Operator
Operator
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to this Herman Miller, Inc. Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2015 Earnings Results Conference Call. This call is being recorded. This presentation will include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include those risk factors discussed in the company's reports on Form 10-K and 10-Q and other reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Today's presentation will be hosted by Mr. Brian Walker, President and Chief Executive Officer; Jeff Stutz, CFO; and Mr. Kevin Veltman, VP of Investor Relations and Treasury. Mr. Walker will open the call with brief remarks, followed by a more detailed presentation of the financials by Mr. Stutz and Mr. Veltman. We will then open the call to your question. We will limit today's call to 60 minutes and ask that callers limit their questions to allow time for all to participate. At this time, I would like to begin the presentation by turning the call over to Mr. Walker. Please go ahead. Brian C. Walker - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us on today's call. I'll begin with a brief update on our recent performance and key strategic initiatives then hand the call over to Jeff and Kevin to review the financials in greater detail. As you know, we announced preliminary third quarter sales and orders on March 2, just ahead of our presentation at the Raymond James Investor Conference that same week. Our final results for the quarter landed within the ranges we provided at that time with consolidated sales coming in at $516 million and new orders totaling $501 million, representing year-on-year growth of 13% and 8%, respectively. As we noted at the time of our preannouncement; during the third quarter, we continued to see momentum in our Specialty and Consumer business segments, both of which reported year-on-year growth in sales, orders and profitability. The same can be said of our ELA segment, which despite a challenging currency environment posted solid organic sales and order growth and improved earnings performance. At the same time, as we highlighted last quarter, the performance of our North American contract business has not met our expectations, particularly in the area of order growth, which began to lag the broader industry trends during our second quarter. On our call in December, we outlined several contributing factors along with the actions we were taking to address the issues. During the third quarter, we rallied around implementing these action plans. Indeed, many of them are complete, and we continue to actively make tactical moves to improve both our short and long-term competitive position in this segment. While we are pleased with the speed with which the organization is responding to these challenges, these actions did not impact orders and revenue in the third quarter. To be frank, given the project cycles of this segment, it will take some time before these actions work their way through wins, orders, and ultimately revenue. With that said, we are confident, these actions will improve our competitive position and we will be relentless in our drive to compete and win. I would further note that our industry outlook for North America continued to show positive signs. The most recent BIFMA forecast calls for mid-single-digit growth in calendar 2015 and 2016. Underlying leading indicators, including service sector employment, non-residential construction forecast, and ABI trends should also support our efforts to accelerate growth. So, let me recap how we plan to do it. First, I'll discuss actions within our sales organization, and then what we're doing on the product side. Within sales, we increased selling capacity during the third quarter by filling open sales positions, and we're now running at normal staffing levels. We're also putting greater focus on small and mid-sized projects to ensure we are competing more effectively for this business. Finally, we are executing detailed, market-by-market plans to ensure showrooms and sales teams are well positioned to effectively communicate our value proposition. Each of these initiatives are up and running and gaining traction. From a product perspective, we've completed development and launch of key new product introductions, including the Canvas Dock, an important extension to the Public Office Landscape and Mirra 2 product lines, all of which are now available for order. We're also accelerating the development of products, which will fill gaps in our offer over the next six months to 12 months. We've also reset many of our North American showrooms with the remainder to be completed by the end of the fourth quarter. The objective was to ensure we had the right assortment of products on the floor including our newest products such as Canvas Dock. We've also moved quickly to get these products into the showrooms of our dealers and accelerated the training of their people. In addition to these actions, we took important steps within our North American leadership to ensure we have the right team in place to help us execute our strategic plan. Our goal is simple, get closer to the customer and dealer and then deliver industry-best speed and solutions. And we're confident we have the right team to do it. To sum it up, as we look at our North American business, we have our arms around the issues, we're attacking them with a sense of urgency and resolve, and we are confident we have the right strategy, the right tools and the right leadership in place to return this business to higher growth. Let me now turn to other parts of our business that have continued to perform well. The Specialty and Consumer segments, once again delivered solid orders and sales and margin contribution. That's great evidence of the continued progress in our Shift strategy to diversify our customer base and develop new avenues for long-term growth as we focus on building a lifestyle brand. Within the Consumer segment, the integration of DWR is well underway and proving very complementary to the strategy. The team led by John Edelman and John McPhee is deeply engaged and moving ahead in high gear on our priorities and plans. We are making good progress towards our exclusive product goals, introducing more DWR exclusives and growing our Herman Miller Consumer product offer, while also expanding our e-commerce business. We are also continuing to see growth from other key non-exclusive brands that DWR carries. Likewise, the new large format studios continue to perform well and are proving to be a more efficient model for the business. We will continue to convert three to five studios per year to the larger format to allow us to display our products much more effectively for our customers. In short, the Consumer business is becoming a powerful part of our economic engine and we expect the positive momentum the team is building to continue. Our Specialty business also performed well this quarter, with double-digit sales and order growth in both Geiger and our Herman Miller Collection business. The Maharam team continues to deliver premium margins and remained very positive on their growth potential with active plans underway in new categories and geographies. While our reported growth rate in the third quarter reflected the negative impact of the strengthening U.S. dollar, our ELA segment delivered solid organic results, posting year-over-year growth of 6% in sales and 5% in orders. This growth was led by increased demand in Asia-Pacific, particularly Australia and India, and continued project activity in the Middle East. As we look at the Herman Miller value proposition overall, we have a premier brand and a talented team to take it further. We are focused on executing a strategy that fits well with our strengths and capabilities. Through our swift and decisive actions and an unmatched dealer network, we are confident we were gaining momentum in our contracts business in North America. With that, I'll turn the call over to Jeff to further discuss the financials.