Karen Colonias
Analyst · CJS Securities
Thanks, Madeleine, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm pleased to discuss our third quarter results with you today, as well as provide an update on our progress towards our 2020 Plan. It's been one year since we announced our 2020 Plan to provide more clarity into our longer-term strategy and financial objectives. Today, I'm pleased to confirm we remain on track to reach our key financial targets under the 2020 Plan. These include, achieving organic net sales compounded annual growth rate of 8%, reducing our total operating expenses as a percent of net sales to the 26% to 27% range, resulting in operating income margin of approximately 21% to 22%, doubling our inventory turn rates and improving our return on invested capital to a range of 17% to 18%. I would also like to acknowledge the hard work and commitment of all of our employees, who remain dedicated to playing their part in helping us achieve these goals. We've made solid headway over the past 12 months, thanks to their efforts, and I look forward to discussing our most recent progress during the third quarter with you today. First, let's review some highlights from our third quarter financial results. We had a solid third quarter. Our net sales increased 8% year-over-year to 284.2 million, driven by growth in sales volume throughout almost all areas of our company. Net sales were also positively impacted by increases in our average selling prices. On July 1st, we passed on relatively small price increases for many of our products with the most significant being an 11.5% price increase in the US on the bulk of our wood connector products, which we enacted in response to rising raw material costs. As we mentioned on our last conference call, we have a process in place to help prevent our customers from excessive pre-buying. The increase in net sales was further supported by US housing starts, which are a leading indicator for approximately 60% of our business. In the third quarter, housing starts rose by approximately 3.5% versus the comparable period last year. Importantly, housing starts remained quite active in the western and southern regions of the US, where we provide a meaningful amount of content into homes due to stricter building design requirements from wind and earthquake concerns. While US housing starts moderated slightly in the third quarter compared to the second quarter, demand so far in the fourth quarter remained steady, subject to typical seasonality we experienced as a result of fewer shipping days from holiday related closures and a slowdown in construction activity during the winter months. In addition, we expect slower demand in the southern region of the United States, as it recovers from Hurricane Florence and Michael. We continue to expect US housing starts will increase at an annual mid-single digit rate over the next few years. Europe's net sales increased approximately 2% year-over-year, excluding the impact of the Gbo Fastener sales from Romania and Poland, which were included in the third quarter of 2017 as well as impacts from foreign exchange. Our positive third quarter net sales and strong gross profit margin of 47% produced strong third quarter earnings of $0.95 per diluted share, an increase of 61% year-over-year. I'd also like to comment on the operating expense improvements we achieved in the third quarter. As a reminder, while our 2018 operating expense dollars will be slightly up from 2017 based on increased commissions from higher sales, additional SAP costs to support our first go-live, and severance costs incurred in Europe, we expect to improve our full year operating expenses as a percent of sales to be in the mid 28% range compared to 31% of sales for the full year of 2017. Our third quarter operating expenses as a percent of sales were 26%, an improvement of 190 basis points year-over-year. Year-to-date, operating expenses as a percent of sales were approximately 27%, on track to meet our 2018 target and an improvement of approximately 300 basis points as compared to the first nine months of 2017. This is a direct result of our strong company culture and responsibility our employees feel to the success of Simpson, as they have been extremely dedicated to understanding, reviewing and improving costs in their respective departments. While we know we still have a lot of work ahead of us, we applaud them for a job well done. Now, I'd like to provide an update on our key operating initiatives. Many of these stem from our 2020 Plan with a focus on rationalizing our cost structure to drive improved profitability without sacrificing our competitive edge. The remainder concentrate on growing our market share and improving our technologies and systems to provide best-in-class service to our customers, a key part of our longstanding trusted reputation and what sets Simpson’s Strong-Tie brand apart. In regard to growing our market share, we continue to introduce our mechanical anchor products into Home Depot stores. The rollout is currently occurring at a slower pace than our original expectations, due to space constraints at the Home Depot stores, which require a vendor shift within the product category to create sufficient space for our product line. We remain prepared and well positioned to quickly accommodate any upticks in the rollout activity in the near future. We have also been making headway on our growth objectives in Europe, which have been supported by improved demand trends. The rollout of the complete line of Gbo Fastener products into the Nordic regions and into France continues to progress, and we experienced an uptick in volume this quarter. We are also tracking in line with expectations as it relates to increasing our presence in wood connectors in the Nordic area. Moving to operational updates, another key objective pertaining to our 2020 Plan involves improving our working capital management and overall balance sheet discipline through inventory reduction. Through these efforts, we continue to believe we can double our annual inventory turn rate by the end of 2020 without impacting our ability to deliver products to our customers. In an effort to right-size our inventory, we have developed a three-phase SKU reduction program. Following the completion of Phase 1, which involved eliminating approximately 10,000 non-moving SKUs from our ERP systems, we are now working through Phase 2 of the process, which involves the identification and removal of slow moving SKUs. We have been working to phase out these SKUs over a transition period as we convert our customers over to replacement products. We expect this to be fully completed by year-end. We've partnered with an external lean consultant to assist us in implementing the inventory reduction program. In addition, we continue to carry out lean rapid improvement events in our production facilities in the US, which have resulted in efficiency enhancements. We look forward to implementing these successful practices across all our locations as applicable in the future. All that said, while right-sizing our inventory is an element of our business that we can control, we are subject to fluctuating raw material pricing in the marketplace, which is something we cannot control. Due to the recent increase in steel pricing, we have been cautious about our steel inventory, as we believe steel prices may continue to rise in the near future. As a result, our inventory balance increased by approximately $35 million or 14%, compared to the third quarter of 2017, the bulk of which was raw material. While we remain focused on improving our inventory turns, we feel it is appropriate to build our raw material position at this time to help mitigate the potential impact of future price increases and steel availability. However, showing a very positive effort on what we can control, over the past nine months, our finished goods and work in process has increased 2% company-wide, while our volume of pounds sold for wood products has increased by approximately 10%. This is a testament for the great work being done at all our factories. In an effort to realize opportunities beyond the 2020 Plan, we have worked with our management consultants to uncover additional areas to enhance our overall efficiencies. We identified strategies to improve our operating expenses through indirect procurement and additional ways to improve our working capital. We will incur additional management consulting expenses in 2018, and into 2019, related to these projects, which are primarily success based fees. That said, the payback period for these initiatives are all within one year or less, so we view the trade-off very favorably. Our SAP implementation continues to progress. As a reminder, during the second quarter, we recast our project timeline and budget by extending the time between roll-outs in order to ensure a smoother transition. We are tracking towards the new company-wide implementation goal for completion in 2021. Currently, we are focused on rolling out SAP technology in our remaining US branches, which we expect will take until the end of 2019 to complete. Finally, we remain committed to cost reduction measures in Europe to improve our operating income margin. Today, we are tracking to our revised 2018 goal for a European operating income margin of 5% excluding severance and incremental SAP expense. Before I wrap up, I want to congratulate our independent board member, Jim Andrasick, as the new Chairman of our Board of Directors, effective January 1, 2019. As announced this morning, our current Chairman Peter Louras will not be standing for re-election at our upcoming Annual Meeting in April of 2019, as he will have reached the end of his 20-year term limit. Peter will continue to serve on the Board as a director until April of 2019. On behalf of the Board and the management team at Simpson, I would like to thank Peter for his many contributions to the company over the past 20 years. In summary, we are pleased with our third quarter performance. For the balance of 2018, we are cautiously optimistic that demand in the markets we operate will remain consistent with seasonal patterns. We are committed to executing against our 2020 Plan goals to ensure long-term sustainable growth and operational excellence, and remain confident in our ability to perform based on positive current market conditions and dedication from our valued employees. I'd now like to turn the call over to Brian, who will discuss our third quarter financials.