Brad Dickerson
Analyst · Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Thanks, Kevin. Now Kevin has been taking you through some highlights and strategies for our business, I would now like to spend some time discussing our first quarter financial results and updated 2011 guidance. Our net revenues for the first quarter of 2011 increased 36% to $313 million, reflecting momentum in both our Apparel and Direct-to-Consumer businesses. Apparel grew 34% to $230 million during the quarter. Category strength was once again broad-based across each of our Men's, Women's and Youth categories. Our training category continues to lead the way accounting for nearly half of our net revenues growth. Including our training category was the launch of our Charged Cotton product in March. Overall, in 2011, we expect a mid-single-digit total growth contribution from Charged Cotton off of our 2010 net revenues base. Our Direct-to-Consumer net revenues increased 53% for the quarter, representing 20% of net revenues compared to 18% in the prior year's period. We opened 9 new Factory House stores during the first quarter, increasing our Factory House store base to 63, up from 39 locations at the end of last year's first quarter. We expect approximately 16 additional Factory House stores to open in 2011, bringing our total door count by year end to 79. Our e-commerce business also remains robust as we continue to capture higher traffic and take deliberate steps to drive conversion. Footwear net revenues during the first quarter increased 20% to $51 million from $43 million last year. Growth was predominately driven by new basketball offerings and strong performance in slide. Our expectations for footwear growth in 2011 are unchanged. We now see the majority of growth balanced between the second and third quarters, compared with the second quarter concentration indicated on our last call. Accessories net revenues during the first quarter increased 213% to $24 million from $8 million last year, reflecting the addition of our hats and bags business, which we brought in-house in January. International net revenues increased 22% to $17 million in the first quarter and represented approximately 5% of total net revenues. First quarter gross margins were 46.4%, compared with 46.9% in the prior year's quarter. We had several factors contributing to the 50 basis point gross margin contraction. First, higher footwear stores and cost negatively impacted margins by approximately 100 basis points. And offset to this, we experienced lower footwear sales returns and markdown reserves positively impacting margins by approximately 40 basis points. Second, less favorable apparel product mix negatively impacted margins by approximately 50 basis points. Third, we continue to generate a higher percentage of net revenues from our higher margin, Direct-to-Consumer business positively impacted margins by approximately 60 basis points. Selling, general and administrative expenses as a percentage of net revenues decreased to 39.6% in the first quarter of 2011 compared to 41% in the prior year's period. Details around our 4 SG&A buckets are as follows: First, marketing cost declined to 13.3% of net revenues for the quarter from 13.6% in the prior year period. During the quarter, we incurred incremental marketing expenses related to the Auburn Tigers national championship game. However, overall costs were lower than planned, giving a shift in timing, approximately $2 million related to retail market spent for Charged Cotton from the first quarter to the second quarter. Second, selling costs increased to 8.9% of net revenues for the quarter from 8.6% in the prior year period, primarily driven from the contained expansion of our Factory House stores, which as we have said carry better gross margins but also incur higher SG&A expense as a percentage of revenue. Third, product innovation and supply chain cost decreased to 9.3% of net revenues from 9.6% last year. We continue to invest in these areas to support our long-term growth, but we're able to show modest leverage given our top line strength. Finally, corporate services decreased to 8.1% of net revenues, compared to 9.2% in the prior year period to leverage corporate personnel and facility expenses. Operating income during the first quarter grew nearly 56% to $21 million, compared with $14 million in the prior year. Operating margin expanded 90 basis points to 6.8% from 5.9% in the prior year quarter. Our first quarter tax rate of 39.5% compared favorably to the 42% in the prior year period. We continue to expect our full year effective tax rate to approximate 40%. Our resulting net income in the first quarter increased 69% to $12 million, compared with $7 million in the prior year period. First quarter diluted earnings per share increased 64% to $0.23, compared with $0.14 in the prior year. Now shifting over to the balance sheet. Total cash and cash equivalents at quarter-end decreased 33% to $111 million, compared with $166 million at March 31, 2010. We have no borrowings outstanding on our new $300 million revolving credit facility, which we recently expanded from $200 million. Inventory at quarter-end increased 68% year-over-year to $249 million, compared to $148 million at March 31, 2010. As we indicated on our last earnings call, we expect that inventory growth during the first and second quarters of 2011 to exceed the 45% growth experienced at year-end. Two notable factors contributed to our inventory growth during the quarter: the transition of our hats and bags business in-house, and as discussed in our last earnings call, an earlier planned build of our ColdGear apparel for our 2011 fall winter season. Excluding these 2 factors, inventory would have increased approximately 45% versus the prior year period, a position that reflects our efforts to better service anticipated demand. We will provide more detail on our inventory positioning shortly. Accounts receivable at quarter-end increased 48% year-over-year to $163 million, compared to $110 million at March 31, 2010. This increase was largely based on the timing of our wholesale apparel shipments, which were concentrated more toward the end of our first quarter. Our investment in capital expenditures was approximately $12 million for the first quarter. We are now planning capital expenditures for 2011 in the range of $45 million to $50 million, up from our prior guidance of $40 million to $45 million, partially reflecting incremental in-store market initiatives with key retail partners. In addition to our normal operating capital expenditure plan and as previously disclosed, we have an agreement to purchase the Tide Point office complex, home of our corporate headquarters here in Baltimore. We now expect this deal to close in May subject to certain closing conditions at a purchase price of $60.5 million. Now moving on to our updated outlook for 2011. Previously, we anticipated 2011 net revenues of $1.33 billion to $1.35 billion, an increase of 25% to 27% over 2010, and 2011 operating income of $143 million to $147 million, an increase of 27% to 31% over 2010. Given our current visibility, we are raising this full year 2011 outlook. We now anticipate 2011 net revenues in the range of $1.37 billion to $1.39 billion, an increase of 29% to 31% over 2010, and 2011 operating income in the range of $149 million to $153 million, an increase of 33% to 36% over 2010. Our current guidance implies full year operating margins between 10.9% and 11%, leveraging 30 to 40 basis points in the 10.6% level achieved in 2010. Below the operating line, contingencies and effective tax rate were approximately 40%. In 2011, although as discussed in our last call that maybe opportunities to capture certain tax credits throughout the year enabling us to improve on this rate. Finally, we anticipate fully diluted weighted average shares outstanding to approximately $52.5 million to $52.7 million for 2011, a slight increase over our prior guidance of $52.3 million to $52.5 million. We would also like to provide additional color around our outlook for 2011. First, with respect to gross margins. Our visibility around 2011 gross margins and the puts and takes remain relatively the same from our last earnings call. The transition of our hats and bags business from a licensing model to in-house although accretive to operating income dollars in 2011, will negatively impact gross margins as will near-term challenges around apparel and footwear sourcing cost. These gross margin pressures would be partially offset by the continued strong growth in our higher margin Direct-to-Consumer business. From a seasonality view, we continue to expect the largest year-over-year decline in gross margins to occur in Q2 and Q3, with a modest improvement to gross margins year-over-year in Q4. We anticipate full year 2011 gross margins to be down approximately 100 basis points from 2010. We also want to provide some early insight into 2012 gross margins where we continue to evaluate product costing and pricing. We are facing the same challenges as the rest of the industry where near-term input cost pressures have intensified for both cotton and oil-based synthetics. As a result, in addition to select retail price increases in fall winter 2011, we are looking at more broad-based pricing increases commencing in spring 2012 to help mitigate some of these pressures. We believe our premium position in apparel gives us unique opportunity to mitigate much of these pressures. In addition, similar to 2011, we anticipate our continued growth in our higher margin Direct-to-Consumer business will also play a part in offsetting product cost pressures. . We will give updates to our progress as we get more visibility into 2012. Now some additional color on SG&A. As we previously mentioned, we shifted approximately $2 million in retail marketing expense for Charged Cotton from the first quarter to the second quarter. We continue to expect a higher weighting of marketing cost in the first half of 2011 as compared to 2010. Given the cadence of new Factory House openings, we would also expect more pressure in selling cost in the first half of 2011, compared to the second half of the year. As experienced in the first quarter, corporate services expense leverage is expected to be the primary driver of improved operating margins in 2011. Regarding inventory. The same factors that impacted the first quarter carrying total gear apparel into the fall winter 2011 season and the transition of our hats and bags business will continue to impact inventory levels in the next 2 quarters. In addition to these 2 items, our ongoing efforts to manage inventory effectively must be balanced with our desire to meet consumer demand. Over the last few years, we have discussed many investments and systems and technology to design to achieve this balance. Although we expect these investments to be a significant part of improving inventory turn efficiency over the longer term, we must be careful on our expectations of how quickly this will occur, especially in balancing this with immediate consumer demand. We believe in the near term, a forward inventory turn of 3x and a 90% to 95% fill rate are realistic goals for our team. If we look back to the first half of 2010, our forward inventory turns were well above a 3x turn rate. In Q2 of 2010, they jumped as high as 3.6x. And as we discussed last year, our fill rate became challenged. To put it more simply, in the front half of 2010, we believe we were under-inventoried to meet demand. This led to our decision to start making incremental inventory investments in the second half of 2010, which have continued into the first half of 2011. Included in these investments are greater positions and core auto replenishment inventory or safety stock and also higher levels of seasonal product. Regarding seasonal product, we feel this gives us greater ability to meet anticipated demand with the backdrop of an efficient and highly profitable Factory House closeout vehicle, which will approach 80 doors by year-end. With all of these factors taken into consideration for inventory, we expect the year-over-year inventory growth rate will peak in the second quarter before moving more in line with our net revenues growth in both the third and fourth quarters. We also want to provide a few comments on our business in Japan with our licensing partner, Dome. As a reminder, we received a royalty payment from this $100 million plus business, which equated to less than 1% of our net revenues in 2010. While revenues and thus our royalty improved significantly in the first quarter of 2011, the environment has clearly changed since the March earthquake and tsunami. Our thoughts are with the people of Japan and with our friends and partners at Dome. We will continue to work closely with them to monitor the impact to their business and our royalty revenue. In summary, demand from our brand remains robust, and we are off to a great start in 2011. While unprecedented sourcing challenges present a greater challenge to the industry through 2012, we believe that we can deliver strong top line performance while improving our operating margin rate, which we see as a compelling combination in this environment. Now I would like to open the call for your questions. We ask that you limit your questions to 2 per person, so we can get to as many of you as possible. Operator?