Earnings Labs

Flexsteel Industries, Inc. (FLXS)

Q1 2009 Earnings Call· Tue, Oct 21, 2008

$55.28

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning. My name is Clara and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the first quarter fiscal year 2009 operating results conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers’ remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. (Operator instructions) And now I would like to turn the call over to Mr. Tim Hall, Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer for Flexsteel Industries. Sir, you may begin your call.

Tim Hall

Management

Thank you, Clara, and good morning everyone and welcome to our fiscal year 2009 first quarter operating results conference call. We appreciate you participating this morning. Joining me this morning is Ron Klosterman, our Chief Executive Officer and President of Flexsteel. We are calling this morning from our showroom in High Point, North Carolina. During the call today, we may make forward-looking statements that are subject to risk and uncertainty. A discussion of those factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from management's expectation is contained in the company’s SEC filings including our most recent 10-K filed on September 15, 2008 and the press release dated October 20, 2008 announcing our first quarter 2009 operating results. Any forward-looking statements or opinion as of now and we undertake no obligations, to update or revise any of the forward-looking information and statements to reflect events or circumstances after today’s call. I would like to make just a few comments before I turn the call over to Ron. From the press release from yesterday, our sales for the quarter were approximately $91.4 million, a decrease of about 9.4%. We reported a net loss of approximately $700,000 or $0.11 per share compared to a $0.18 per share earnings in the prior year quarter. During the quarter, we recorded pre-tax charges of approximately $1.4 million related to facility consolidations that we announced during September. Excluding those charges, our net income for the current quarter was approximately $100,000 or $0.02 per share. Our sales were both – breaking down our sales, our residential net sales were approximately $62 million, substantially flat with the prior year quarter. Our commercial seating sales were up slightly to $23.5 million, about 4% increase I guess. The recreational vehicle seating part of our business is where we have struggled…

Ron Klosterman

Management

Thank you, Tim, and good morning everyone. While this certainly has been a very challenging quarter, great volatility in the marketplace between the – all the issues going on in the financial end of things, the impact of the slower housing, etc., all of these seems to play a significant role in our businesses. Almost every product we make is an easily deferrable purchase. Although we’re never pleased with having top line revenue being flat, quite honestly, we’re not greatly disappointed in either our residential or our commercial business at this point in time, especially as we look at some of our competition in those areas. We feel reasonably good about having relatively flat top lines at this time compared to a year ago. And then, in fact, in the home furnishings industry, probably performing better than much of our competition. The recreational vehicle business has been a real challenge for us. It has been throughout calendar year 2008, as we saw declines already beginning in the early part of the year as the retail volume of recreational vehicles started the year, the first couple of months being down in the 10% to teens areas, growing to the 20% and 30% range as we went through the late winter/early spring months and really being substantially impacted during these last three months or at least the last three months reported with I think the industry saying that retail sales for the month of August were off over 60%. With this, the original equipment manufacturers that we supply significantly cut back on their production, many of them taking extended shutdowns in the middle of the summer, around the 4th of July, some of them again in August and even into early September and also further plant consolidations by some of our key…

Operator

Operator

(Operator instructions) Your first question comes from John Deisher [ph]. Your line is open, sir.

John Deisher

Analyst

Good morning.

Ron Klosterman

Management

Good morning, John.

John Deisher

Analyst

A couple of questions. One, on the expected annual pre-tax cost savings of $3.5 million to $4 million from the restructuring, when do you expect to capture those, over which future quarters?

Ron Klosterman

Management

We would anticipate that those will start to come back to us as we get a little bit into the third quarter and into the fourth quarter of the current fiscal year and then, obviously, we’ll have all of those as we move into fiscal year of 2010.

John Deisher

Analyst

Okay, so your Q3, that would be the March quarter and June quarter?

Ron Klosterman

Management

March and June quarters will start to develop for us.

John Deisher

Analyst

Okay. Nothing in the current quarter?

Ron Klosterman

Management

Nothing in the current quarter. Both of those facilities are still producing product and running production through the first part of November, and then we’ll have some people still on staff as we move inventories and equipment out of the buildings, etc., so there might be a very small amount but probably not much in the December quarter.

John Deisher

Analyst

Right. And I think you announced this already, but what’s the headcount reduction going to be as a result of those closures?

Ron Klosterman

Management

I think in total, with active employees at the time that we made the announcement, it was in the area of 250 people total.

John Deisher

Analyst

250, okay. And that includes – okay, so that’s the net number?

Ron Klosterman

Management

Yes, that’s –

John Deisher

Analyst

Okay.

Ron Klosterman

Management

Hourly production associates and supervision, administrative, etc.

John Deisher

Analyst

Right. Okay, good. I’d like to say another question, as you talk about some of your customers being under stress, I’m wondering are any of your competitors under stress? Do you see any competitors perhaps going out of business either on the RV or the residential side?

Ron Klosterman

Management

A little harder to address on the RV side because most of our, well, almost all of our seating competitors in RV are privately-owned, if you will, sort of family-type business. So other than once in a while speculation or rumors, there’s not too much information as to how they are doing. One would anticipate that if our volume is down this significantly, then many of them are feeling the same thing, but what that means to their financial well-being is hard for us to comment on. On the residential part of the business, we certainly know how some of the public companies are doing and through the industry and the trade, we know how a few of the private companies are doing, and there have been certainly some that are under stress. For instance in the residential business, there was a long-standing competitor of ours, a private company, that filed bankruptcy and went out of business although they’ve recently been restructured and some other individuals are taking over the brand and the operation, so one would anticipate that there could be a few more of those out there.

John Deisher

Analyst

Interesting. Can you share with us who that private company was?

Ron Klosterman

Management

It was Norwalk, based out of Ohio.

John Deisher

Analyst

All right. Okay, good. And then you are at the show right now? I guess it’s the start of the show?

Ron Klosterman

Management

Yes, it is.

John Deisher

Analyst

Are you seeing any kind of enthusiasm or what’s the reception been amongst the buyers from your corner [ph] so far?

Ron Klosterman

Management

Well, I think overall – first of all, we are finding that during the first couple of days, the traffic is about the same as it was a year ago. All of the – at least for us, our – all of our dealers are there [ph] of course, there – certainly our significant larger retailers are here and they’re looking at products. Some of them talk about the slowdown and so they’re probably a little bit more tempered in their enthusiasm to buy product right now but they’re certainly coming to look at new products, to know what’s going to be available to them. With this market here, we really never know the results of how well we've phrased our product until 4 to 6 weeks after market because many of the buyers come and look here but they don’t actually order here. That happens when we go back to the field and meet with them at their individual locations.

John Deisher

Analyst

Okay, so you’ll have a better feel in 4 to 6 weeks? Is that correct?

Ron Klosterman

Management

Yes, that’s correct.

John Deisher

Analyst

All right. Okay, thank you.

Ron Klosterman

Management

All right, John.

Operator

Operator

(Operator instructions) There are no more questions in queue at this time sir.

Ron Klosterman

Management

All right, thank you. Well, we thank all of you for joining us this morning. Once again, we look forward to speaking with you again at the end of the next quarter. Hopefully, we’ll see a stabilization in some of the businesses, especially the RV business, and look forward to some upturn as we move past the end of the calendar year and into 2009. So, thank you for your commitment to Flexsteel and we’ll talk to you again.

Operator

Operator

This concludes today’s conference call. You may now disconnect.