Rob Kay
Analyst · Anthony Lebiedzinski, Sidoti and Company
Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to discuss Lifetime Brands' first quarter 2021 financial results. Lifetime Brands is off to an excellent start in 2021 with top line growth of approximately 35%, driving net income of $3.1 million, and year-over-year growth in adjusted EBITDA of 418%, or $13.6 million. Our strong results this quarter demonstrate Lifetime's ability to consistently outperform across our categories in the many channels in which we sell our products. I could not be more proud of the Lifetime team and the incredible work that has contributed to our unprecedented results, which once again validates the strong foundation we have established through our Lifetime 2.0 Strategy. And while we've delivered strong top line growth, we've also remained focused on disciplined cost control, which has contributed to making our company a leaner organization and continues build on the 21% adjusted EBITDA growth we achieved in 2020. I'll start with our core U.S. business, which showed remarkable strengths and continues to lead our overall business. In fact, it has now delivered its seventh consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth. We are benefiting from our ability to add new products, grow into adjacent categories, and expand brands, such as our KitchenAid line, which we recently extended into cutlery and into international markets. The combination of our strong top line growth, the benefits of better utilization of our infrastructure, and a disciplined focus on cost efficiencies all contributed to our strong results for the quarter. Building on our momentum from 2020, we continue to gain market share across the majority of our categories, driven by robust consumer demand, leading brands and product offerings, and vendor consolidation at our largest customers. Additionally, we benefited in the first quarter from our strategy to invest in increased inventory levels, to assure product availability to our customers and consumers. We continue to see solid performance across most of our channels, including math, club, off-price, and increasingly, grocery. We also benefited from expansion into adjacent categories where we believe we have a right to win given our infrastructure, product design capabilities, and customer relationships. New product launches in the barbecue, pet, and storage, and organization categories contributed to our strong performance, and we believe we will drive growth in these and other consumable durable categories moving forward. We are also continuing to grow our e-commerce revenues, which grew up approximately 65% in the first quarter and accounted for approximately 20% of total revenue in the quarter, up from 16.2% as compared to the comparable quarter a year ago. Contributing to our omni-channel growth has been our ability to execute drop shipments, which grew approximately 38% compared to the prior year. It is worthwhile to note that while our e-commerce revenues have grown significantly, we have grown at a faster pace in our brick-and-mortar channels during the quarter. We are excited about the opportunities presented by our strategic acquisition of Year & Day, a development stage online tabletop platform focused on Millennials and Gen Z consumers, which enable us to enhance our general offerings for this high-value age group. As mentioned on our last call, we expect the transaction to be accretive by 2022. We believe that this and other new brand and category offerings in 2021 will enable Lifetime to continue to achieve growth levels in excess of our underlying markets within our core business. Turning to our international business. We saw significant year-over-year improvement in profitability as we continue to reap the benefits of the reorganization of our international market operations and market strategy. Despite store closures throughout Europe, our international business grew revenues 22.8% in the first quarter. Importantly, the impact of our transformation strategy for LTB Europe can be seen in a year-over-year improvement in EBITDA of $4.6 million for the quarter. Contributing to this improvement, our reduction to the LTB Europe cost structure is evident in the reduction in our UK distribution expense as a percentage of those shipments from our warehouses to 14.4%, from 16% year-over-year. As I mentioned earlier, we are also starting to see revenues from our KitchenAid, kitchen tools, and bakeware international rollout, and are making meaningful progress with our full product rollout. We are also pleased with the progress and corresponding potential with brands that we have launched directly to consumers in Asia. Dampening international revenue growth, we have seen a planned reduction in our overall international e-commerce revenues as we eliminated a meaningful amount of SKUs which had a low or negative contribution margin. The near- and long-term benefits from this planned reduction can already be seen in the first quarter results with improved margin percentages and margin dollars generated from this channel. We expect to see further uplift from our international business as the UK and other European markets continue to reopen this year. Cutting to another long-term growth initiative, we remain confident that our investments in the commercial foodservice business, with Mikasa Hospitality, will provide significant long-term growth opportunities for Lifetime. To this end, we have increased our investment in Mikasa Hospitality in 2021, and we have continued our sales and ramp-up efforts during the pandemic, which we believe are gaining meaningful traction with distributors and customers. In the second quarter, we brought on key talent to bolster our sales capabilities and help us successfully execute on this massive opportunity. We continue to be optimistic about the potential for our front-of-the-house foodservice initiative to complement our leading position back-of-the-house smallwares and expect to gain significant share in this category in the COVID recovery and in 2022 and beyond. I look forward to providing further updates as restaurants, hotels, and the hospitality industry continue to open up and eventually return to normal operation. As mentioned on last quarter's call, we are expecting headwinds related to shipping challenges due to inbound ocean freight and outbound domestic freight availability. As a result of these headwinds, we experienced slight shipping delays and cancellations. Thanks in part to the flexibility provided by our balance sheet, we are actively working to mitigate these headwinds by investing in inventory to ensure continued availability of our products. We are also working on several strategies involving our supply chain which are designed to mitigate these challenges. In addition to freight challenges, we are seeing inflation in the various inputs to our cost of goods sold. Again, we are actively implementing mitigation strategies to offset these inputs, which we believe will continue – which we believe will offset these cost increases. We do anticipate the short-term lag impact until the benefits of these strategies are realized. And therefore, anticipate a temporary slight reduction in our gross margin percentage. These factors were considered as we developed our 2021 financial guidance, which I will discuss in greater detail shortly. Looking ahead, 2021 will be a year of growth investment as we strengthen our focus on strategic initiatives designed to provide incremental growth to our base of business. This includes expanding in foodservice and in categories adjacent to our core business, where we have a right to win, supporting high growth and high margin potential brands like Year & Day, and continuing to enhance our digital capabilities and assets. We will continue to leverage the strength of our balance sheet as we capitalize on these opportunities to drive long-term growth and profitability. While 2021 will see a significant increase in investments to support these growth initiatives, we still expect to be able to achieve meaningful growth in our top and bottom line. All of these factors should lead to a very strong 2021. That brings me to our financial guidance, which we issued this morning. We've built this forecast carefully after evaluating all of our key categories, brands, and products, and are confident that we are well-positioned to meet this outlook. Factors that we considered in setting our guidance, among others, included COVID impact, inflationary challenges, labor costs, and positive secular trends. COVID factors include timing irregularities caused by previous discussed COVID impact on supply chains in India and China, as well as challenges in international markets as a result of continued lockdowns in Canada and Europe. Despite these factors, we will continue building on our incredibly strong momentum as we grow across our categories and continue to gain market share, as well as capitalize on the market share gains we have made over the past 15 months. Our guidance also considers the near-term inflationary challenges I mentioned earlier, which impact cost of goods sold and fray costs. Finally, we have also considered a noticeable increase in domestic labor costs, consistent with what we have been experiencing for the past six months. As provided in more detail in our press release, our outlook for 2021 is to achieve net sales of between $847 million and $856 million, diluted income per share of $1.24 to $1.33 and adjusted EBITDA of $82.5 million to $85.5 million. As you can see, even with our planned investments and certain macroeconomic headwinds, we expect to be able to grow double digits in 2021, building upon our 21% adjusted EBITDA growth in 2012. Based upon the company's accelerated growth and success in achieving as previously disclosed long-term financial objectives, we will be revising those objectives upward. Driving our continued growth is the strong market share position that we have achieved, supplemented by plus one growth opportunities that we continue to invest in. Further, we expect to benefit from increases in home building and homeownership supplemented by an increase in home entertainment, driven by vaccinations and a return to social gatherings, which are expected to grow home entertaining in the U.S. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Larry.