Welcome to the Third Quarter 2015 Lifetime Brands' Earnings Conference Call. My name is Catena and I'll be your coordinator for today. [Operator Instructions]. I would now like to turn the presentation over to your host for today's call Ms. Harriet Fried of LHA. Please proceed.

Good morning, everyone and thank you for joining Lifetime Brands third quarter 2015 conference call. With us today from management are Jeff Siegel, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Larry Winoker, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin I’ll read the Safe Harbor statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The statements that are about to be made in this conference call that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements and involve risks and uncertainties, including the company’s ability to comply with the requirements of its credit agreements, the availability of funding under those credit agreements, the company’s ability to maintain adequate liquidity and financing sources and an appropriate level of debt, changes in general economic conditions, which could affect customer payment practices or consumer spending, changes in demand for the company’s products, shortages of and price volatility for certain commodities, the effect of competition on the company’s markets. The impact of foreign exchange fluctuations and other risk detailed in Lifetime’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements. The company’s earnings release contains non-GAAP financial measures within the meaning of Regulation G promulgated by the SEC included in this morning’s release is a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the comparable financial measures calculated in accordance with GAAP. With that introduction, I'd like to turn the call over to Mr. Siegel. Please go ahead, Jeff.

Lifetime's third quarter results generally met what we expected despite the impact of foreign currency exchange rate fluctuations on our international business which has reduced our reported net sales revenue by approximately $3.6 million or 2.3% year-over-year and had a negative effect on our margins. In the U.S. where foreign exchange is not an issue, our wholesale business increased 4.2% year-over-year with growth in each of our three product categories, kitchenware, table top and home solutions. Most exciting was a double digit jump in Home Solutions, a 22% overall. The home decor area has been a drag on our U.S. businesses several years. However as I predicted last quarter it's finally turned the corner. A key contributor is a large new program at a major pharmacy chain which is devoting a section to Bombay Giftables in all the U.S. stores. Bombay has been a great specialty brand for over 30 years and ranks among the top ranked recognizable home decor brands in America. We expect the Bombay Giftables program and our recent penetration into the drugstore channel to continue to be an important source of growth for this division. In kitchenware the largest component of our U.S. wholesale segment, sales were up slightly with increases in cutlery and [indiscernible] partially offset by declines in other areas including tools and gadgets. Kitchenware sales were hurt by the bankruptcies of to mid-sized retailers, [indiscernible] and Anna's Linen and a comparison of year-over-year performance must take into account strong sales in Costco in last year's quarter that didn't occur this year as Costco shifted its emphasis to other categories such as pantryware and table top which reflected in the results of those divisions. In tableware sales were up reflecting good growth in the Casa branded dinnerware and flatware as well as strong sales…

Thanks, Jeff. As we report this morning net income for the third quarter of 2015 was 5.1 million or $0.36 per diluted share as compared to net loss of 1.6 million or $0.12 per diluted share in 2014 period. Adjusted net income for the quarter was 5.9 million or $0.41 per diluted share as compared to 5.7 million also $0.41 in 2014. A table which reconciled as non-GAAP measure to reported results was included in this release. Income from operations was $9.8 million compared to 8.4 million in 2014 excluding impact of impairment charge in 2014 income from operations at 11.8. Consolidated EBITDA, a non-GAAP measure that is reconciled to our results in the release, was $14.1 million for the current quarter, and $16.5 million for the 2014 period. Consolidated EBITDA was 41.9 million for the 12 months ended September, 2015 and $42.6 million for the same period last year. For our U.S. wholesale segment, net sales in the 2015 quarter increased 4.2% to $130.6 million, growth in all our business categories, Kitchenware and tableware and home solutions. Kitchenware’s increase was modest as growth in cutlery and products more than offset lower volumes and other line, tableware's increase from Mikasa and flatware. While home solutions reported a very strong quarter on home decord's Bombay product line and pantryware's volume in the warehouse channel club. U.S. wholesale segment gross margin was 34.3% in the 2015 quarter compared to 34.9% in 2014. The decline in gross margin reflects faster growth in lower margin product categories and sales channel mix. However through the nine-months of the year, U.S. gross margin is up 20 basis points for 35.4%. U.S. distribution expense as a percentage of sales shipped from our warehouses improved 3.4% in the quarter from 8.8% last year, benefit of higher shipments in…

[Operator Instructions]. Your first question comes from the line of Frank Camma representing Sidoti. Please proceed.

You stated that you have confidence in the holiday season and I'm trying to figure what that’s based on what I hear from other companies and retailers, can you just give us some more color on the?

It's based on placement frankly. And what we have what we call our flex plan which is our internal plan which is updated on a monthly basis sales. We begin the year with a budget and then adjusted each month based on whatever changes happen at different retailers and based on what's going on we still have a high level of confidence. You know our biggest records [ph] as we've noted is in international where -- though this is doing well the translation is hurting us and that's going to continue.

But international was actually down even if you ignore translation.

It's down only at one place which is Creative Tops, Creative Tops is the ceramics part of our UK business. Besides exchange differential which is about 15%. They also have a 25% anti-dumping duty which came took place in the last two years. So their retail prices, the prices at retail of their product has gone up close to 40%. It's a dampen sales to some degree. It's it seems to be turning around because they're converting their business and moving away from the pure ceramic items to more of the accessory items that they can get a higher margin on.

With respect to you know understanding your relatively slow inventory term, we’re still not in the quarter at least if we didn’t see any improvement on commodity costs, it looks like the impact cost. I was wondering if you’re going to address that all for further you said maybe Q4 next year, can you toss it out?

If you just see it's substantially better in Q4 of this year and again I'm talking about the U.S. business [Technical Difficulty] international, the U.S. business there should be a substantial improvement starting in Q4 and certainly going into 2016 the main commodities that we use are down dramatically and we certainly are getting of course decreases overseas.

And at what point does your retail partners so do they push against you, you know knowing that?

They do to some degree, not all of them but some of them do. But that's overall ,we still expect to be a little bit better off. I mean we're not going to be, it's like a princess in one case [indiscernible] [indiscernible] steel which is down from $550 a ton in January to under $350 a ton right now and we use a lot of that in our bakeware. We’re getting lower cost, but we have also lowered some of the retailers as expected. But overall we still will be improving our margins.

Larry, outlined some issues on why the distribution cost continue to go up, it's clear on why SG&A goes up both on absolute basis and relative to revenue as a percent basis. So I was just wondering if you can give us clarity on that.

I thought it was in fact in-line with what it was last year as a percentage of sales. And yet another thing I mentioned is about the timing of when -- we even recorded our short term compensation, incentive compensation not ratably throughout the year depending on where the profits are and it was shift versus last year so we recorded it earlier, more of it earlier this year than we did last year. But by and large our [Technical Difficulty] we have a number of initiatives to control end used costs. So I think for the year we should be okay relative to their sales.

Okay and last question just see how does this impact obviously bringing down numbers for this year. How does this impact your view on longer term growth rates?

It really doesn't have much of an impact on the longer term, we still feel organically we can grow in this 3% to 5% range and will layer on acquisitions above that. We still feel the same way, there is no change in our feeling, hopefully the exchange doesn’t get much than this now because that is certainly putting us back. Our U.S. organic growth rate in the quarter was over 4%.

So just one clarification, Larry did you say your full year tax rate was going to be 39%?

Yes.

Would that imply very high fourth quarter tax rate from doing the map rate?

Yes that’s because of how performance in overseas is. So our rates here -- our U.S. rate is 35 plus state taxes and in the international or the UK it's below 20, but because of what's happening actually it's driving up our effective tax rate.

I understand that but you'd have to have a statutory rate above 40%?

That’s what is following us [ph].

[Operator Instructions]. With no further questions at this time I would now like to hand the call back to Mr. Jeff Siegel for any closing remarks.

Thanks for joining us today. As you heard we have a multitude of efforts underway at Lifetime to create new and innovative products that make household tasks easier, more exciting and more fun to consumers. We're optimistic about our results for the holiday period and look forward to giving you an update after the fourth quarter.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen thank you for your participation in today's conference. This concludes the presentation. You may now disconnect. Good day.