Michael Benstock
Analyst · Barrington Research. Please go ahead
Thank you, Hala, and good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining us to review our fourth quarter and fiscal 2017 results. This quarter, we have provided a few supplemental slides to augment our remarks, to better explain the impact of the U.S. Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Andy will specifically address during his remarks. We have also included a slide that outlines our updated expectations for our long-term top line growth guidance. These slides can be found on the Investor Relations section of our website. As usual, I will begin by discussing key highlights for Q4 and 2017, and provide our thoughts on market trends. Next, Andy will provide more details about our financial performance, tax reform impact and accounting changes. Afterwards, I'll review our outlook and offer some general thoughts on the future. We will then be happy to take your questions. We had a strong finish to fiscal 2017 with the fourth quarter marking our 21st consecutive quarter of increasing year-over-year revenue. Fourth quarter consolidated net sales in 2017 increased 12% over the same quarter in 2016. For the entire year, consolidated sales were up 5.6%. Our net sales growth was highlighted by double-digit growth in promotional products and The Office Gurus, our remote staffing segment had record growth. Our Uniform segment had mixed results from channel to channel and posted a decline of 1.5% in the fourth quarter. Overall, we achieved solid profitability with a great boost from our sourcing strategies and further streamlining of operations. Throughout the year, we saw margin improvement and into the fourth quarter as well with an operating margin of 9.7% compared to 9.3% in the 2016 fourth quarter. For the full-year, our operating margin grew to 9.2% compared to 8.6% in 2016. Now, let's review fourth quarter segment performance. In our core uniform segment, revenue declined 1.5% for the fourth quarter and 2.7% for the year. For the quarter, we saw positive signs in our employee ID business, led by HPI Direct, which delivered solid performance. For the full-year however, sales on the employee ID side of the business declined and were impacted by the loss of one of our large legacy customers we described during our first quarter call as well as the elimination of two recurring promotional uniform programs. Andy will detail this further in his remarks. In the latter part of 2017, we kicked off strategic initiatives to integrate superior ID and HPI, leveraging the strengths of each group to create a stronger more efficient organization. We are already seeing some benefits from the utilization of our administrative and operational shared services and expect to continue to benefit as we aggressively create one even stronger entity from these two solid well-managed organizations. We will continue to fully integrate the groups over the next year or so taking our time to make sure that we enhance our customer's experience at every step. For the full-year, we were disappointed at the performance of our health care indirect channel, which is our legacy uniform business selling primarily to laundries and dealers. This business has experienced a lot of consolidation in the past few years. It is also an extremely competitive environment. In fact, our most challenging environment from a pricing standpoint, particularly during the second half of the year, pricing pressure in the market place pushed some prices so low that we chose simply not to chase certain opportunities that would not have met our profit goals. In the end, this sector was up in Q4 making up for most of the decline earlier in the year, and we've implemented some new strategies that are already yielding positive results. Our direct health care business continues to perform well. We continue to diversify in this market, expanding opportunities in the medical college sector and further deepening our relationships with key integrated delivery networks. We are uncovering more opportunities in long term care and in other direct channel areas that don't have the same pressure as the indirect channel. While the direct channel is not the largest portion of our health care business, it certainly is the fastest growing. Looking ahead, we do expect to see some margin pressure from several sources. In some of the regions that we operate, we have seen significant mandated wage increases. We are also seeing increases in the prices in many of the components of fabric and trends particularly from China where the government is forcing many textile plants to spend heavily on environmental compliance. Their increased costs in turn drive up our prices. Fortunately, our broad footprint and operating scale help to somewhat mitigate the impact of those pressures. We have explored expanding our factory in Haiti beyond the 300 operators currently in place to ultimately accommodate as many as 450 operators producing multiple product lines. We are in the process of moving forward with some of this capacity expansion which will increase our production capability beyond what it currently is. In the fourth quarter we finished the build out of our startup remote distribution facility in Sparks, Nevada that will allow us to provide shorter delivery times to customers in the Western U.S. This small investment in more nearby distribution is meant to create higher satisfaction from current customers, but also to help gain new customers we considered on a more timely basis. We would call this experimental at this point and look forward to reporting more after we have had more time to judge its impact. Looking at BAMKO our brand new merchandise segment, net sales increased a remarkable 79.6% in the fourth quarter compared to 2016 and 54.2% for the year. This included one month of sales from the December 1 acquisition of Tangerine Promotions. A promotional products and branded merchandise agency that serves some of the best known brands in the world. Tangerine is one of the leading providers of point of purchase and point of sale merchandise in the country. Additionally, earlier in the year we acquired Public Identity, a small yet niche oriented company which provides us with an entrée into collegiate licensed products. Both of these acquisitions are expected to be accretive to results in 2018. Tangerine and Public Identity have become true partners in supporting the BAMKO mission. Our Promotional Product segment has gained a larger geographic footprint, new market segment penetration, new product lines, expanded channel distribution and new customers. The management teams of all of our companies have been meeting regularly to strategize and capitalize on cross selling opportunities in other segments and using the benefits of our larger share organization. To give a couple of examples of where we have worked together to try to take care of all the synergistic benefits of our large organization, BAMKO, for instance has been able to take advantage of our Arkansas warehousing facilities for their customers who want their products stored, staged and distributed. As a result of having this capacity and capability, BAMKO and Tangerine are able to take on more business that would've been out of their reach prior to being acquired by us. Public Identity has partnered with The Office Gurus using El Salvador outreach team to drive additional sales opportunities. BAMKO, in India, is doing a good share of our customized web development, which has already been rolled out for some of HPI's customers and has received very favorable results. These are just a few of the dozens of synergistic benefits that we're realizing from our current structure. Let's speak about The Office Gurus. The Office Gurus had an exceptionally strong quarter with revenues up 51.2% and reported a 61.2% increase in net sales to outside customers. The Office Gurus continues to broaden its footprint, and as we grow we will expand the infrastructure ahead of anticipated strong demand. In 2017, our call center in Belize added 150 seats. We have signed a lease on another facility in Belize where our target is to add another 250 to 300 agents. Because of our success at accelerating our sales we are also currently exploring the Caribbean, Central and South America to determine where to best place our next call center. By the end of the fiscal 2017, the total employee headcount in this segment was nearly 1,200. Segment growth has come from new customers as well as gaining deeper penetration into our existing base. The Office Gurus services our entire organization as well and we continue to leverage SG&A across segments and capitalize as much as we can on synergies in cross selling opportunities. Shifting a little bit now to the macro environment, from our perspective and from what many economists are saying we can expect more inflation driven by full employment which will result in wage increases. And with that we can expect to see higher employee turnover. Unemployment has been at or below 5% for more than a year as more people have returned to the job market and hiring has maintained momentum. The unemployment rate is currently 4.1%. Some might call that, "Full employment." Additionally, we believe uncertainty around health care should be behind us at this point as full reform does not seem to be within reach and we are seeing some of the connectivity. We also believe that with the tax benefits many companies were given, not only have bonuses been given out, but we expect that there will be rebranding, upgrading of uniforms and more acquisitive activity. These all spell an increase in demand for uniforms and promotional products. As it gets harder to hire for the entry level call center positions in the U.S. we also see our call centers abroad benefiting greatly from the higher wages and shortages here. To sum it up, we see the employment and wage picture in the U.S. being very positive influence on our near future. I'll now turn the call over to Andy to review our financial highlights.