Kurt L. Darrow
Analyst · KeyBanc Capital Markets
Thank you, Kathy. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us today on our call. Yesterday afternoon, we reported our third quarter results for fiscal 2013. It was a strong quarter across many fronts. Consolidated sales increased 10.3%, our operating income increased 37% and our retail segment turned profitable with same-store sales for the La-Z-Boy Furniture Galleries store network increasing 11.8%. We also generated almost $36 million in cash from operations and increased our cash position while buying back shares, paying a dividend and purchasing the property for our new World Headquarters, all in all, a very good quarter. Turning our retail segment around has been a significant undertaking and quite frankly, took longer than expected, and I will address that in a few moments. But with the operation profitable, we will now be able to harness the earnings power of the integrated retail model and continue to make investments in our business to drive profitable growth and return to our shareholders. Sales of our upholstery segment increased 12.3% on top of a 10.7% sales comp in last year's third quarter. The operating margin for the segment in this year's third quarter was 10.1% compared with 9.1% in last year's comparable period. Our manufacturing facilities are lean and we will continue to leverage the fixed cost structure associated with them to drive bottom-line results. And while on the topic of manufactured, it was in indeed an honor for our Dayton, Tennessee, La-Z-Boy facility to be named by IndustryWeek magazine as one of the 10 Best Plants in North America for 2012. It is a competitive and coveted title to obtain and, in fact, the Dayton facility was a finalist for the prior 3 years before receiving the prestigious award last month. Lean initiatives are part of our company's DNA and we worked hard for years to implement them, and we'll continue to do so. Part and parcel to being efficient is the objective to deliver the highest quality products to our customers. This award recognizes the world-class manufacturing operation at our Dayton facility, which totals 1.2 million square feet of manufacturing. I am quite proud of the some 1,300 associates in Dayton who earned this recognition and thank them for their hard work and dedication, as well as that of thousands of other associates who work tirelessly everyday and contribute at all of our other facilities. We are continuing to invest in our Live Life Comfortably advertising campaign, and this quarter spent an additional $1.5 million compared with last year's third quarter towards that campaign. That said, as a percentage of sales, the spend was consistent with last year's quarter. As we have commented before, the campaign is driving a more qualified consumer to our stores, one who is looking for and finding on-trend furniture with a great value. Today's consumer better understands that La-Z-Boy is more than a recliner company and that we offer a wide array of stylish upholstered furniture. Our stationary product sales are growing at a much faster rate than motion, which is a key objective of the campaign given the size of the stationary market. At the same time however, with innovation being one of La-Z-Boy's key attributes and the basis upon which the company was built, we continue to have a great success with our power business and are pleased to be gaining traction in both categories, recliners and motion. As I noted a few moments ago, the written same store sales performance for the 316 La-Z-Boy Furniture Galleries stores was robust. We have just completed 8 consecutive quarters of strong written same-store sales comps, including 4 quarters of near double-digit growth and 4 that were above 10% or greater. Assuming all things remain equal, we would expect this quarter's written same-store sales comp to translate into strong delivered number for the upholstery segment in the fourth quarter. You may remember that in fiscal 2012 fourth quarter, we had a similar situation and those orders rolled in as delivered sales in the first quarter of fiscal '13. With ongoing strength in the business, we along with our dealer network, are keen to open additional La-Z-Boy Furniture Gallery locations. We believe the branded channel is the one with the most promise given the changing distribution landscape over the last several years and for us, it's the channel that has been exhibiting the most growth. Year-to-date, we have opened 6 new stores, relocated 3 and remodeled 4, with a couple of projects planned for the fourth quarter. Finding the right locations, the right square footage and lease structures, are paramount to success so we are not rushing the process, although we are eager to build out the store system as quickly as possible. Ultimately, we believe the demographics throughout North America will support approximately 400 La-Z-Boy Furniture Galleries stores. Now turning to casegoods. In this segment, sales for the quarter decreased 4.7% and the operating margin for the segment declined to 0.6%. Absent a charge for the probable adjustment for import duties, the operating margin would've been 5.1%. The changes we made last quarter to our Hudson, North Carolina manufacturing facility, where we closed the lumber processing operation and are sourcing wood parts, our cadence [ph] was fast and showing promising results as evidenced by what our performance would have been on the declining volume. During the quarter, we continue to enjoy momentum in our occasional line, which remains a good business for us with a wide range of customers, including the La-Z-Boy Furniture Galleries stores. Unfortunately, dining room and bedroom are challenged and it takes a lot of occasional pieces to offset the decline in sales for full groups of bedroom and dining room. However, we did introduce a number of collections at the October furniture market, which were all well received and they will begin shipping here in the fourth quarter. I'd like to spend a few minutes on our retail segment. For the quarter, we posted delivered sales increase of 24.6%. Without the recently acquired and new stores, our delivered increase was 6.1% as the segment turned profitable this quarter with a 3.7% operating margin and the segment is profitable for the 9 months ended January 26, 2013. It has been a long road to turn around this segment but we have made steady progress over the past 4 years to reach the point of where we are today. While there is still much work to do, we are well positioned to continue to progress. Let me take -- let me digress a moment to give you a little bit of history on our company-owned retail segment. While the company has owned some La-Z-Boy stores for more than a decade, it was really in the middle of 2000 that we embarked on an aggressive strategy to shore up the La-Z-Boy Furniture Galleries store system by taking over a number of troubled operations. Given the fact that most of our independent dealers were running profitable businesses and doing well, we used their operations as a guide post and had the confidence that with the right set of people and processes we could make the business we took over profitable. While these operations had challenges, they were in great markets with great potential, so we stepped in. In many cases, we needed to move stores to new locations within various markets and build out the markets with additional stores and we did much of this at the height of a real estate boom and entered some very expensive leases. Then came the financial crisis in late 2000, early 2008, early 2009 and our volume declined precipitously and significantly. Just before the financial meltdown, we had brought in a new management team who went to work making a series of changes throughout the operation. With significant changes in the cost structure and selling process, they hit the ground running with performance improvements and steadily moved the segment from a loss of more than $40 million several years ago to profitability today. Additional credit has to be given to our merchandising, product, marketing and sales teams for their hard work and contribution to the operations results. We've introduced compelling new product that is innovative and stylish with great value. We have a great sales team who is enthusiastically working with the design team, focused on growing the In-Home Design business. And we have a new concept design for our stores that is being rolled out across our network. All of this gives the consumer a great shopping experience at the La-Z-Boy Furniture Galleries store and a beautiful, comfortable room at home. For the quarter, traffic to our stores and website increased as did the average ticket, units per ticket and the In-Home Design business, and we continue to increase our gross margin as well. We also opened a third store in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania market in December and as with the first 2, the store's results have been strong from the beginning. The period also included the first full quarter with our southern Ohio operation. This business has a lot of potential. We talked through the years about harnessing the power of the brand and the integrated retail model, changed the earnings power of the company and we are now in a position to demonstrate the strength of this model. Our team has worked hard and we'll continue to do so to further improve the operation's performance. I'd like to take this opportunity to give a call out to the entire retail organization, noting their steadfast work, discipline and perseverance as demonstrated in the trajectory this operation has exhibited over the past 4-plus years. I will now turn the call over to Mike to review our financials. Michael?