Kevin Plank
Analyst · Evercore ISI. Your line is open
Thanks, Tom and good afternoon everyone. Today, we reported outstanding financial results for 2014. It was a record year in almost every aspect of our business, enabling us to continue our streak and out 19 consecutive quarters of revenue growth over 20% and five consecutive quarters of 30 plus percent growth. Heading into 2015, the confidence we have in our apparel and footwear business has never been higher. Our execution never better, and our ambition never stronger. We also announced the formation of the world’s largest Digital Health and Fitness Community with the acquisitions of Endomando and MyFitnessPal, to supplement our existing MapMyFitness and Under Armour record platforms to create Under Armour Connected Fitness. We believe this positioned Under Armour to meaningfully benefit as the world of technology and health and fitness intersect, creating new ways of connecting with athletes, building equity for our brand and additional levels of trust with our consumers. So first, I want to spend a few moments, covering how our performance this past year will inform how we will grow our business in 2015 and beyond. And then spend some time on the future state of Under Armour, and how the acquisitions we announced earlier this afternoon will help ensure two things. That we reach our consumer in a manner they expect now and in the future and that we continue to grow our business in the manner our shareholders expect as well. Crossing the $3 billion revenue mark in 2014 was an important milestone for our brand, and we did so with the most balanced growth in our history. And while a lot of today’s conversation will be about new growth drivers. We had a tremendous year in our core apparel business, growing total apparel revenues by more than half a billion dollars. The growth was across all categories and genders across our wholesale and direct businesses, and new categories and established ones, and also across geographies. We brought a new dimension to our brand in 2014 and laid the foundation for continued growth in women’s with our, I WILL WHAT I WANT campaign. We continue to drive innovation in premium pricing throughout our North American Apparel business with large platforms like ColdGear Infrared, Charged Cotton and Storm, and in key categories like training, outdoor, golf, and women’s studio. We are focused on gaining additional floors base in these categories with our key wholesale sporting goods partners through improved merchandising and key initiatives, like reinvigorating our core performance training apparel with the introduction of Armour. Our reengineered base layer featuring enhanced ventilation. In addition, we see growth with our partners in department store channel as we build out broader businesses there in women’s and kids. There are multiple parts to our apparel growth story for 2015, but they are consistent with what we’ve been and planning and executing against for the past 21 quarters and in each of them we’ve driven 20 plus percent growth in our core Apparel business. We will continue to built out large platforms, charge better assortments and strategically broaden our wholesale distribution in the right businesses. Accompanying that growth with our wholesale partners and our continued focus on a direct consumer business where we grew 32% coming in at just under $1 billion for the full year. We saw strong growth in our Factory House stores as we increased our assortment of Footwear and benefited from our new Brand House stores in Tysons Corner and SoHo in New York. In Q1, we are opening our largest Brand House yet Michigan Avenue in Chicago, where we will highlight the innovation, localization and specialization of product that we can only do in a 30,000 square foot Brand House environment. And you also see our Connected Fitness initiatives integrated into the stores, as well. We know from our experience in the existing Brand House stores especially in SoHo that we are better positioned to tell great footwear stories and we’ll expand on that as we build out new doors in 2015 and beyond. Our footwear business help accelerate our overall growth in 2014 with revenues up 44% for the year to $431 million. As we’ve been discussing on these calls, we are most proud of the foundation and the team we are building in our footwear category, as we continue to gain share and drive innovation in large categories like running and basketball. We significant invested in footwear leadership in 2014 and the strength of the Under Armour brand continues to bring consumers to our Footwear, while our focus on cushioning and fit is helping drive market share gains. This past weekend Tom Brady won his fourth Super Bowl and third MVP award wearing red and white run n gun Under Armour cleats. And next week the biggest star in Under Armour’s basketball universe and leading vote-getter for the NBA All-Star Game. Stephen Curry will be in New York City to debut his first signature shoe, the Curry One. We’ll be telling the basketball world about it and we introduce our holiday one commercial next week starring Stephen and a very special surprise guest. This will be the largest campaign in our company’s history, so big in fact that there will be a second part with for the campaign to support the introduction of the SpeedForm Gemini running shoe. With the Curry One retailing at a $120 and the SpeedForm Gemini at $130, we are creating a sustainable platform for growth in footwear by focusing our premium innovative product for the best athletes in the world and will look back on 2014 as a pivotal year in the development of what may become our biggest engine for growth. The last piece of 2014 that I’ll discuss also happens to be the part of our business where we saw the greatest increase in growth, international. Revenues grew 96% to $260 million in 2014 as we open new markets around the globe. Expanded our wholesale account base and continue to build out our international brand house-based with 68 brand house stores open outside the United States enrolling out underarmour.com in multiple new markets and languages. As we head into another strong year of growth in our global business, we’ll continue to invest in both local and global assets like our recent signing of Andy Murray, the number four rank tennis player in the world and Australian open finalist. We will strategically grow with our wholesale partners around the world, continue to build out the international brand house stores, going from 18 stores at the end of 2013 to 68 stores in 2014 and adding more than 100 doors this year. This growing global presence enables us to bring the full Under Armour story to our consumers outside the United States and illustrate the true breadth of our product innovations. So summing up the year, 2014 was a period of great accomplishments for the Under Armour team and great an example of what’s possible we’re successfully anticipating the needs of our consumer. Our focus in 2015, as it has been since Under Armour’s inception, is on making all athletes better and going well beyond their expectations. That philosophy enables us to focus on what is written on the white board in my office about everything else. Do not forget to sell shirts and shoes. That is job one for our team in 2015 and will always be the foundation on which we grow the Under Armour brand’s global footprint. That being said, I want to transition now and provide some color on how the acquisitions we announced earlier today accomplish two very important things. First, the immediate scale we gain by adding Endomondo and MyFitnessPal to the MapMyFitness in UA Record platform, positioning Under Armour as the world’s largest digital health and fitness community. And second, how this investment would enable us to better anticipate our consumers’ needs, drive more inform purchase decisions and authentically build brand loyalty by helping our consumers lead a healthy life. So first the facts. Early last month we purchased Endomondo the Copenhagen based company that is still one of the largest global connected fitness communities, with approximately 20 million registered users, most of whom live in Europe. Endomondo provides the perfect strategic complement to the activity and work out tracking we currently have in our existing digital platform of MapMyFitness in UA Record. And with today’s announcement to acquire MyFitnessPal, we have firmly established our Connected Fitness platform as the leading provider of everything in athlete needs to live a healthier lifestyle. Based in San Francisco, MyFitnessPal is the leading resource for healthy living and nutrition with over 8 million registered users and world-class nutritional resources. By bringing this established leader into our Connected Fitness platform, we can offer the full suite of information activity and workout tracking as well as nutritional expertise to truly make all athletes better. So what do we brought and more importantly why? For starters with MyFitnessPal and Endomondo added to our existing platform, we now have the world's largest digital health and fitness community with a combined audience among all our platforms of over 120 million unique people. For perspective, there are approximately 20 digital communities in the world with more than a 100 million members to the first thing to note is the sheer scale that we now bring to bear. I give you a sense of that scale, one out of every five people in the United States has downloaded one of the apps in our platform. Collectively, the three sites grew 46% last year, adding 40 million members and we continue to add over 100,000 registered users everyday. We have great geographic balance with 57% of our 120 million registered users in North America and the balance outside the United States. We also have 72 million women registered on our platform, providing another great opportunity for us to grow our brand presence with both female athletes and athletic females. Second, owning the world’s largest digital health and fitness platform provides an incredibly unique opportunity for Under Armour to build a different type of relationships with our consumer over the long-term. Health and fitness is a part of your life from childhood onwards. And our goal in aggregating these three platforms is to make you better by making your health and fitness really easy to understand. The truth is that you know more about how your car is performing than your own body. And we see the potential to inform and inspire our consumer through these assets and its impact on our ability to sell shirts and shoes as unparalleled in our industry. We build a $3 billion business by making great product and telling great stories, but there is nothing that says we must follow our competitors’ playbook especially when the way consumers digest media and make their purchase decisions is undergoing such dramatic shifts. The net result of the shift is that our consumer is demanding more from athletic brands and just making shirts and suits. We embraced those higher expectations and believe these investments position us better than anyone in our industry to truly make all athletes better. At the end of the day, the math is pretty simple. The more active someone is the more likely they are to buy athletic apparel and footwear. And for the month of January, the four sites in our Connected Fitness platform, MapMyFitness, Endomondo, MyFitnessPal and UA Record recorded more than 100 million workouts and added 4.2 million new unique users. So how do we come to this decision to invest in these communities and strategically add another tool and how we interact with our consumer? This chapter in the Under Armour story started at the NFL Combine in 2011, where we debut the Armour39, the first performance apparel that incorporated biometric measurements and was used to track the performance of top NFL prospects. We saw the potential and measuring performance and how our consumers could benefit from it. At the same time, a lot of different trackers are wearable technologies started to hit the market. And we were quick to realize that our core competencies lied in making shirts and shoes and understanding how to best incorporate technology to improve athletes’ lives. We also realize that for Under Armour, it wasn’t as much about the hardware as there would always be someone else working in a lab or garage, someone who might crack the code on the next great device. And that we can create the most value by working closely with partners, who understood the power of the Under Armour brand and our knowledge of the athletes. At the same time, we started to understand that the true value for an athletic brand was actually in the community. And that crystallize for us when we started the conversation with Robin Thurston that led us to acquiring MapMyFitness in December of 2013. As we started working with Bob and his team in Austin, Texas, it only reinforced our belief that the value is in the community, especially one where the user is not just looking at their friend’s pictures, which providing you with data that empowers you to come back to them with an informed point of view to help improve their health and fitness. We understood that there was tremendous value in becoming that trusted brand as a setout to assemble all the elements that would enable Under Armour to be the one place to access all of that information. From a geographic view, Endomondo was the obvious choice to complement MapMyFitness. Their community of 20 million users most of whom are based in Europe provides a great opportunity for us to learn from and expand our ability to interact with the consumers who are still relatively new to us. With MyFitnessPal, their expertise and the nutritional space positions us to have a complete picture of our athletes and rounds out the data from which we will be able to provide the most informed and personalized input on our users health and fitness. So how will all this come together? All the three existing platforms MapMyFitness, Endomondo and MyFitnessPal will leave distinct platforms under the Under Armour Connected Fitness banner, but we have a longer term point of view in vision and it’s found in UA record, the community we launched last month at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas. Over time, we believe UA record will eventually become the daily destination dashboard, aggregating all you want to know about your general fitness, sleep, steps, activity level and yes nutrition. We know that we are on the verge of a marketable developments and wearable technology, some of which are being worked on across the street and in our own innovation lab right now. And our recently announced partnership with HTC will enable us to help develop statement level products that demonstrates the full capabilities of UA record, but by focusing on an open platform and being device diagnostic, we believe we are the best positioned among all athletic brands to benefit from the evolution of wearables. So let me sum up with this investment we will do for Under Armour and why we believe it’s critical to our ability to sell the shirts and shoes going forward. Everything about our consumer is rapidly evolving. The way they digest media, what influences their purchase decision, how and where they buy things. We see that everyday in our business, for example this past December, we did 77% more e-commerce business on a mobile device than we did in December of just the year prior in 2013. Brands that do not evolve - that do not offer their consumers nothing more than product will be hard for us to complete in 2015 and beyond. We fully understand a massive shift and how consumer will intersect with that favorite brands. And these acquisition firmly position us on the leading edge of that new paradigm with the world’s largest digital health and fitness community, we now have a unique opportunities to build equity and consumer loyalty over the long-term. We will be able to provide the most complete measure of a person’s health and fitness and become the trusted brand that will help to drive not only e-commerce, but also long-term value for our shareholders. Are we ready for this next step? Two years ago, I would have had the answer no. But since that time, we have assembled an incredible pool of talent, led by three entrepreneurs who had literally helped to create the entire category of Connected Fitness, Robin Thurston and the founder of MapMyFitness; Mette Lykke, the founder and CEO of Endomondo; and Mike Lee, the founder and CEO of MyFitnessPal. Prior to the MapMyFitness acquisition, we had four engineers working in our digital team. With the two acquisitions announced today that number is now over 300, more important in the sheer numbers. We now have three of the best minds in the space, all adept [ph] that navigating in a rapidly shifting market and all with extensive experience, understanding the needs of their communities. Robin is going to run our overall Connected Fitness Business and reporting to him will be [indiscernible], who’ll drive our international business and initiatives; and Mike Lee will be running our North American business. This breadth of experience will enable our core product leadership to focus on the business of selling shirts and shoes, as we build out these new growth platform that will position Under Armour at the center of the world’s health and fitness activities for years and years to come. And with that, I’ll hand it over to Brad.