Michael Dinkins
Analyst · Matt Mishan from KeyBanc. Your line is open. Please go ahead
Thanks, Tom, and good afternoon, everyone. I am going to take you through our financial results, balance sheet metrics and a discussion of our updated full year guidance. As you’ve heard from Tom, we have made progress both operationally and financially to stabilize our business and this is reflected in our third quarter results. Sales in the third quarter of 2016 were essentially flat at 347 million compared with 348 million in the prior year and in the second quarter of 2016. This is a significant improvement compared to the year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter declines we saw during the first half of the year. Foreign currency exchange rates did not materially impact sales in comparison to the prior year in third quarter. Gross margin of 28.3% remained steady as well. Comparing flat to prior year and a 70 basis point improvement compared to 27.6% in the second quarter of 2016. Our efforts to reduce costs, drive the integration synergies and focus on operating efficiencies are generating results. Operating expenses as a percentage of sales are down 360 basis points from the prior year quarter to 17.6% and down 160 basis points from the last quarter. Taking a closer look at sales, the chart on slide eight provides a quarterly view of sales on a comparable basis over the past several quarters. Year-over-year, quarter-over-quarter and year-to-date product comparisons have improved from the second quarter of 2016, reflecting enhance customer relationships, waning impact of discrete customer programs and the improvements in overall market conditions. Tom will discuss our product lines in more detail later in the call. We are focused on improving our adjusted EBITDA because it provides us benefits and generating cash to pay down debt and meet our loan compliance requirements. Our approach to improving performance is to concentrate on quality metrics that improved customer satisfaction, reduced cost and the system expanding our share wallet with our customers. We achieved this through a culture of continues improvement and an attention to details. We are faced with continued pricing pressure and estimate that our prices are down approximately 1% to 2% for the quarter and year-to-date, which drives the need to focus on quality as a driver of margin expansion. We believe that superior quality is a depreciator in the market that will lead to volume increases and efficiency. Cash flow provided by operating activity for the third quarter and 2016 were approximately 39 million and capital expenditures were approximately 17 million. Cash flow from operations in the third quarter of 2016 were negatively impacted by approximately 13 million of consolidating, IP related litigation, acquisition, integration and spinoff related expenses which are predominantly cash expenditures and $18 million of interest payments on debt. During the third quarter of 2016, we repaid 12 million of our outstanding debt and our cash balances increased $8 million. Year-to-date, we have repaid 29 million of our debt. We are implementing several initiatives to continue to improve cash flow. First, we are targeting continued reduction in our inventory levels, not only for the balance of 2016 but for the 2017 budget it means to generate cash and continue to pay down debt. Second, our supply chain team continues to rationalize the number of vendor we do business with to drive synergies and expand payment terms. In addition, we are looking at reducing our capital expenditures in the integration expenses as we approach to tail end of our integration efforts. Let’s now turn to a discussion of our outlook for the remainder of the year. Our ongoing efforts to collaborate more closely with our customers have improved our understanding of future revenue projections and we are reconfirming the full year revenue guidance range of 1.375 billion to 1.395 billion that we updated last quarter. We are also reconfirming our full year adjusted net income and adjusted diluted EPS guidance. We have updated our full year 2016 adjusted EBITDA guidance to be within the range of 285 million to 295 million, a decrease of 10 million as the midpoint of guidance. This decrease is driven by changes in the estimate that bridge us from gap results to adjusted results, primarily income taxes and depreciation and amortization. With respect to the financial covenants associated with our indebtedness, we remained in compliance with both our net leverage ratio and our interest coverage ratio as of the third quarter 2016. As we look to the end of the year, our current outlook for both revenue and adjusted EBITDA allows us to remain well within the net leverage ratio requirement. Based upon our updated range for adjusted EBITDA for 2016 there is a potential that we may not be able to meet our minimum interest coverage ratio in the future. We are actively monitoring our financial covenant compliance and are taking steps to identify opportunities from proven our financial performance so that we will remain in compliance. However, in order to reduce our risk we are working with the administrative agent under our credit facilities to obtain an amendment or waiver of the financial covenants before year-end. Please see the appendices of this presentation of information regarding how to calculate our financial covenants and more information on our bank facility. I will now turn the call back Tom Hook.