Kevin A. Plank
Analyst · Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Thank you, Tom, and good morning, everyone. We had another quarter of solid revenue growth in Q1 as we continue to lead our industry in bringing true innovation to athletes. All 3 of our product engines: apparel, footwear and accessories grew more than 20% with total revenues up 23%. That marked the eighth consecutive quarter where our top line has grown above 20%. Brad will provide more color on our results in a moment, but I want to focus my comments this morning on 2 broad themes that we believe are driving our results, and more importantly, setting us up for continued profitable growth in 2013 and beyond. The first point is a simple equation. When we innovate and add value for the athlete, we win. And importantly, when we do that, we do not see consumer resistance to price, a critical piece for us as we expand distribution while maintaining our premium brand status. Second, we've done a very effective job over the past 2 years of balancing the need to improve our competencies in critical areas like supply chain, planning and design, while executing to deliver the 20-plus percent growth that we have accomplished. While our brand strength continues to drive our connection with consumers, we believe its ability to focus on investments in people and systems, while also delivering solid top and bottom line growth is a critical element to the Under Armour story. Let me cite a few examples of how investments we made in the past 2 years paid off in this quarter and how we continue to make new investments that we believe will help drive results 2 years out. While innovation for athletes will always be at the core of how we build products, over the past 2 years, we've begun to deliver a more Under Armour-specific design language throughout our assortments. We invested significantly in both our team and tools around design, bringing industry expertise to help bolster this dimension of the Under Armour brand. This focus has specifically helped drive improved results in our Women's business and the introduction in Q1 of the Armour Bra, Sports Bra, is a great example of the right blend between performance and style. Our team talked extensively with our consumers to understand what was lacking with their existing sports bra. They also went into the lab to better understand how a sports bra could offer ultimate support and comfort. From that work, our design team reconstructed the sports bra and the results have been great. We've had a very successful launch with the Armour Bra with our wholesale partners and early sell-through on our e-commerce site was as strong as we've seen for new women's products. By increasing our investments and design over the past 2 years, we're now seeing stronger products across the Women's business with new items like the Perfect Pant, with soft, breathable fabric that has superior stretch with a great fit. Our sweat-wicking Moisture Transport System accelerates dry time as well. The true benefit is longer term as we're introducing our brand to a new Women's consumer who may have previously seen us as solely focused on team sports. As I mentioned upfront, when we innovate, we win. And we are able to drive higher price points with better products. We saw it last year at the introduction of Charged Cotton that dries faster than your old cotton T-shirt. On the Women's side, we focused on improving the fit of our Charged Cotton T-shirt in year 2, and the early results have been very strong sell-throughs. We saw it first quarter with the Armour Bra introduced at that $58 price point. And we also saw strong consumer reaction to our new Tech tee, where we've brought a new fabrication making it softer, while keeping it extremely lightweight and taking the price up to $23 from just $20 a year ago. We believe these are all great indicators that the consumer continues to view us as a premium performance brand and reinforces the thought that as long as we continue to innovate, we will win. The other major apparel store that hit in Q1 was ColdBlack. This latest technology from Under Armour not only blocks the sun's UV rays, the ones that causes sunburn, but also reflects infrared heat keeping you more comfortable on a hot and sunny day. Our success here is enabling us to drive higher price points in our polos, and eventually, at other products as well. Hunter Mahan has been wearing ColdBlack to great success in the PGA Tour this year. Winning 2 tournaments so far this year and moving up to #5 in the world, his highest ranking ever. ColdBlack is a great example of Under Armour incorporating additive technology to a premium product, and we see consumers truly starting to embrace it as the weather heats up. In our Footwear business, the impact of our prior investments have been equally important. We preached patience on our Footwear business, and we continue to make the type of progress that will position us long term as a leader in this space. Our first and most important consumer is on field, and our baseball cleats business has been exceptional this spring. We've taken market share at the greatest rate since our introduction of baseball cleats over 5 years ago. We are now the official performance footwear supplier of Major League Baseball. We've got our cleats on many of the game's rising stars, like Buster Posey and Ryan Zimmerman. And our premium product is performing extremely well. Next up, our premium product for the football field is coming with the introduction of the Highlight cleats, the super high and ridiculously light cleat that Cam Newton wore exclusively this past season. Visually, this $130 cleat will look different from any footwear you'll see in the NFL this season. But it provides additional support that reduces the need for taping ankles. The limited pairs we've made available on our e-commerce site were quickly sold out, but will be available next month at Dick's Sporting Goods, Foot Locker's Eastbay catalog and website, as well as limited numbers with other select retailers. We've talked about establishing the right cadence in our Footwear business, building off our early success in our on-field product, improving it each year and taking those learnings to more acceptable categories like running. Our recent success with the Charge RC running shoe is evidence that we are establishing the right pace of innovation at the right price in the right distribution. We've seen continued strong sell-through on the $120 Charge RC running shoe. As we bring new colors to the assortment, we are seeing strong results for the Charge RC in both Men's and Women's in both specialty run and our direct consumer channels. And the Split II Running Shoe performing very well within our own sporting goods distribution. So while we're in a very strong product cycle entering 2012, we think it's important to understand where that product came from. It came from investments. Ones that were made over the past 2 years and ones that were made as we simultaneously delivered 20-plus percent top line growth. We believe this illustrates not only the power of the Under Armour brand, but also the efficiency of our business model in harnessing that brand's strength. We believe this is a critical element in the understanding of the Under Armour investment story. Simply put, this is what you're going to see from us over the next several years. Our growth will be driven by smart and early investments in people, systems and technologies and a high level of execution to ensure the best possible return on those investments. As we have stepped up the pace of innovation on the product development side, we've also been making investments in our supply chain and planning functions. We're starting to see early benefits from the years of industry experience that we've brought to the organization in our supply chain and planning teams. While you're now just starting to see the early fruits of their labors, we believe more meaningful financial benefits will be seen later this year and into 2013. Equally important is that these business leaders are driving new competencies and improving our cross-functional communications that would be essential as our organization grows. We have consistently stressed the importance of building a great team and continue to add experience from outside Under Armour with the recent hires of senior leaders in both supply chain and Human Resources. As we begin to aggressively execute in places where we've made some initial investments, we're building the teams that will be contributing meaningfully to our growth in 2014 and beyond. This past quarter, we announced the hiring of Charlie Maurath as the new President of Under Armour International. Charlie has over 20 years of experience with athletic brands internationally. Most recently, as head of the Latin America business for Adidas. We believe that the best time to invest in our international business is when our core U.S. business is strong, so that new markets like China, South America and our business in Europe will bring an entire new population of consumers to the Under Armour brand. So in summary, our business this past quarter was very solid. We continue to lead the athletic apparel industry in the pace of meaningful innovation, thought leadership. And we're establishing the right cadence of product flow at premium price points in Footwear. New technologies are helping us bring new levels of performance in style to our Women's business. In Men's apparel, we're reaching new consumers with Charged Cotton and our new underwear program and expanding the definition of performance with ColdBlack. We're successfully transitioning from a tight T-shirt company to a fully integrated athletic brand, capable of servicing the full needs of the athlete, men's and women's, head to toe globally. But more important, we continue to invest to ensure the next Armour Bra, the next ColdBlack and the next innovation in Under Armour footwear are already somewhere in our product pipeline. And we are investing in a team that will be able to execute on these opportunities and continue to drive the type of growth that you've come to expect from Under Armour. With that, I'll turn it over to our CFO, Brad Dickerson. Brad?