Sarah Nielson
Analyst · Baird. Your line is open
Thanks, Scott. And thank you all for joining our call today. Before I cover the financial details of our 2000 [ph] fiscal fourth quarter, I want to provide an update on the CEO search that the board is conducting, as we just had our quarterly board meeting yesterday. First, the firm that the board engaged early on to help with this process is Spencer Stuart, a global executive search and leadership consulting firm who is providing assistance to the boards search committee. Second, the board is still considering both internal and external candidates that has conducted multiple first and second interviews thus far. Lastly, as it relates to the timing, the board appreciates how important doing this role is which is why they are conducting such a thorough process. As noted in our press release, yesterday the board approved an 11% increase of our quarterly dividend to $0.10 per quarter. Next, I would like to share with you more background on two key initiatives that we carefully evaluated and decided upon during the fourth quarter of fiscal 2015 which we believe will help to reduce our labor constraints and renew our focus on our higher margins motorized business going forward. First, we made the decision to enter the bus business as announced earlier this week and have sold the related inventory and tooling to our distributor partner at cost. In light of the labor constraints that we have experienced this past year, we determine that our resources were better used to focus on the design and manufacturing of our motor homes. Also, we had not achieved profitability within this operation since inception. We’ve recorded 1 million in operating losses in fiscal 2015. Second, we made the decision to cease our aluminum extrusion operation, historically this operation supplied extrusion both internally for our motorized production and externally to outside customers. The external portion accounted for approximately 25 million in annual revenues but its margins were well below our core RV business. The exit of this operation will take some time as we are under contract to outside customers to the first quarter of fiscal 2016. In addition, we need to ensure that we have adequate supply of extrusions externally to fill our motorized requirements. We anticipate that this transition process will be completed by the end of our second quarter. As a result of these two initiatives we hope to better utilize our labor capacity from the bus and extrusion operations from motor home production and to improve the company’s overall margins. Combined, exiting these operations will add approximately 70 employees for motor home production. In addition to these key decisions, we are evaluating our approach and other facets of the business all with the aim of improving our ability to grow revenues, margins and profitability so that we can keep up with the retail demand of our products. We are very encouraged by the continued robust consumer demand for both our motorized and towable products as noted in our earnings release this morning. This strong performance is a testimony to the consumer’s appeal to our product line, many of the new innovative models that we’ve introduced throughout the past few years. Moving back to the financials, fiscal 2015 fourth quarter revenues were up just over 2% mainly driven by strong performance within our towables group where revenues grew nearly 37%. We are very excited with their performance and believe there is significant runaway for additional growth given that our total market share is just under 1%. On the motorized side, fourth quarter revenues were down nominally year-over-year with growth into the class B and C product categories being offset by lower class A revenues. To note, we had an interesting dynamic within the motorized ASP comparison this quarter. A low overall ASPs decrease inside every product class we saw an increase. Overall, ASP was down just under 1% to 91,301 from 91,924 due to higher sales of our class B and C products. Specifically, looking at our fourth quarter ASPs year-over-year, here are the key changes. Class A gas ASP was 97,199 up nearly 4%, Class A diesel ASP was 189, 342 up 9.5%, Class C ASP was 75,636 up nearly 8% and Class B ASP was 71,523 up 0.5 percentage points. On the towable side, travel trailer ASP was 23,501 up just over 23% the result of the introduction of the Spyder, a Toy Hauler product. Our Fifth wheel ASP was 52,086, an increase of nearly 27% due to the increased sales of the Destination and the introduction of the Scorpion another Toy Hauler product. In aggregate, total ASP was 29,461 up over 26%. Fourth quarter motor home dealer inventory increased 2% compared to last year and stood at 472 units at the end of the quarter, however sequentially motorized dealer inventory declined 9.5% compared to the end of the third quarter which we believe reflects the seasonal pattern related to the selling season. Throughout most of fiscal 2015 our dealer inventory levels and order trends reflect many dealers taking stock of our new products as well as dealers undergoing greater stocking of inventory. At this point in the cycle we believe they may be at equilibrium for where we should receive one wholesale order for each unit retailed. Year-over-year, dealer inventory of our Class B and C motor homes increased significantly due to the strong retail demand of these products. Our retail market share for Class B and C products increased approximately 46% and 4% respectively on a trailing 12 months basis through July. Given the solid consumer appeal for these products, we anticipate they will continue to generate increased retail demand in fiscal 2016. Moving the backlog, motorized bookings grew approximately 22% on a rolling 12-month basis compared to last year which is in line with the retail registration growth that we’ve seen over the same period. Fourth quarter profitability was a bit lower than last year a result of several factors. Starting with gross margin, we saw a sequential improvement in the fourth quarter over the third quarter partially the result of improved manufacturing efficiencies within the motorized group, however we know we still have work to do in this area as motorized manufacturing inefficiencies impacted the fourth quarter gross margin approximately 20 basis points year-over-year. To this end, we’ve been making investments and training within our organization refocusing our on boarding programs for new employees as well as implementing safety oriented programs. Also impacting the fourth quarter gross margin comparison was unfavourable trends and warranty expense and the establishment of a warranty recall reserve each of which impacted approximately 40 basis points. Gross margin was favourably impacted by the reinstatements of tariff rebates on certain imported materials by approximately 25 basis points, the realization of cost savings benefits related to our strategic sourcing initiatives by approximately 17 basis points as well as lower commodity related expenses and greater absorption of fixed costs. Compared to last year, fourth quarter operating expenses increased $1.5 million due to incremental cost associated with the ERP implementation and strat sourcing project. Additionally, we incurred costs of 1 million related to a separation agreement due to the retirements of our former CEO; partially offsetting these increases was lower executive confrontation. Both of our strategic initiatives are progressing well. During the fourth quarter, as I mentioned earlier, we realized benefits from our strategic sourcing project. We are optimistic this project will continue to identify future cost saving opportunities and believe it will benefit our gross margin of upto 50 basis points in the back half of fiscal 2016. During fiscal 2015, we invested 5.8 into ERP of which 2.2 million was incremental expense. We are excited to announce the project met its first milestone as our finance department successfully transitioned to the new system at the start of fiscal 2016. Operating cash flow for the fourth quarter doubled to 26.6 million which contributed to our strong balance sheet consisting of 70 million of cash and no debt at the end of August. We are pleased with the generation of 45 million of operating cash flow for the year and with the state of our balance sheet. Notably, this was accomplished during a period where we are making substantial investments for our future. Capital expenditures for the full year of fiscal 2015 was 16.6 million an increase of 58% over the last year and in line with the guidance we provided a year ago. We anticipate CapEx in fiscal 2016 to be 20 million to 30 million, in addition to the normal 8 million to 10 million of maintenance spend for our current facilities we will continue to invest in our ERP system and are also seriously evaluating incremental capacity expansion investments. We hope to have more information on that front soon. Fiscal 2016 is a year where we expect to continue investing and rebuilding for Winnebago’s future. We anticipate flat-to-modest motorized deliveries growth which is in line with RVA projections of 3% growth for the industry. We’ve taken steps to improve motorized labor efficiency and expect to see modest improvements in fiscal 2016. In Towables, we anticipate building on our fiscal 2015 results with continued penetration of our new products and further expansion of our distribution base. We believe, we can again achieve growth in excess of the overall towables market projections for fiscal 2016,also please keep in mind that the exit of the aluminum extrusion operation will further reduce revenues as noted earlier. Additionally, we are optimistic that profitability will improve in fiscal 2016 over fiscal 2015 through margin improvement even on modest revenue growth. Gross margins should be positively impacted due to our strategic sourcing project, continued plant improvement in our manufacturing efficiency as well as the exit from the bus and aluminum extrusion operations. We expect fiscal 2016 operating expense as a percentage of sales to increase slightly year-over-year given the further investments we are making to support growth within the towables and greater spending related to our strategic initiatives. We are anticipating a fiscal 2016 tax rate in the range of 32% to 33% compared to 30.8% for fiscal 2015. In conclusion, in fiscal 2015 we generated strong cash flow while maintaining our profitability and a strong balance sheet during a year of investing for our long term success. We also saw a nice contribution from our towables group as it generated revenue growth of 23% while doubling operating income. In fiscal 2016, we are taking additional measures to position Winnebago for growth and improve margins and profitability in the future. With motorized industry delivery volume still well below peak, along with expanded population of our key demographic market and the positive trajectory of our towables operations, we believe we have a bright future. With that, I would like to open up the line for questions.