Michael Benstock
Analyst · Barrington Research
Thank you, Hala and good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining us to review our fourth quarter and fiscal 2016 results. I will start with a few highlights for both periods and then provide commentary on market trends. Next, Andy will give you some background on our financial performance. After which, I will offer some general thoughts on the future. Then we will be happy to take your questions. We delivered strong fourth quarter performance with record earnings of solid finish to a year of diligently executing against our long-term strategic plan initiated in 2013. We extended our string of consecutive quarterly sales increases to 17 on a year-over-year basis, with revenues up 21.6%. Turning to segment performance, I want to point out that we realigned our reporting structure and segmented the promotional products business, which includes only BAMKO sales. Andy will discuss this further in his remarks. Uniforms and related products performed exceptionally well, up 6.5% in the quarter despite typical seasonality as customers are generally focused on their own holiday related sales during that period rather than uniform purchasing. As our non-uniform business expands, we do expect these seasonality trends to even out as evidenced by BAMKO’s solid contribution. The team at BAMKO delivered strong results and finished the quarter with just under $8 million in sales. Our employee ID business contributed nicely, while working through a warehouse system implementation of HBI direct. This pushed a small number of shipments into January, but that is now behind us and system performance is improving daily. We also delivered on the bottom line, with net income up 31.8% for record fourth quarter earnings of $4.4 million or $0.30 per diluted share. Of note, earnings were positively impacted by the early adoption of an accounting standard related to stock-based compensation. Andy will address this in more detail during his remarks. Here are some 2016 highlights. On a full year basis, total net sales reached $252.6 million, up 20.1% over a very good year if you recall in 2015. This included a 6.1% increase in revenues for the uniform segment during the year. We continued to see organic growth by penetrating current customers and acquiring new ones bolstered by strong employment trends and more robust voluntary employee turnover. BAMKO, which we acquired effective March 1, generated net sales of $27.8 million representing a contribution of 11% of total net sales by our new promotional products segment. The team successfully penetrated existing customers, continue to build new relationships and leverage cross-selling opportunities with our legacy uniform customers. Remote staffing solutions, the Office Gurus, consistently performed well with net sales to outside customers increasing by 20.1%. We continued to reach this underserved market of new customers that need fewer than 25 seats to fulfill multiple back and front office support functions. This approach is attracting new customers and allowing us to expand work with current ones. Looking back at 2016, we achieved the number of impressive and fundamentally important milestones that reflect positive momentum for greater growth opportunities in the coming years. Let’s recap them. In January, we opened our first company managed manufacturing facility in almost 20 years located in Haiti. The factory came online faster than anticipated and implementation has progressed exceptionally well supporting plans to accelerate expansion. Our staff is currently at 180 and we expect to employ a total of approximately 300 people by the end of this year. That will give us a full complement of staff to reach our goal of $25 million in outlook for 2018. We also expect to see incremental margin improvement when the operation reaches full capacity by mid-2018. As we have described on prior calls, we make the single line of engineered healthcare apparel professions to healthcare in that factories. Our competitive advantage here is not only are we a low cost and perhaps the lowest cost manufacturer, but we also have the ability to bundle orders, which better positions us to bid on larger contracts. It’s proximity to United States also allows us to react to unexpected demand much more rapidly. During the year, we also restructured our approach to the healthcare market combining our direct and indirect sales and marketing efforts. After 4 years of executing our strategic plan, it became clear that we aren’t fully realizing our desired return on investment part of this channel. We realigned our sales force to ensure business. Development costs were more in line with profitable opportunities. Our combined sales professionals are trained to operate in both the direct and the indirect markets. You will recall that the direct markets includes such areas as large integrated delivery networks, outpatient services, home healthcare, long-term care chains and medical colleges, while the indirect focuses on laundries and distributors. We have strengthened our channel efficiencies through a flatter and more focused operation leading us to engage in more profitable opportunities as we move forward. Additionally, we consolidated our supply chain across our healthcare and non-healthcare channels giving our uniform segment stronger sourcing power and leading to an even better competitive environment for us. We expanded our global sourcing capabilities, including the leverage of BAMKO’s infrastructure in China giving us the competitive edge. We also are realizing synergies, the cost effective web development, IT and accounting support in our India office. As I mentioned earlier, we are now breaking out the promotional products segment. After acquiring BAMKO, we became one of the largest branded merchandise promotional product distributors in the United States. We are very proud that the team was recognized in January and awarded 5 out of 14 awards presented by the Promotional Products Association International. These included awards for BAMKO’s consumer, sales incentives, international, employee incentives and health and wellness programs. This made BAMKO the most decorated firm in the promotional products industry for 2016. Of course, BAMKO represents the latest success in our acquisition strategy. We plan to remain aggressive in this area, because there are plenty of opportunities here. Of the 22,000 companies in the promotional products industry, we have narrowed our list to around 150 that might meet our current acquisition criteria. The attributes are important to us are that they have revenues of $10 million to $25 million, good geographic penetration, strong customer base or product lines that we can leverage. We are connecting with many of these targets and in conversations with several. We have the financial strength and experience integration team and expect to close one or two bolt-on acquisitions a year. The market for uniform segment acquisitions is very, very different. Here are the full of good targets is much more limited. Many are family-owned, multi-generational operations that compete with us in non-healthcare markets primarily. We are in regular contact with these businesses and stand ready to capitalize throughout your time. For our remote staffing solutions segment, the big news is that we completed the expansion of El Salvador operation, which nearly tripled its capacity. Our plan is to focus center to capacity in about 4 years if not sooner. We are very encouraged by the workforce and the planned build out of the sales force. Our newly appointed VP of Sales will build an organization designed to accelerate its growth. The progress has been really encouraging. Now for a perspective on the key market trends during the fourth quarter, we can’t say one way or another, the customers delay decisions on new branding initiatives or other expansion investments or purchasing decisions in the aftermath of the presidential election. What we can say is that holiday season was surprisingly good for many retailers and when people buy more, companies hire more. Monthly employee turnover rates remain high during the quarter. Labor stats also show job – solid job creation in December. Combined with the upward revisions for job creation in October and November the average monthly job creation for the fourth quarter was strong at 160,000 and the trend is continuing in the first quarter. These are strong key indicators for our business. I will now turn the call over to Andy for his financial review.