Operator
Operator
Welcome to Select Comfort's Q3 2015 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed in a listen-only mode until the question-and-answer session. Today's call is being recorded. If anyone has any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I would like to introduce Dave Schwantes, Vice President, Finance. Thank you. You may begin. Dave Schwantes - Vice President of Finance, Investor Relations & Decision Support: Good afternoon and welcome to the Select Comfort Corporation third quarter 2015 earnings conference call. Thank you for joining us. I am Dave Schwantes, Vice President of Finance and Investor Relations. With me today are Shelly Ibach, our President and CEO; and David Callen, our Senior Vice President and CFO. This telephone conference is being recorded and will be available on our website, at SleepNumber.com. Please refer to the details in our news release to access the replay. Please also refer to our news release for a reconciliation of certain non-GAAP financial measures and supplemental financial information included in the news release or that may be discussed on this call. The primary purpose of this call is to discuss the results of the fiscal period just ended. However, our commentary and responses to your questions may include certain forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties outlined in our earnings news release and discussed in some detail in our Annual Report on Form 10-K and other periodic filings with the SEC. The company's actual future results may vary materially. I will now turn the call over to Shelly for her comments. Shelly Radue Ibach - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Good afternoon and thank you for joining our call. My SleepIQ score was 84 last night. I will highlight our results, provide an update on the ERP implementation, discuss the progress we've made against the plans we laid out at the start of the year, and close with our growth prospects heading into 2016. We planned for an ambitious year of advancing our consumer innovation strategy while also delivering strong financial results. In addition to achieving our goals, we have strengthened our competitive position by acquiring BAM Labs. Accelerated our innovation pipeline and improved our financial flexibility by establishing a new $100 million revolver. Year-to-date net sales grew 20% to $999 million, including a 15% comp gains with earnings per share up 51%. Our operating profit increase of 43% shows the leverage we are realizing from our business models even as we take on large transformational investments. We are very pleased with the trajectory of our business and the steadiness of our results. We are delivering growth from both units and ARU which for the first nine months were up 9% and 11%, respectively. And we continue to deliver record average sales per store, which is now at $2.56 million for the trailing 12 months, up 16% from the prior year, while also adding net new stores. And we are gaining market share in both dollars and units in a healthy mattress industry when comparing to those (3:23) reported results through August. We planned for and delivered a strong third quarter. Net sales grew 16% to $374 million including an 11% comp gain, while our earnings per share grew 41% to $0.62 per share. We again posted stellar Labor Day results, which was meaningful as we annualized the 16% comp gains from the prior year's third quarter. The underlying fundamentals of demand, margin, cash flow and capital efficiency were all strong contributors to our quarterly results and on track with our internal plans. In addition, the third quarter benefited from the movement of $10 million in shipments from the fourth quarter in preparation for our ERP implementation and a $0.04 EPS gain from the BAM Labs acquisition. Our new ERP systems went live the second week of October, on time and on budget. Ultimately, the new processes will result in greater agility, speed, and efficiency while simplifying our customers' service experience. I want to thank our employees and partners for their incredible contributions in preparation for and in the implementation of our new system. Almost every employee has needed to learn how to do his or her job differently. It takes a high level of engagement, capability, coordination, and perseverance to accomplish an ERP implementation of this magnitude and complexity. Three weeks after our go-live, the system is stable, the design is effective, and we are operating the new system across the company. Stores are processing all their transactions, plants are manufacturing and shipping products, customer service is scheduling and routing, and home delivery teams are delivering. As we knew it would be, the implementation has been disruptive to our customers' experience, specifically in the areas of extended delivery, delayed service, and wait time on calls. In our customer focused culture, this has been especially challenging, because we never want to disappoint our customers. Thankfully, we will positively impact many more customers in the future with our more efficient system. Our teams have been working 24-7 to address issues, and we are making meaningful progress. We still have much work to do, but we have narrowed the remaining issues. Our lead times are currently 21 days for most of our products, versus our typical 14 days. We expect to be operating efficiently, with normal customer service levels, within the quarter. We appropriately forecasted for the implementation challenges, and we remain on track to deliver full year earnings per share of $1.35, consistent with our previous guidance. Since our last call, we acquired BAM Labs, the Silicon Valley pioneer of biometric sensor and sleep monitoring. This acquisition strengthens our competitive position, with unprecedented data and connected product capabilities. We know BAM well, as we have partnered with them since 2012 to develop and commercialize SleepIQ technology. BAM is now operating as an independent business unit called SleepIQ LABS. The deeper collaboration of our teams has already resulted in acceleration of our innovation pipeline, which will be visible at the International Consumer Electronics Show in January. The plans we laid out at the beginning of the year are delivering the results we expected. Let me update you on our 2015 priorities. First, we are increasing demand for our differentiated products, we continue to deliver year-over-year sales growth from benefit-driven products like SleepIQ technology, FlexFit adjustable bases, and our FlexTop mattresses. In addition, we entered a new market adjacency with SleepIQ Kids, and we are excited about the potential to connect with the entire family. We expect this new category to build over time. Second, we have evolved our marketing and advertising in 2015, which has delivered increased traffic from a broader base. Our new customer growth reflects younger, more affluent customers in addition to our historical core customer base. We introduced a new suite of TV commercials this year, including the memorable and engaging Lion Sleeps Tonight ad featuring Partner Snore technology. We continue to align our media mix and advertising spend with our target customer, moving into more productive TV, digital, and social media, resulting in our seventh consecutive quarter of media ROI improvement. Third, we have improved our digital experience. This includes launching a modern, responsive design, with easy mobile navigation. These improvements, along with relevant digital content, help consumers learn about our brand and proprietary products, easily find our stores and shop online. In the third quarter, unique visitors to SleepNumber.com were up 53%. We continue to see a strong correlation between this metric and our store traffic. Fourth, we continue to successfully advance our market development initiatives. We have opened, remodeled, or repositioned 36 stores since the beginning of the year. This is in line with our intention to improve existing locations and grow our net store portfolio 5% to 7% annually. We now have a quarter of our store base, more than 100 stores, delivering more than $3 million in annual revenue. We launched another aggressive growth market in the third quarter, the 10th of the 13 markets we planned when we began this effort in 2011. And finally, in support of our many consumer-facing initiatives, we're deeply focused on increasing our manufacturing efficiency and sourcing opportunities. This is year three of Lean Six Sigma initiatives in our plants. We have increased our productivity and plan to extend our current capacity into 2020 with minimal capital investment. In addition, our demand and supply planning capability is informing our hybrid make-to-stock program. We benefited from this effort at the end of third quarter, when we accelerated deliveries in advance of our ERP implementation. Now let me turn to 2016. We're confident about our growth prospects heading into next year, and here is why. Our proprietary innovations are attracting new customers to our brand, while reengaging our existing customers. We expect this combination to continue to result in ARU and unit growth in 2016. We will introduce our next innovation at CES in January, and we expect this product will be a metric unit driver. We're growing our share in a healthy industry that has average dollar growth rates of nearly 6% over the past five years. By comparison, our sales CAGR over the same five-year period, has been 16%. Our innovations and a consumer who is increasingly focused on health and wellness have resulted in consistent share gains and we expect this trend to continue. We have a differentiated retail experience that has resulted in retail leading sales productivity with room to grow our footprint. Our sales per square foot is in the top 10 U.S specialty retailers. And in 2016, we expect to launch at least one more aggressive growth market, continue our overall store growth of at least 5% to 7%, and further increase our average revenue per store. We are also advancing our digital customer experience and the seamless integration between stores and mobile. We are benefiting from the efficiency of national broad-reach television advertising that supports our national store footprint. This efficiency funds local advertising for our aggressive growth in our other high potential markets. Attracting new customers to our brand, mobile site, and national store base is a key part of our growth strategy and market share gains. We have a loyal customer base that drivers our repeat and referral business which makes up more than a one-third of our sales. Innovative offerings like SleepIQ technology increases the frequency of our customer interaction and strengthens our ongoing customer relationships. We are evolving to a more agile supply chain, which will further reduce complexity, expedite deliveries to customers and increase efficiencies. We expect this initiative to drive 50 basis points to 100 basis points of margin improvement beginning in the second half of 2016. We deploy capital efficiently. Our return on invested capital remains consistent with our mid-teen long-term target and above our 10% weighted average cost to capital. Our share repurchase program continues with repurchases totaling $68.6 million year-to-date compared with $30 million from the same period last year. Over the next couple of quarters, we expect to be assertive in our repurchases given that our shares are currently a good value. Our cash priorities in 2016 include funding organic growth, maintaining financial flexibility, and share repurchases. And finally, we have what we call Sleep Number DNA, a dedicated team of employees that are passionate about our customers and our products. They are highly engaged and highly confident about our company and our future with a bias for getting things done. Today, our employees' level of engagement is on par with extraordinary company norms that drive superior organizational performance. We are one of just a few U.S. companies to achieve this level of engagement. All of these attributes are contributing to our sustainable, profitable growth. We continue to be on track to deliver our long-term commitment of earnings per share of $2.75 by 2019. I'll now turn the call over to David, who will provide more detail on the quarter and the remainder of the year. David R. Callen - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Thank you, Shelly. Good afternoon. Before I get to my prepared remarks, I understand we may have had some webcast challenges at the beginning. I apologize to those of you who were affected. We'll make sure we pick up on your questions at the end of the call, but the webcast will also be on our website for replay later. Our teams continue to build demand, leverage the business model and deploy capital efficiently to deliver industry-leading results, while significantly advancing our growth initiatives. So far in 2015, we have delivered year-to-date net sales up 20% versus the prior year, including a 15% comp gain. Gross profit is up 21% including 70 basis points of rate improvement to 62.1%. Operating income is up 43% or 170 basis points to 10.6% of net sales, and year-to-date EPS is up 51% over the prior year or 2.5 times the growth of the topline. Our strategy is working and our initiatives continue to deliver healthy returns on investment, while completing a complex ERP system implementation. Before walking you through our financial outlook details, let's review our Q3 performance. Net sales of $374 million were up 16% over the prior year, on top of 23% growth for Q3 last year. Comp growth in Q3 was 11% and net new stores added 4% to our sales growth. ARU and company controlled mattress units each grew 7% over the prior year third quarter on top of double-digit growth in both metrics to prior year third quarter, up 13% and 10% respectively. Benefit-driven pricing contributed 3% to our growth for the quarter consistent with our five-year historical average. And our comp stores reached another record with $2.56 million in average trailing 12-month sales, up 16% versus the prior year. We delivered a 20% incremental operating flow-through rate on record Q3 net sales, while also funding strategic projects. While the timing of our initiatives will cause quarterly rate fluctuations, we continue to expect mid-teen flow-through rates over longer periods of time. Q3 gross profit dollars grew 18% year-over-year with a gross margin rate of 62.5% of net sales, 110 basis points higher than Q3 last year and our highest quarterly gross margin rate in two years. Lower discounts, higher year-over-year sales volume, favorable product mix and benefits from our Lean manufacturing initiatives all contributed to the gross margin improvement in Q3. Operating income grew 28% to $45 million with operating expenses up 15% over the prior year. Several important initiatives we are calling out for the quarter. As planned, we spent $5 million during the quarter to launch our SleepIQ Kids and our 10th aggressive growth market, both long-term growth initiatives that resulted in 70 basis points of media deleverage in Q3. G&A expenses included $7 million of planned ERP implementation cost for data conversion and training. Our G&A line also included a $3.5 million gain from the BAM Labs acquisition. This gain was partly offset by a $0.5 million of lab R&D costs, netting to a $0.04 benefit in Q3. Incremental lab R&D cost in Q4 of approximately $3 million to $4 million or $0.04 are expected to offset the Q3 gain, resulting in a net neutral impact in 2015. For 2016, we expect the acquisition to be dilutive by $0.10 to $0.12. Product cost reductions resulting from the acquisition are expected to start late in 2016, turning the acquisition accretive in 2017 and beyond. Q3 EPS grew 41% to $0.62, including $0.03 each from lower share count and a lower annual effective tax rate projection of 32.5%, resulting largely from tax planning benefits on the BAM Labs acquisition gain. During the quarter, we paid approximately $57 million to acquire BAM Labs and used $18.5 million to repurchase shares. Trading rules prevented us from being more aggressive with our share repurchases prior to announcement of the BAM acquisition. As expected, inventories of $78 million were $9 million higher than Q2 to support demand ahead of our ERP launch. We ended the quarter with $89 million in cash and securities, net of customer prepayments. Both our cash and inventory levels are seasonally high at the end of Q3, and we expect both to be lower by yearend. As we exit 2015, having completed the most complex aspect of our transformation, we intend to operate the business with meaningfully lower cash balances than the previous average of $100 million of cash net of customer prepayments. The new $100 million credit facility established during the third quarter provides a highly accessible liquidity and greater financial flexibility. Our capital deployment plans continue to prioritize investments in the business first, followed closely by our intention to maintain sufficient liquidity to support our plans and to return cash to shareholders through share repurchases. We are confirming our 2015 full year guidance for EPS of a $1.35. This outlook implies EPS growth of 27% excluding this $0.06 from the 53rd week benefit in 2014 and $0.16 of estimated ERP launch costs in 2015. Our outlook continues to assume mid to high single digit second half sales growth adjusted for the extra week last year, an estimated $10 million to $12 million sales drag in Q4 from ERP implementation inefficiencies, or $0.09 of EPS impact, and full year ROIC of approximately 14%, in line with our long-term expectations. I will review several other noteworthy items expected to affect our year-over-year comparisons for the fourth quarter. Please also refer to the supplemental financial table on the last page of the press release. First, recall that the fourth quarter of 2014 included $25 million of net sales or $0.06 of EPS for the extra week, and $0.04 for a favorable legal settlement. This year, we accelerated approximately $10 million of shipments from Q4 into Q3, which shifted approximately $0.04 of EPS into Q3. Because of these shifts in volume and Q4 ERP implementation inefficiencies, we expect the gross margin rate in Q4 to be lower than Q4 of last year. We continue to expect full-year sales and marketing expenses approaching 44% of net sales. We expect G&A expenses in Q4 to be similar to the $28 million in Q3, including approximately $3 million each of ERP launch costs plus incremental IT depreciation. Capital projects for the full year 2015 will be approximately $85 million, with depreciation and amortization of approximately $48 million. R&D spending in Q4 is expected to be approximately $5 million higher than last year, primarily from the inclusion of SleepIQ LABS cost. We project an annualized income tax rate of 32.5% in 2015. This does not include the extension of the R&D tax credit, nor the bonus depreciation provision. If Congress acts before our fiscal year-end, our full year rate would be approximately 34%, negatively impacting Q4 EPS by approximately $0.03. Looking ahead, our 2016 sales and EPS growth expectations are in line with our long-term commitments to deliver at least $2.75 of EPS by 2019. This implies mid to high teen EPS growth on high single digit sales growth from 2014. We expect to deliver that growth in 2016 while absorbing approximately $9 million, or $0.12 additional R&D costs from the BAM Labs acquisition, about $12 million or $0.16 incremental depreciation, largely from the ERP system and new stores, and approximately $4 million or $0.05 of supply chain module implementation costs in the first half of 2016. We continue to expect the additional logistics capabilities to enable 50 basis points to 100 basis points of supply chain efficiencies, beginning in the second half of 2016. We will provide more specific guidance for 2016 on our next earnings call in February. We expect to enter 2016 with four of our five major transformations behind us that establish our foundation for sustainable profitable growth, including highly productive retail operations including our stores and digital, effective marketing strategy and tools, differentiating customer driven innovations, including our SleepIQ technology platform, and most recently, the ERP platform that will support our growth and agility for years to come. In 2016, we will execute our supply chain transformation. This initiative has been dependent on implementing the new ERP system, along with the system modules planned for the first half of next year. Transforming these fundamental elements of our business has us well positioned for sustainable, profitable growth for the long-term. I would also like to share my sincere thanks to our Sleep Number teams for the heavy lifting they've done and continue to do for this business, our customers, and our shareholders. We are now happy to take questions. Kai, please open the line.