Earnings Labs

Farmer Bros. Co. (FARM)

Q3 2015 Earnings Call· Thu, May 7, 2015

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Farmer Brothers Third Quarter Fiscal 2015 Earnings Conference Call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will follow at that time. [Operator Instructions]. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Mr. Tom Mattei. Sir you may begin.

Tom Mattei

Analyst

Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining Farmer Brothers’ third quarter fiscal year 2015 earnings conference call. I'm the company's General Counsel. With me today are Mike Keown, President and Chief Executive Officer and Mark Nelson, Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer. Earlier today we issued a press release which is available on the Investor Relations section of our website at www.farmerbros.com. The press release is also included as an exhibit to our Form 8-K available on our website and on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at www.sec.gov. Please note that all of the financial information presented on this conference call today is unaudited. A replay of this audio only webcast will be available approximately 2 hours after the conclusion of this call. The link to the audio replay will also be available on our website at www.farmerbros.com. Before we begin the call, please note various remarks that we make during this call about the company’s future expectations, plans and prospects may constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the Safe Harbor provisions under the Federal Securities Laws and regulations. The company’s actual results and other future events could differ materially from what is described in those statements. Additional information on factors that could cause actual results and other events to differ materially from those forward-looking statements is available in the company’s press release and in our public filings which are available on the investor relations section of our website. In addition, any forward-looking statements represent our views only as of today and should not be relied upon as representing our views as of any subsequent date. While we may elect to update those forward-looking statements at some point in the future we specifically disclaim any obligation to do so, even if our views change. Therefore you should not rely on these forward-looking statements as representing our views as of any date subsequent to today. Additionally, please note that the company uses certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, net income excluding restructuring and other transition expenses and net income, excluding restructuring and other transition expenses per common share diluted in assessing its operating performance. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures is included in our earnings press release, which is available on the Investor Relations section of our website. I will now turn the call over to Mike Keown our President and Chief Executive Officer. Mike?

Michael Keown

Analyst

Thank you, Tom. Hello everyone and thank you for joining us this afternoon. I am very pleased you could be with us today. Here is the agenda for this call. First, I will do a top-line review of our third quarter of fiscal 2015 results and then update you on our corporate relocation plan. I will then turn it over to Mark Nelson, our Treasurer and CFO who will discuss our financial results for the quarter in greater detail. So let’s start into it. Overall we continued to make progress in improving operating performance in the current environment of volatile coffee prices. Net sales in our third quarter were $132.5 million, up 5.6% versus the same period a year ago. Though net sales increased, the volume of green coffee manufactured and sold was down by 3.9% at 20.9 million pounds in the third quarter of fiscal 2015 versus 21.7 million pounds in the third quarter of 2014. To be frank, these volume trends did not meet our expectations in the quarter. There were some factors that we believe contributed to the reduction in volume and drove the slowdown in the growth of our topline during the quarter. Most important of these was that several of our larger national customers experienced a slowdown for various reasons such as timing of significant promotional activity. Moreover as we have mentioned before that we have new business prospects in development. These don’t always move on the schedule that we expect like or would prefer. Adjusting [ph] our profit performance, it is critical to understand the moving pieces that Mark will detail later in the call. First, net loss was $2.6 million versus net income of $2.5 million in the same period a year ago. If you exclude the restructuring – transition expenses for the…

Mark Nelson

Analyst

Thanks, Mike and hello everyone. I will spend the next few minutes discussing our financial performance for the third quarter of our fiscal year 2015. As Mike mentioned, we continue to make progress towards our objectives of driving operational improvements and financial improvement. Now let me get right into some of those details. On the income statement, net sales in the third quarter of fiscal 2015 were $132.5 million, representing a 5.6% increase from net sales recorded in the third quarter of fiscal 2014. This increase was primarily due to increases in sales of our coffee and other beverage products, primarily driven by pricing actions through which we increased prices to our direct ship and to DSD street customers. The increase of $7 million over the prior period included approximately $4.8 million in price increases to customers utilizing commodity-based pricing agreements with the changes in the green coffee commodity costs are passed on to the customer. Many of our customers were covered under coffee hedging contracts which insulated them from immediate changes in green coffee commodity prices. The duration of these hedging contracts creates a lag in how quickly commodity price changes are ultimately reflected in our topline revenues. For DSD customers, we also implemented pricing increases over the past four quarters as we saw the green coffee commodity cost begin to increase. In cost of goods sold, in the third quarter of fiscal 2015 increased by $8.5 million versus the third quarter of 2014. As a percentage of net sales, cost of goods sold increased to 64.9% in the quarter of fiscal 2015 versus 61.7% in the prior year period, primarily due to an increase in the average cost of green coffee purchases. As you know, we generally experienced a lag and the impact of changes in green coffee…

Michael Keown

Analyst

I would like to thank those on the call for their continued interest in Farmer Brothers. I want to reiterate our commitment to ensuring continued and uninterrupted service to our thousands of customers nationwide as we begin our move to Northlake, Texas. We recognize our time limitation to successfully complete this enormous task ahead of us but are also very excited for the opportunities in the future as we prepare for the next hundred years at Farmer Brothers. And with that, I would like to open the call up to a few questions.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Tony Brenner of ROTH Capital Partners.

Tony Brenner

Analyst

Have a couple of questions. Regarding the decline in volume of 3.9%, I wondered if you can break that out between your DSD and national chain account businesses?

Mark Nelson

Analyst

Yes, sure. So it was a decline in both of the channels. There’s probably a slightly larger decline in the national account side as far as the pounds go, probably about two thirds in the national channel and one third of that decline came from DSD.

Tony Brenner

Analyst

And why would -- the DSD volume had been down?

Mark Nelson

Analyst

We've seen a little bit of softness in the quarter on the DSD side. It’s hard to predict each and every quarter, quarter-over-quarter I think it was within a percent of the prior year volume number. So it's not a real significant decline but it was ultimately down as well in the quarter.

Michael Keown

Analyst

Tony, it’s Mike. On the national account side of that, it was largely promotion timing on a year-on-year basis and that was actually the most significant portion of the decline.

Tony Brenner

Analyst

With that [ph] you might wound around in actual on derivatives, most of the production was not transitioned to Houston until the second quarter, does that mean that there again will be a fair amount of unallocated coffee subject to the vagaries of price change in this quarter as well?

Mark Nelson

Analyst

So what happened actually as we headed into the tail end of the third quarter as we had been aligning our green coffee inventory pools here in Torrance, as well as the green coffee pool in Houston, aligning common item numbers and common green coffee SKUs. And as we did that, it actually resulted in the forecast coverage for green coffee being pushed out. So it turned out, as we combine the coffee inventories, we had more coffee understandably going through one facility instead of two. So that planning process allowed us to forecast a longer coverage in our coffee derivatives and our coffee on order. What that means is we ultimately wound up with a lower designated percentage on our derivatives portfolio. We had roughly 86% designation which is still quite high. It's hard to get a whole lot more than that but it could have been higher if we hadn't been combining inventory pools and that coupled with the very significant drop in coffee prices, it pushed out a pretty significant mark-to-market adjustment in the quarter. If you go back 12 months, the exact opposite happened. We had a relatively low designation percentage and coffee dropped quite a bit actually, much more precipitously than it did in this quarter the drop and so that –

Tony Brenner

Analyst

So the question is – is there that same vulnerability this quarter?

Mark Nelson

Analyst

Well, as coffee prices change, we’re going to see either some portion of it get marked to market through our non-designated piece of our portfolio but once again the majority of it we’re going to try and keep designated and it would have the effect of deferring any gains or losses until the actual commodity was delivered and then that would push it into cost of goods sold. I think we will always try to have as higher designation percentage as we can. We will never get to a 100% designation. It’s very challenging to be at that level. But I think that we will do a better job of seeing it at a higher designation percentage in the future.

Tony Brenner

Analyst

And I wondered if you could just talk a little about the factors behind the SG&A reduction [indiscernible].

Mark Nelson

Analyst

Sure. So when you look at SG&A there was $3.6 million included for restructuring expense and the reduction in SG&A in the other categories came primarily from payroll and payroll related expense. We've seen some attrition come through as we went through the end of the quarter with our announced corporate relocation. In addition, there were differences in rate of our incentive accruals that we went through the third quarter last year versus the third quarter this year. And we did see about almost $1 million in fuel savings year-over-year. So that we saw some good results on and some basic consulting and auditing, some of it associated with the restructuring activity we had in the prior year and we didn't have this year. That was also about a $1 million of savings. So we have seen some pretty good benefits. Depreciation expense is also down in the quarter and you can see that. So those factors together caused a very significant reduction in our SG&A expense.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Chris Krueger of Lake Street Capital.

Chris Krueger

Analyst

I generally just have a kind of one question, it’s related to your move to your new facility. I know you expect to be much more efficient and better and be able to better compete on these large national accounts. Could you talk about that a bit and how – I know they’re probably a slow selling process. I mean do you begin to bid more competitively in the near future before the completion of the projects in anticipation of what you’re going to be able to do to try to win that stuff or you have to wait till it’s up and running and until you have a handle on the margins before you can do that, or how should we look at that?

Michael Keown

Analyst

Sure. I will take that. So I think there's a couple of different ways to think about it. The first one is we didn't have a site that we could share with customer till just last week. So we really haven’t had an opportunity and been very eager to better engage both current customers and future customers on what this facility will be able to do. We’re envisioning a facility that will be state-of-the-art in efficiency, have all the appropriate certifications, SQF, lead, those types of things and also have the quality production and roasting capabilities to serve the most demanding customers. So we’re just beginning to look through that process moving forward. As we do go out there, obviously we will always attempt to be as competitive as we can from a price standpoint but I think the real opportunity here is more round quality, consistency and sourcing coffees around the world in a very high quality manner and also having a facility that we can use to help train our selling organization in the continued evolution in coffee and so forth. So hopefully we will have some more news on that in the future but we’re just in the infancy of really being able to leverage it in the marketplace.

Chris Krueger

Analyst

And on that note, I know last quarter, you announced – I think it was Big Lots and Cozy [ph], was there any new ones announced this quarter?

Michael Keown

Analyst

No, not of a significant nature. There were number of smaller regional customers but we’re really bringing on board those two and frankly wanted to make sure we successfully executed the transition to Houston and Portland. We've sent well over 10 million pounds of those facilities and a significant focus of that is doing that with excellence and it appears like the production teams in Houston, Torrance and Portland have done a tremendous job taking in a very significant amount of coffee. I’d also underscore it was a bit lost in our last call that we did close the distribution center in Houston. So there were number of moving pieces from an operational standpoint that were our primary focus. That being said, we’re now going after new business in a very aggressive way and obviously continue but have tried to walk a fine line over the last quarter and half of ensuring we did everything we could to serve our current customer base. End of Q&A

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And that’s all the time we have for questions today. Mike?

Michael Keown

Analyst

Okay. Well, if that’s all we have, I just want to thank everybody once again for their continued interest in Farmer Brothers. We appreciate your interest in our story and are extremely excited about the future. And we look forward to continuing the progress we've made in the past and updating you as we embark on the next chapter of our evolution at Farmer Brothers. Thank you again. Bye, bye.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation on today’s conference. This concludes the program. You may now disconnect. Everyone have a great day.