received a great deal of interest from lenders. We have reached agreement in principle and are confident we can get this done shortly. Turning to guidance, we are resetting guidance to reflect the Entertainment segment as a discontinued operation and are providing guidance for an additional non-GAAP metric that I mentioned that accounts for a significant cash tax benefit of our business model. The following guidance refers to continuing operations. We expect 2017 revenue to be in a range of $235 million to $245 million as compared to $245 million in 2016 when adjusting for the divestitures of entertainment, Sharper Image and Badgley Mischka. For reference in 2016 the Entertainment segment generated $113 million of revenue and in the first quarter of 2017 revenue from the Entertainment segment was running up 2%. We're revising our 2017 GAAP earnings per share guidance to $0.29 to $0.44 from $0.43 to $0.58 to reflect an additional anticipated loss related to the early extinguishment of debt with existing cash on the balance sheet. We are maintaining our 2017 non-GAAP earnings per share guidance of $0.70 to $0.85. We expect as the elimination of earnings from the entertainment division will be offset by a reduction in interest expense. This compares to approximately $0.78 in 2016 when adjusted for the gain on sale of trademarks, the earnings associated with the Entertainment segment and the Sharper Image brand and interest savings related to portion of debt that was paid down with the proceeds from the asset sales. We estimate the tax savings in 2017 related to the amortization of intangible assets to be approximately $28 million for the year, which would equate to approximately $0.51 of earnings per share. This compares to approximately $28 million in 2016 or about $0.53 of earnings for share. Therefore we expect non-GAAP earnings per share adjusted for tax amortization to be in a range of $1.21 to $1.36. We are also maintaining our 2017 free cash flow guidance of $105 million to $125 million. I'll now turn the call back to John for some closing remarks.