The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. (EL) Q4 2014 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Good day, everyone, and welcome to Estée Lauder Companies Fiscal 2014 Fourth Quarter and Full Year Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded and webcast. For opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to the Vice President of Investor Relations, Mr. Dennis D'Andrea. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, everyone. On today's call are Fabrizio Freda, President and Chief Executive Officer; Tracey Travis, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; and John Demsey, Group President. John will discuss the makeup and luxury categories in the context of his global brand portfolio. Since many of our remarks today contain forward-looking statements, let me refer you to our press release and our reports filed with the SEC, where you'll find factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. Our discussion of our financial results and our expectations are before restructuring and other charges, including the remeasurement charge related to Venezuela. In addition, we will generally discuss results before the impact of accelerated retail orders that took place in the fourth quarter due to the July implementation of our Strategic Modernization initiative. We will also explain the impact of the shift in sales on our fiscal 2015 first quarter and full year expectations. You can find reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP figures in our press release and on the Investor Relations section of our website. Now I'll turn the call over to Fabrizio.

Thank you, Dennis. Good morning, everyone. Fiscal year 2014 capped five years of our strategy by delivering an excellent financial performance setting new records and transforming our company in many positive ways. I am pleased to be able to celebrate and share these important accomplishments with you. Throughout our winning strategy, we have aligned our organization, created multiple engines of growth, improved our profitability and solidified our leadership in global prestige beauty. The Estée Lauder Companies has many unique attributes that contributed to our achievements including a diverse portfolio of powerful prestige brands, huge global reach, a business that's balanced across category, geographies and channels and superior talent in creativity product quality and innovation. By strengthening our asset pursing the best opportunities and sharpening our execution, we have delivered outstanding results year after year. We believe the foundation we have worked so hard to develop over the last five years set us up for continued success creating desirable product, consumer covered and creating value for our stockholders. We are fortunate to be in an exciting and growing industry that strives on newness and attract millions of new consumes every year. We are confident we can build on our success and continue to deliver sustainable profitable growth that outpaces global prestige beauty even when certain geographies or categories may be challenged. Fiscal year 2014 was highlighted by strong topline growth. Sales increased 7% in local currency to a record $10.8 billion, excluding accelerated orders relating to our recent SMI implementation. These results were in line with our estimates and approximately three points ahead of global prestige beauty growth. All regions and categories contributed to our performance. We successful leveraged our higher sales and created greater efficiencies to boost the bottom line. We grew our sales and profit in the phase of…

Thank you, Fabrizio. I’m glad to be here today to share some details about our portfolio and our forward looking strategies. I am going to focus primarily on the growing makeup category and our luxury business. I joined the company 23 years ago with the Estée Lauder brand and helped build the M-A-C brand. Now as Group President I oversee nine brands some of which include Estée Lauder, M-A-C, Bobbi Brown, La Mer, Tom Ford Beauty and Smashbox. One of the core strength of the Estée Lauder companies is our large and diverse portfolio. We have more than 25 prestige brands in four major beauty categories across a range of price points and position to appeal to a multitude of consumers. Our channel, geography and category diversity lets us dial up and dial down what we are investing and seeking opportunities. Our broad range allows us to react quickly and optimize our brands to focus where the industry is growing and navigate where there may be weakness. Makeup is a key growth driver for us. The Estée Lauder Company is the global leader in prestige makeup and the category is the second largest and fast growing one for the company. In the United States the Estée Lauder Company share in prestige makeup is over 45%. We have the top two brands M-A-C and Clinique and the last 10 of the top 20 prestige makeup launches in the United States were from our brands. We are outpacing industry growth and global prestige makeup, which is expected to be the fastest growing category in many markets. We are well positioned in this category since it plays to our competitive advantage, creativity and innovation. Within face we leverage much of our skin care technology to create high performance foundations. In color we are…

Thank you, John and good morning everyone. I will briefly review our fiscal 2015 fourth quarter and full year financial performance and then share with you our expectations for fiscal 2015. Please note that my commentary excludes the year-on-year impact of restructuring and other charges, primarily the Venezuela remeasruement charge we took in the third quarter of this year. Also excluded is the fourth quarter and full year impact of the acceleration of retailer orders that otherwise would have occurred in the first quarter of fiscal 2015 related to our July rollout of SMI. The final impact of that shift was $178 million in sales and $127 million in operating income equal to approximately $0.21 per share. This amount was larger than the estimate we provided in May primarily due to higher advanced orders from our travel retail customers. A full reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP financial statements can be found in today’s press release and on our website. I am pleased to report that for the fourth quarter net sales rose 6% to $2.55 billion. Excluding the impact of currency translations sales grew 5%. Net earnings grew sharply and were 81% higher at $175.2 million compared with $96.8 in the prior year quarter and diluted EPS was $0.45 above the top end of our expectations primarily due to the timing and discipline of expense management. Regarding our regional performance, sales in the Americas increased 4% in local currency with 4% growth in the U.S. and double digit growth in Canada and Latin America. We continue to realize double digit growth in the U.S. through specialty multi-stores, online, our freestanding stores and salons and spas and low single-digit growth in department stores. Latin America, double-digit growth was driven largely by Brazil. In the Europe, Middle East and Africa regions, sales…

(Operator Instructions) Our first question today comes from Lauren Lieberman of Barclays.

Thanks. My first question was just around capital structure. I think many of us, just even based on what you shared in the recent past conference and so on expected. A little bit more of an update really change in terms of capital structure particularly as you have seen greater visibility and the potential for improvements in cash and inventory after SMI is implemented. So could you just maybe elaborate a little bit more there, if you have plans for where inventory levels could go over the next couple of years, and what your priorities will be for any changes in Cap structure once that comes to path? Thanks.

Sure Lauren. So again, now that we are in the hyper care stage as it relates to SMI and certainly starting to deploy some of the insight that we’re getting from SMI to aggressively reduce the inventory levels that we have. There are quite new initiatives going on this year that should meaningfully impact our inventory levels towards the back half of the year and certainly in the next few years. So I think we have spoken about at least a 20 to 30 day improvement in inventories over the next few years that we could see clear visibility to. That as it relates to at least our structure currently, most of the free cash flow that we generate is returned to shareholders via dividend and share repurchase activities. So certainly as we free up cash from working capital as we demonstrated this year, with some of the areas of working capital improvements that we had, we fully expect to redistribute that back to shareholders assuming that we don’t have other uses for that cash which -- in the acquisition area. So I think certainly we expect over the next few years that our free cash flow generation will increase as our working capital improves.

Okay. Thank you. And then I did have one question for John. The Estée Lauder with Pure Color Envy that and Modern Muse I feel like there has been a pretty significant shift in the maybe call it the tone of the Estée Lauder brand advertising. Have you done any consumer testing at this point or a sense if the consumer profile has shifted at all with those two launches over the last I guess it will be six-plus months now younger, more mobile any kind of change there to know that this is maybe having a bit of the impact you’re hoping for?

Sure I'll have it over to Lauren welcome back.

Thank you.

Lauren welcome back, this is Fabrizio.

Thank you so much.

In truth, yes, the new inventory round Pure Color Envy and Modern Muse has brought a younger more contemporary customers to the Estée Lauder brand. We’ve seen fantastic performance for both Modern Muse and for Pure Color Envy which is the most successful lip color launch that the brand is having over a decade. So we are bringing younger consumers and the good thing about fragrance and makeup is being transactions.

Great. Okay, I'll pass it on. Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Bill Schmitz of Deutsche Bank.

A couple of questions, the first is how do you really know what sales from SAP pulled forward and what are normal, meaning like, does the retailer tell you like we’re buying this because, you need to got your SAP stuff in order. And then my real question is, on skin care is there a plan to take back market share because, obviously some of the selling data has been great, but some of the market share data which has improved recently has been a little bit soft. So is there an urgency there and should we expect market share gains in '15? Thanks.

Okay. so, on the SMI orders what we do is work with our retailers to look at the first few weeks after go live of what the expected sales that they have will be on the expected shipments that we would normally have to support those sales. And those are the sales that we pull forward. So it's skew by skew, its week by week in terms of how we plan with our retailers. Obviously this pull forward was greater than all of the others that we’ve had A, because the markets that were involved were larger, and the time frame of the year is larger. So July is a big time period for us as well as certainly for our retailers in terms of receiving shipments. It’s all the timeframe that we have big launches as you heard from retail, as it relate to Clinique and some of our other brands. But it is the first few weeks of the July time period that we worked with our retailers to plan.

To answer the question on skin care, definitely there are very strong plan to grow market share on skin care. I just wanted to clarify that in fiscal year '14 we did grow market share of skin care globally and we plan to continue to do that. If you’re referring to the North America market U.S. market share, trend in skin care, yes, we didn’t grow market share in the U.S specifically and we have plans to go back to growth via, first of all, innovation. Innovation, which is much more wide space in new areas and less cannibalizing than what we experience in the beginning of fiscal year 2014 and strongly improved merchandising store in this area and new services connected to the skin care area. Also, globally the skin care local relevant approach of our innovation is actually giving us some great returns and so we plan to continue growing market share globally in skin care also across fiscal year 2015.

Right, thank you very much.

Our next question comes from the line of Alice Longley of Buckingham Research.

Hi, good morning. One housekeeping question. Can you tell us what the organic sales growth was for the year overall for Clinique and Estée Lauder. So we can see the difference between those and the other brands of your growth overall? And, your organic sales growth in the fourth quarter was 5% and you’re saying its 5% to 6% in the first quarter, both of which are lower than what you think are sustainable organic sales growth will be including for fiscal 2015 overall. Why should we expect that acceleration next year?

First of all, our fiscal year '14 overall, our constant sales growth was 7% and we are forecasting 6% to 7% for '15. So, is not acceleration for the year is consistent. In term of the sales by quarter, again they are heavily dependent on the amount of new innovation to happen in the quarter or in other also in the geography where these innovation is launched and finally in the category in which these innovation is launched. So, as I say every time, don’t attribute too much into reading a single quarter, read our fiscal year overall trend which I think is a much more solid element for predicting the direction and the solidity of our business trend. So, we are 7% in 2014, we predict 6% to 7% and this will be driven as I said by market overall at 3% to 4% in our estimate. So consistent overall global market growth, but a strong innovation our brands and the profile of our growth, will continue to be the double-digit energy market, double-digit online, very strong results into our retail and some markets like the U.K. are doing fantastically well that we expect to continue. And growth in China is expected to continue. And so, there is a full consistent approach to growth which is the strength frankly of our strategy.

And we don’t comment on individual brand growth.

But I want to clarify on the individual brand growth that Lauder and Clinique are growing. They are growing globally for the fiscal year and that will continue to grow globally if in some markets their growth has been below the market growth meaning losing some share points, but little share points in some markets but this will not distract by the fact that both of these brands are growing and growing globally.

Are they growing globally in line with the prestige market globally?

They are growing globally in line with the prestige market, also likely below depending by quarter and by brand and that's the ones that we want not to comment on to give too many details, public details…

But for the year overall?

On our growth rate, but they’re growing and they're growing in a way as I said, we plan to grow market share also in these brands globally over the next two years.

Okay. Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Chris Ferrara of Wells Fargo.

Fabrizio, against your advice I apologize, I have to ask a question about the quarter, but I was hoping in the context of the picked up investment you’re going to see that you’re talking about in Q1, can you just talk about how extensive that’s going to be to the point that it would not knock earnings lower year-on-year? And I guess, if you can marry that with the fact that the topline for the quarter is expected to be below what the full year range is, I am just curious with the dynamic is there? And then just a quick follow up for Tracy, I think you said 20 to 30 days in inventory coming out, but I thought that you had said over time the number would be much more extensive than that. I thought you guys did something like 130 days, 140 days of inventory might be more reasonable? So, any color there would be fantastic. Thank you.

So in terms of the quarter and again, some of it has to do with what we’re anniversarying. So, we had major launch activity last year and we have solid launch activity this year as well. There are some margin differences, gross profit margin differences between the launch activity we had last year and the launch activity we had this year. So, that is suppressing some of the margin expansion that you would normally expect to see I think in the first quarter. Clearly it’s even down over the course of, over the year and it’s really first quarter phenomena for us from a gross profit standpoint. In addition to that, I talked about some of the investments that we have in the first quarter. We do have SMI hyper care going on. So that is an investment this quarter that we didn’t have last year. We had SMI going on but much of that activity was, some of that activity was capitalized and some of that activity was expensed. It’s all expensed this quarter as we are in hyper care other than obviously the system itself. We do have some consulting expenses for some projects that we have going on this year that are impacting us in the first quarter as well. So, all of those things are impacting us in Q1, which is why we -- and Fabrizio made the comment quarter-to-quarter really the focus should be on the full year as I think we demonstrated quite solidly last year. As it relates to inventory, you are right on the both the counts, so what I said we have near-term visibility to 20 to 30 days and the team, as the actions in place to drive to that and then we have visibility over time and plans over time to achieve greater than that. So, you’re right on both counts.

And I just want to add one your question on reconciling rest of the sales growth, many of the investments Chris as you referred to are not necessarily in advertising at the immediately the sales growth within the quarter. For example, we are investing in the first quarter into the big part of our R&D investment will happen there. In the direct channel going more direct online sites and things will happen there. We have a trial retail investment that will happen there and then we all benefit the rest of the fiscal year and finally we have investments on the consultants that was discussed in creating the savings that then will impact possibly the next of the fiscal year and in other capabilities like in the area of supply chain fundamentals. So, some of this investment will not provide immediate results on sales within the quarter. We’ll provide first of all sustainable growth in the long term and results on profit in the second part of the year.

Thank you very much.

Our next question comes from the line of Olivia Tong of BofA Merrill Lynch.

First, why do you only expect operating margins to be up 40 basis points on a like-to-like basis in fiscal 2015, perhaps can your parse out a bit more in terms of the major drivers there. I know you’ve thought obviously on hyper care expenses, but what have you expected that to be offset more or less by the savings associated with SMI, and then Fabrizio I just want a follow up on your comment about growth in the small and mid size brands versus the Clinique's and Lauder’s are you seeing an acceleration in the divergence of the Lauder and Clinique brands relative to the others or is it just a continuation of what you’ve already being seeing for some time? Thank you.

I’ll answer first there on the growth profile of our company. I think I said in the last calls, the profile of our growth is that we have created multiple engine of growths by brand, by channel, by region. Some designs go in certain moments at double digit, other at single digit. But they all provide support to the growth. So, from brand standpoint and John commented on some like M-A-C or the luxury brands which are definitely driving double-digit because of their level of development at their profile and their opportunity for expansion. There are other brands that are definitely, Lauder and Clinique are in this camp in that fiscal year that are driving single digit. The same profile is by channel, we have channels like online, travel retail, freestanding stores, which are driving the business at double digit and other channels like our core department stores which are driving at single digit in this moment. And then during the years, this has changed and our ability to flexibly react to these changes and make sure that we invest where the opportunity is in a given moment of time is also the strengths of our model. So we do keep the flexibility to make these changes and these adjustments on purpose in order to be able to leverage growth where growth is. I'll let Tracey answer the other question.

In terms of the 40 basis points, the hyper care just affects the Q1 year-over-year comparison. The SMI net is a benefit this year and we have many other costs savings activities that benefits this year. Some of the investments that we have spoken about as it relates to increasing R&D innovation and other investments to support capabilities for future growth are impacting this year. But we feel very confident that if the sales growth materializes this year then we will very much deliver double-digit profit growth.

Our next question comes from the line of Stephen Powers of UBS Investment Bank, Research Division

Great, thanks. Maybe, Tracey, if I could push on the capital structure point just a bit. I understand that you are returning much of the excess free cash flow that you are generating to shareholders. But looking forward, clearly you're confident in underlying P&L momentum, and you seem well positioned to accelerate free cash flow ahead of income growth, given the working capital opportunities. So with that plus your starting point of a net cash position, why not take on a bit more positive leverage just in order to accelerate returns to shareholders? Or are there other cash uses, priorities, that we should be considering more near-term -- like M&A, for example?

So clearly as we have spoken previously M&A is a high priority for us. We certainly have locked the activity going on in terms of looking at acquisition opportunities and we certain want to reserve flexibility for M&A activity so that's certainly a piece of why we would not consider taking on additional debt at this particular time. And as I mentioned in my prepare able remark, given the improvements that we have made and we will continue to make in certain areas of working capital and the improvement that we have in front of us as it relates to inventory, which now that estimates behind us we can certainly expect more steady improvement as it relates to our inventory turnover that should deliver very strong returns to the shareholders. We are mindful that in order to keep and support the wonderful brands that we have it requires investment. It requires investments in advertizing. It requires investment in infrastructure and in capability. So we balance all of that when we look at the capital structure as well as our plans for any fiscal year.

Okay. That's great. Thank you. Then maybe John, you talked a lot about the strength of your current brand portfolio. But with that M&A consideration, maybe looking at things through a different lens, where would you say you have the largest opportunities to fill gaps in the portfolio? And I guess how many of those gaps can be filled with existing brands being extended, versus maybe looking outside to realize opportunities through acquisition?

This is Fabrizio. I think I’ll take this one because I don’t think we can start talking openly about acquisition opportunity by brand or by gap because this would be frankly to match information to our competitors so more than to you. But the key point again as we stated is our overall M&A strategy. Our overall M&A strategy is first of all is a strategy looking at brands, which has global potential. As you know we don’t have a strategy of weak M&A partnership but rather is about buying brands that we can develop over the years. M-A-C is the example of the ideal acquisition strategy for a settled company buying a medium sized brand and making it use huge over the years that’s our strategy in M&A. Now in which areas we focus I said it repeatedly obviously skincare acquisition around the world particularly in Asia at an area where we are starting the market continuously and then there are opportunities in all the area, which are high profitable and growing and where our portfolio is today not completely filled in. and the last thing I want to say is not necessarily a gut feeling strategy. It is really our M&A strategies about buying amazing brands with amazing potential that we can leverage thanks to our great R&D and global reach and create global brand Alamak also in the future. That’s what we are looking for. We are scanning the global market continuously for opportunities and we want to keep the flexibility to engage in these activities when the opportunity arises.

Our next question comes from the line of Connie Maneaty of BMO Capital Markets.

Good morning. I was hoping to get some detail on what is going on in China. Could you tell us what the same-store sales growth did in the fourth quarter in the Tier 1 cities, and why the sales growth in China picked up overall? Sounds like it was above 10% in the fourth quarter; is that right? Also, what is the status of Osiao? Is it out of test and into full distribution yet?

Okay, so China in the fourth quarter net sales were up 20% and for the year it were double digit and about 13% so very solid performance overall in China across the year. The like door the same door sales in the quarter was actually plus 0.1% so flat and this is a big improvement versus the decline of the overall prestige market same-door in China and our pervious performance in the previous quarter was mine 2.3% so an improvement trend. What is driving that in China again I explained that the big cities because of the developmental of the online, because of the saturation of the market are not growing are not growing anymore same-door sales for sure. While the big expansion is in secondary in Tier 3, Tier 4 cities and online basically expanding the reach of the many interested Chinese consumers have been able to sell to them, that’s what we are doing and that’s why we are successful. We continue build the reach. So we get new consumers into our brands, new Chinese consumers into our brand every quarter. The other thing I said already I want to repeat the fact that the same-door sales are flattish should not scare because for example our Estée Lauder brand has the highest productivity per door in the world in China. So as table says same-door does not have a significant impact on profitability. The other positive of China that this new consumers that we are reaching expanding in secondary cities are also very good travelers and when they travel they are interest in our brands because they get to know them better and they buy more of our brands in travel retail or in the big capital travel like Paris, New York or whatever. And thus the other big benefit that we are following up in our analysis and how to continue to build the China’s market. So that's what's happening and as I said I have a big trust that China will continue to be growth driver for us in the future in the next three years on the plan that we are discussing.

Our next question comes from the line of Ali Dibadj of Sanford C. Bernstein.

Hi, guys. I have two questions. The first one is -- so SMI this quarter, the shift is much larger than projected. So I wanted to use that as a jumping point, because we have seen a lot of, over the years, SAP going to companies; and I think we've rarely seen it be as long or drawn-out or unpredictable as the implementation of this SAP or SMI implementation. So I am trying to understand: Why so many challenges? Perhaps more importantly, if we believe your guidance, whether it be operating margin guidance or even at this point the inventory guidance, it is hard to see what benefit you are actually seeing from SMI. So can you help us unravel that a little bit and give us a sense of quantification of what you will be getting from SMI after all this pain? And is that included or incremental to your guidance? Then I have a follow-up.

Okay. I want to take the first part of the question and Tracey will take you through the benefits of SMI that we see in the next year, which by the way are significant, but the first point why we got high order was mainly our travel retail customers. They decided to order more than we originally estimated because it's their decision how much they want to assess the risk of being under lever under-shipped in the months of July and they want to protect their business. because the business is doing well and so they want to protect and avoid the risk of outer stock because of SAP. As you know many companies in the past had issues in executive SAP meaning that they have some periods where they cannot ship, cannot deliver product after their implementation. So that's why our customers sometimes decide to protect themselves because they have this bad experience from the past. Now the good news is that first of all we monitor that and we don’t double count that. Second good news is that we didn’t give so far any issue to them so that we are really executing SAP with excellence and I believe we are one of the best companies in the way we are executing SAP and avoiding the issues that probably you have seen or volatility and consistency that come from the implementation in other cases. So that's as far as the volume orders.

Ali. You are right. It has been a long journey. The good news is that this last wave that we just went through is our last major wave. We have a few markets left to go alive on SMI, but we think we can manage those within normal course of business. So the supply chain team, the finance team, the business team that have been focused on SMI implementation are now focused on value realization and really levering the benefits of the system where the organization has been focused on a long drawn out SMI implementation as you indicate. The areas of improvement that I mentioned in my prepared remarks the improvement in forecasting capabilities area real and we are putting action plans together. We have good start to action plans to improve those forecasting capabilities that should help us in the areas of inventory. It will help us in the areas of margin. It will help us in the areas of freight. So as we look throughout the P&L we have to identify where saving opportunities will occur. And as it relates to launches, some of the improvements that we expect to see in terms of some of the resources involved in launches, from some of the better visibility that we get with SAP indirect procurement savings. We have launched Phase II of our indirect procurement savings, which will deliver a meaningful amount of savings over the next few years. As we look at over the next three years the SMI saving there are certainly some embedded within this fiscal year and in fiscal '16 and '17 even greater amount of SMI savings. As it relates to this year and why you are not seeing more of it, one of things as a global company with lots of opportunities we pace the investment of that opportunities and right now it's based on some of the saving imitative that we we're generating from SMI and other initiatives. So where in the past we have had more benefit from a combination of saving activities and margin expansion, gross profit margin expansion, I think I have indicated in the past that more of our margin expansion opportunities will come in the cost saving areas. So cost saving actions have actually become more contributing in terms of our ability to not only expand margin but also to reinvest back into business. So what you are seeing is the net impact of all of that, but Fabrizio mentioned R&D innovation. There are lots of areas this year that we are ensuring our foundation for not only this year’s growth but the next few years of growth that allow us to be able to stay with a good degree of confidence based on our insight right now that we continue to deliver double-digit growth.

Our next question comes from the line of Caroline Levy of CLSA.

Thank you. I would like to go back to China if I might and just ask a couple more questions about that. The Chinese in travel retail, you mentioned you were optimistic because more people knew your brand and were traveling out of China. But did you actually see a pickup in Chinese purchases in travel retail of your brands? And related to that, Korean brands appear to be doing very well in Korea, in China and globally and I am wondering if that's having a negative impact on you at all, or if there is perhaps an acquisition opportunity that you can look at, if there are any because it's been a while since you've actually found something you have been able to land of any scale. Is that on your radar, the Korean brands?

So first of all, travel retail, Chinese will continue for a long term to be one of the most travelers. In the last year, we didn't see -- we saw an increase of overall number of Chinese traveling and their destinations have changed dramatically. The Southeast issues like turmoil in Vietnam or in Thailand or the Malaysia, unfortunate situations and they create for example a decrease in travel of Chinese in South East Asia. The Chinese now travelled much more in Japan and in Korea, some of these also influenced by currencies interest of the Chinese travelers, the Hong Kong situation, the Chinese traveling will be less to Hong Kong. So it’s a very volatile situation, more than volatile, dynamic situation where the overall traveling trend for Chinese continue to be strong, although growing at lower pace than in the last year, but continue to be strong. Where they travel is very dynamic and so the companies that are able to better understand these, analyze it and make sure the trends are dynamically moved accordingly to their corridors are the companies that will do a better job and I think we’re very good at that and we’re following this carefully and as I said we value the flexibility of our model exactly because of this. The second part of your question is Korean brands. Now clearly in Korea, Korean brands have done very well and as we said, we took a couple of years to understand how to more effectively compete. I think we’re some interesting results. Some of our new brands like Jo Malone and Aveda they’re doing fantastically well in Korea, so we’re learning how to compete also with our new brands in this market and in other markets like China, we see Korean brands mainly in mass being very successful. Frankly in prestige they’ve not yet impacted in any way our trends to continue to be very solid as you see and in travel retail, in Korea, mainly in Seoul, Korean brands are significant. There’s been significant frankly in our new -- been significant for the last three or four years. But around the world, it still is growing. You’re right. But it's not to a pace where in any way is limiting our current growth but they are a formidable competitors. They definitely are an additional formal competitor, which meant yes, we’re looking and we’re evaluating opportunities on how to compete or participate to this growth in a more efficient way in the future.

Our next question comes from the line of Javier Escalante of Consumer Edge Research.

Good morning, everyone. I would like to go back to travel retail and perhaps, Tracey, if you could tell us, for Q4 specifically, what was your retail sales growth and your shipment growth. Because it seems to me that you ship ahead of retail sales, but it still fell below passenger traffic. And if you can tell us what is happening in the travel retail channel -- LVMH commented on very low conversion rates. What gives you confidence that sales in these channels are going to rebound? Thank you.

Just want to give you the data, our retail sales for fiscal year '14 in travel retail has been plus 8% and our net sales just a little bit higher than that and the traffic was about 5%. So just to keep the record straight, we’ve been growing solidly ahead of traffic in term of retail sales and travel retail. Now Tracey will…

And Javier, so in terms of obviously they went live with SAP. So we certainly advanced shift in Q4 in support of the first few weeks of go-live and they did increase -- our customers did increase their shipment as it relates to that. We’re starting to see passenger traffic pickup. One of the reasons why travel retail increased their orders was July is a very important travel period for travel retail. So it’s a heavy volume period and to make sure that they had the product in order to support that volume period, if we had any issues they wanted to have a greater degree of certainty. So we’re starting to see passenger traffic pickup and as Fabrizio said, we’ve continued to outpace passenger traffic in the last few years in our travel retail business. So we benefit from traffic growth. We’ve also been as John indicated earlier expanding some of our brands, particularly our luxury brands and other brands in the travel retail channel, which has been an accelerator on our travel retail growth and we continue to see opportunities and that is certainly in our plans this year to continue to have travel retail be an outperformer in channel growth and our overall growth.

We have time for one more question. Our final question comes from the line of Neely Tamminga of Piper Jaffray.

I want to thank John upfront for spending so much time on his brands. He's had a fantastic career at Estee Lauder; it's great to hear from him. For retail, I want to ask you a little bit more of a philosophical question around distribution in this digital era. So as consumers are migrating more online for both their search and purchase behavior and activities, obviously essentially landing people directly to your brand sites -- so I am just wondering, hypothetically speaking in the future how is the role between Estee Lauder and the retail and distribution partners, how is it going to evolve in this digital era? Any insights you can share with us? That would be helpful.

Yeah, frankly my point of view is that the digital area will strengthen our relationship with our retail partners and we are constantly working side to side with them to support their eCommerce and their digital expansion of activities. So all the customers, which have the retail partners which have the best dot com activities are also the one which delivers the strongest brick-and-mortar sales. There is a clear strong connection between success of the retailer online and success of the same retailer in brick-and-mortar. So we are participating to the development of the business of our retail partners both in brick-and-mortar and online and we’re very supportive including putting our capabilities in cooperating with them in developing this business because this Omni channel approach, that many of the global retailers that we partner with are taking I believe is the future. It is the right future. So it's true that we’ve also some of our brands with strong direct sites, which we sell direct to the customer like it's true that we have some of our strong brands with great freestanding stores where we sell our brick-and-mortar direct to the consumer as well. So we see our direct size like our freestanding store M-A-C for example and they used to penetrate the markets where our retail partners are not or to create flag-shipped brand equity building activities and show creativity and strength or to complement high traffic areas. But they never used in competition with our retail partners. So all the move to direct online and in brick-and-mortar is actually -- is a great move for accessing the consumer around the world and to develop the brand equities and our wholesale business is actually benefiting from these activities in a big way. So my view is very positive and very constructive.