Steve Quinlan
Analyst · William Blair. Your line is open
Thanks John, and welcome to everyone listening this morning. While John has reported the overall sales and profit performance for the first quarter of our fiscal year, in the next few minutes, I will give you some color behind those results and we’ll start by discussing the performance of the food safety group. We do continue to be impacted by fluctuations in currencies in the countries we operate in. As john mentioned, revenues would have been $1.2 million higher for the quarter in a neutral currency environment. With the Euro down 4% and the Pound down 5%, each largely the result of the Brexit uncertainty, the Chinese RMB declined 4% due in part to the continuing trade stand-off with the U.S., and the Aussie dollar declined 7% in the quarter. And about $1 million of that shortfall is in the food safety segment as the majority of the international businesses report in through this segment. Revenues overall for the food safety segment were $51 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2020, and that's a decrease of 2% compared to $52.2 million in last year's first quarter. The currency issues impacted the segment, but there were other issues within our international businesses which also affected our results. Our Brazilian operations had a 42% increase in sales of food safety diagnostic products led by continued market share gains in aflatoxin sales during the country's corn harvest, and an 18% increase in dairy antibiotic test kit sales, but lost a large commercial lab customer testing for drugs in commercial drivers in Brazil as that customer changed to a higher throughput method for testing. And as we noted in last year's first quarter, we had a nonrecurring about $1 million insecticide sale to a government agency in that quarter. These two items offset the gains I discussed, and the result was a 16% decline in sales in Brazil overall in the current quarter. The lost forensic sales will impact the second and third quarters by approximately $800,000 each quarter, and a lesser amount in the fourth quarter. Our European operations had sluggish results for the quarter with revenues up 1% in local currency, primarily on the strength of a 6% increase in our England-based cleaner disinfectant business. Genomics revenues, which grew at a double-digit pace throughout 2019 and 24% in last year's first quarter, rose 4% in the first quarter of this year. These increases were partially offset by declines in culture media revenues, lower sales of our products to detect spoilage organisms due to a large equipment sale in the first quarter of the prior year, and relatively clean crops after a mild DON outbreak last year in France. After converting to U.S. dollars, revenues for the European operations declined by 4% for the quarter. Neogen Latinoamerica, our business based in Mexico City, had strong 36% growth in sales of our food safety products led by mycotoxin kit sales due to an aflatoxin outbreak in corn in Mexico. Sales rose broadly across all of the diagnostic product lines. Sales of cleaners, disinfectants, and rodenticides however dropped 32%, due in large part to lower demand and delayed orders from larger customers and distributors, and this resulted in an overall increase in revenues of 5% for the quarter for this group. Our operations in China were negatively impacted by the African swine fever outbreak in that country, which resulted in lower genomic testing for pork in the quarter and contributed to an 18% decline in revenue in China. Our domestic food safety business only grew by 5% for the quarter but there were some nice areas of growth within the business. Revenues for our industry-leading product line to detect inadvertent allergen contamination, which includes diagnostic tests to determine the presence of milk, peanuts, and processed soy, among others, were up 11% domestically in the quarter. Tree nut and gliadin test kit sales were particularly strong, up 45% and 17% respectively for the period. We have continued to strengthen our allergen test kit portfolio and recently added new tests for contaminants such as coconut. Our AccuPoint line, which is used to detect general sanitation and cleanliness in food processing environments, had a strong 12% increase in disposable sample revenues during the quarter. Our domestic natural toxin product sales decreased 3% compared to last year's first quarter due in part to the late planting of corn and other grains this spring caused by the severe weather, which has delayed the harvest of these crops. We believe that as the crops mature, we will see an uptick in new in the second and third quarters. Revenues for our test to detect the presence of antibiotics in milk declined by 8% in the quarter, due primarily to lower demand from a large European distributor. Our domestic culture media business declined 13% in the quarter. A number of our larger customers, particularly those in animal vaccine production, have pushed their orders for these products to the second quarter and second half of the year due to weakness in their markets. Finally, we were unable to ship a number of readers for our product line to detect spoilage organisms such as yeast and mold due to backorders of a key part with one of our equipment suppliers. This resulted in approximately $400,000 shortfall in reader sales for the quarter. These readers are expected to ship in the second quarter. The animal safety segment continues to be adversely impacted by the ongoing trade impasse between the U.S. and China, which has disrupted our market. However, we recorded revenues of $50.4 million for the quarter, up 6% over the $47.4 million achieved in last year's first quarter. This growth was driven by a 24% increase in service revenue with our domestic genomics testing and bioinformatics business located in Lincoln, Nebraska with continued strength in the commercial beef and dairy cattle markets and market share gains in the companion animal parentage and wellness testing markets. Worldwide, genomics revenues rose 17% with additional growth in Brazil, Australia and Canada offset by lower sales in China. Animal care products sold out of our Lexington, Kentucky-based manufacturing and distribution center such as small animal supplements, wound care, antibiotics were up 10% and vet instruments such as disposable syringes and marketing products rose 9% for the quarter. Now these gains were partially offset by lower sales of life science products, the result of more forensic kit sales to commercial labs and higher promotional rebates. Rodenticide sales declined 8% in the quarter due primarily to lower rodent pressure in certain areas of the country. And domestic cleaner and disinfectant sales were essentially flat and insecticides rose 6% in the quarter. Gross margins were 47.5% for the quarter compared to 46.9% in last year's first quarter. The improvement here is due to increased margins at our domestic genomics operation in the animal safety segment and the shift in product mix in the food safety segment toward products which have higher gross margins and lower sales of lower margin products such as culture media and biosecurity products. Overall, our operating expenses rose 6% on the quarter compared to last year's first quarter. Sales and marketing expenses increased 2%, in line with revenue growth for the quarter. General and administrative expenses rose 5% for the quarter, due primarily to higher depreciation expenses resulting from our continued investments in information technology infrastructure, stock-based compensation and increased legal fees. Research and development expenses increased $869,000 or 31% over the prior year as we continue development spending on a number of new products which are scheduled to be launched in late fiscal 2020 and early fiscal 2021. The $3.8 million we spent this quarter is similar to the $3.6 million we spent in the last quarter of 2019. And we expect this run rate to continue throughout fiscal 2020. Operating income for the first quarter was $16.3 million, compared to $16.5 million in last year's first quarter. And expressed as a percent of revenues, operating income was 16% exactly compared to 16.5% last year, with the decline in the result of the higher R&D spending level. We recorded $1.5 million in interest income for the quarter compared to $930,000 last year. This reflects our higher cash and marketable securities balances and higher interest rates on those balances. Foreign currency losses totaling $117,000 in the first quarter compares to $386,000 in losses in the same period last year. Our pretax profit was $17.7 million compared to $17.1 million in last year's first quarter. And our effective tax rate for the first quarter was 17% compared to 11.1% in last year's first quarter. Last year's effective rate was unusually low due to $2.3 million in tax benefits recognized from the exercise of stock option. This year, the comparable number was $769,000. As I have mentioned on previous calls, the volume of option exercises can result in large fluctuations in the effective tax rate for the comparative periods. On the balance sheet, our net receivables balance declined by 4% compared to year end and our collection period was 64 days for the first quarter. Inventory increased by $1.7 million or 2%. We are focusing significant effort this year on improving our inventory turns and have objectives and programs in place at each operation to make that happen. We generated $23.7 million in cash from operations during the quarter, invested $4 million of that in property, plant and equipment and additional amounts to license technology. I will stop here to say that we realize that we need to accelerate the organic growth performances of our business. There were number of areas in the business which performed well in the quarter, which were obscured by one-time factors and other market noise. We continue to be excited about the remainder of the year and appreciate your support. And at this point, I will turn it back to John for further comments.