Bhaskar Rao
Analyst · Bank of America. Your line is open
Thank you, Scott. Before going into the detail, I would like to briefly expand on the trends we experienced through the quarter. We exited the first quarter with accelerating negative trends, as COVID began impacting our North American market. In early April, the trends reached the worst, at down 80% during a few days. We then saw sales trends improve throughout the remainder of the month, and we ended April down 55% as compared to the prior [inaudible]. We anticipated that the April trends would continue to modestly improve throughout the remainder of the quarter. However, business conditions improved quicker than we anticipated in the U.S. and by Memorial Day, we began to experience positive year-over-year trends in the U.S. The reopening of brick-and-mortar stores, the acceleration of our e-commerce business, and the improving global trends, drove the sequential improvements from April to May to June. The inability to foresee this rapid change of volume has caused some inefficiencies in labor and shipping costs, thus pressuring gross margin. We are still experiencing these costs as we ramp up. We have and will continue to spend whatever money we need to service our customers. Turning to the financial results, please note that we have adjusted $25 million of charges during the quarter. These charges were in accordance with our senior secured credit facility and the subsequent financial details have been adjusted for these items. I want to call out that $8 million of those charges were in operating margins from COVID costs associated with temporarily closed company-owned retail stores and sales force retention costs. Of those $8 million in charges, $6 million were in North America, and $2 million were international. The impact on EPS for the second quarter was $0.11 per share. Before going into the segment details, I would like to highlight a few items as compared to the prior year. Adjusted gross margin declined 280 basis points to 40.6%. Adjusted operating margin was 11.7%. Adjusted EBITDA for the credit facility decreased slightly to $110 million and adjusted earnings per share was $0.79. Turning to North American results, North American net sales decreased 3% in the second quarter. On a reported basis, the North American wholesale channel, decreased 6% and the direct channel increased 27%. The direct channel’s growth was driven by robust web sales trends of up over 140% versus the prior year, partially offset by the headwinds in our own retail stores, as most were closed during the period. Since those stores have opened again, trends improved, and we now are seeing same-store sales positive year over year in July. North American adjusted gross profit margin declined 220 basis points to 38.6% as compared to the prior year. The decline was principally driven by product and brand mix, partially offset by decreased floor model expenses and lower commodity costs. As anticipated, we experienced negative brand mix in the quarter as Sealy recovered more quickly than Tempur. During the second quarter, some retailers deemed essential and were able to remain open throughout the quarter. Those retailers have lower average selling price versus our fleet average, which benefit is Sealy trends, creating a temporary pressure on our average selling price and margin during the second quarter. Tempur trends were negatively impacted as all of our Tempur retail stores were closed during part of the quarter, and most retailers focused on volume, which emphasize Sealy over high priced Tempur products. While we expect these temporary headwinds to average selling price from product and brand mix to still be present in the third quarter, we believe that they will lessen substantially as Tempur sales trends have improved and are running ahead of Sealy. North American adjusted operating margin was 14.3% and excluding COVID-19 charges was 15.4%, an improvement of 150 basis points as compared to the prior year. This improvement was primarily driven by lower operating expenses as a result of cost actions during the quarter, partially offset by the declining gross margin. These results include an incremental bad debt expense of $7 million, principally related to the bankruptcy of one department store in the U.S. during the quarter. When you take it in -- when you take this into consideration, you can see why we're especially pleased with our expense management practices over the past few months, which resulted in expanded operating margins by mitigating the unprecedented impacts of the pandemic on our business. Turning to international, net sales decreased 30% on a reported basis. On a constant currency basis, international net sales decreased 27%. As a reminder, our international products are priced at the upper end of the luxury market. In the U.S., we have products across a wider range of prices, which is very good different than our international go-to-market approach. Given our concentration internationally in the luxury market, we expected and have seen slower recovery of sales trends. There was a wide variation of performance between different regions in the second quarter. Our Asia business, which was first to be impacted by the pandemic and experienced large declines in February and March, rebounded nicely and returned to growth during the second quarter. Outside of Asia, our international business was challenged due to the timing of the global pandemic, but conditions generally improved throughout the quarter. All major markets are now open for commerce and are experiencing varying degrees of improving sales trends. As compared to the prior year, our international adjusted gross margin declined 150 basis points to 53%. The decline was primarily due to fixed costs deleverage on lower unit volumes and decreased royalties partially offset by favorable country mix. International adjusted operating margin was 14.6% and excluding COVID charges was 16.6%, a decline of 370 basis points as compared to the prior year. This decline was primarily driven by fixed cost deleverage on operating expenses, increased bad debt expense, and the decline in gross margin. These declines were partially offset by the performance of the Asian joint venture. Turning to the company's global performance. Excluding COVID charges, adjusted operating income was $78 million. Adjusted EBITDA for the credit facility was $110 million and adjusted EPS was $0.79 cents, which clearly demonstrates the flexibility of our business model. The slight decrease in adjusted EBITDA for the credit facility was primarily due to fixed cost deleverage on lower unit volumes, partially offset by expense management, principally in other selling and marketing and lower floor model expenses. Commodities were slightly better than expected for the second quarter, and we expect favorable commodity costs to continue for at least the next few months. We believe that in the third quarter, we will experience about $5 million of benefit from commodities, including the impact of tariffs. The U.S. government recently ruled in favor of extending the anti-dumping actions to an additional seven countries, which were deemed as dumping products in the U.S. We believe these activities could materially benefit demand for U.S. made, value price mattresses. These actions are designed to limit the import of extremely low-price products, so we expect there could be a bit of a tailwind for the industry, as it may raise the opening price points in the U.S. markets and provide some benefit to our U.S. Sealy, Sherwood and Comfort Revolution businesses. Our supply chain has been impacted by the rapidly changing environment. Some materials in the production of bedding products are being used for making personal protective equipment as the U.S. government has mandated that domestic suppliers of the material redirect capacity for such use. We have taken certain steps including pricing actions to partially mitigate the impacts as our supply remains constrained on these items. Now moving to the balance sheet and cash flow items. We generated second quarter record operating cash flows from continuing operations of $155 million and spent $23 million on CapEx during the second quarter. Our record operating cash flow was driven by our focus on disciplined cash management. I would like to further discuss our liquidity. At the second quarter, consolidated debt less cash was $1.6 billion. As Scott pointed out, our leverage ratio under the credit facility was 2.8 times, down significantly from 3.7 times at the end of the second quarter 2019 and is within our new target range of two to three times. As a reminder, we entered into a $200 million 364-day term loan in May, which increased our liquidity during a time of great uncertainty. We ended the quarter with over $600 million of available liquidity, which included $147 million of cash on our balance sheet and over $400 million available under our revolving credit facility. I want to touch briefly on our accounts receivable. Going into the quarter, we recognized some of our customers were under financial strain for mandated shut downs, which could expose our AR. As of June 30, 2020, despite the substantial volatility in the market, our accounts receivable aging was consistent as compared to the prior year. This was an especially good sign to me that the broader U.S. bedding market has held up much better than we had expected and the credit risk has returned to normalize levels. As we have discussed on previous earnings calls, our variable cost structure naturally flexes. During the quarter, we implemented further cost reductions, with a focus on preserving cash and improving our liquidity position when we felt that it was needed. These reductions were primarily in advertising, personnel, other staffing related items and variable compensation. As the business trends improved, the variable expenses increased in line with revenues. And as we felt more confident in our outlook, we bought back most of the discretionary expenses as well. We now expect most have our income statement line items to have a similar rate to sales as they had historically. In short, we are playing offense not defense, which changes our cost outlook. We are not in a position to issue full-year 2020 adjusted EBITDA guidance today, but I would like to offer color on our near-term expectations excluding any material, unforeseen changes in the operating environment. Our trends for the third quarter to-date have accelerated from the second quarter across all geographies and all brands. Given the improving trends, we have an internal target for global net sales to be about 25% positive in the -- in the third quarter as compared to last year. This takes into consideration our capacity constraints and would imply that by the end of the third quarter adjusted EBITDA could possibly reach the aspirational plan’s low-end threshold of $600 million on a trailing four quarter basis. This would be a remarkable result in the third quarter as it would be a 25% year-over-year growth. As a refresher, the aspirational plan is tied to challenging performance targets. The plan is triggered when the company achieves between $600 million and $650 million of adjusted EBITDA on trailing four quarter basis through the end of 2020, as determined by the Compensation Committee of the Board. If the threshold is triggered, then between 550,000 and 825,000 restricted [stocking] will vest resulting in a non-cash one-time charge between $33 million and $50 million and a dilution of 1% to 1.5% in the quarter if the performance target is achieved. There will be a true-up in the fourth quarter if the trailing four-quarter adjusted EBITDA achieved is greater than in the third quarter. Lastly, I'd like to flag a few items for modeling purposes. For the full year 2020, we currently expect D&A to be $135 million and $140 million. Total CapEx to be between $100 million and $110 million, which includes maintenance CapEx of $70 million, interest expense of $80 million to $85 million, a tax rate between 28% and 29%, and a diluted share count of 53 million shares. If we trigger the aspirational plan, we would expect D&A would be higher by at least $33 million, the tax rate would be unfavorably impacted, as this non-cash compensation charge would not be deductible and the share count would also increase. With that, I'll turn the call back over to Scott.