Good morning ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Movado Group Incorporated Fiscal Fourth Quarter 2015 Earnings 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. As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, this conference is being recorded and may not be reproduced in whole or in part without permission from the company. I would now like to introduce Ms. Rachel Schacter of ICR. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning everyone. With me on the call is Efraim Grinberg, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Ricardo Quintero, President; and Sallie DeMarsilis, Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started I would like to remind you of the company’s Safe Harbor language, which I’m sure you’re all familiar with. The statements contained in this conference call which are not historical facts may be deemed to constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual future results may differ materially from those suggested in such statements due to a number of risks and uncertainties, all of which are described in the company’s filings with the SEC, which include today’s press release. If any non-GAAP financial measure is used on this call a presentation of the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure to this non-GAAP financial measure will be provided as supplemental financial information in our press release. Now I would like to turn the call over to Efraim Grinberg, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Movado Group.

Thank you, Rachel. Good morning and welcome to Movado Group’s fourth quarter conference call. With me today are Ricardo Quintero, our President; and Sallie DeMarsilis, our Chief Financial Officer. Rick Coté, our Vice Chairman and Chief Operating Officer will join us for questions and answers. For the fourth quarter we met our updated forecast on the top line and exceeded our revised plan for operating profit. On a constant currency basis our sales would have been $138 million. For the year, on an adjusted basis, our sales grew by 1.5% to $587 million, and our operating profit was $71.5 million, a decline of 5.3%. Our diluted earnings per share was down 2.4% to $2.02 on lower shares outstanding. While fiscal 2015 was a more challenging year than we initially planned or anticipated I’m pleased that we were able to exceed our revised guidance. Overall, our biggest brands performed well in a slow growth retail environment, which portends well for the future. In January 2015 during our fourth quarter, the Swiss franc was delinked from the euro, causing the Swiss franc and the US dollar to significantly rise in value against the euro. The lower value euro affects both our sales and profitability. To deal with these external realities we are taking decisive actions to mitigate their impact: First, we will be taking selective price increases/. Second, we are streamlining certain aspects of our business to provide greater operating efficiencies. And third, our supply chain organization is focusing on sourcing improvement opportunities. Our management team has been diligently working on developing a strong plan for fiscal 2016. The strength of our core brands in the marketplace and our continued focus on product innovation will allow us to grow both sales and operating profit and lay a solid foundation for continued accelerated…

Thank you, Efraim. Good morning. I am pleased to be here today to share with you the highlights of our fiscal ’15 year-end results and our key strategies to grow our business in fiscal ’16. As you know I joined Movado Group in July of 2014, and during the past nine months I have devoted my time to learn the watch business, our company, our brands, and spending time with our talent around the globe. I have visited every major region and most important markets for our company. I am quite enthusiastic about the potential of our brand portfolio as it spans many different consumer segments, which are not necessarily equal across the globe but certainly present a great opportunity to connect with consumers worldwide by offering aspirational values, compelling designs, quality, and attractive value propositions as we continue to leverage our unique creativity and innovation, which is clearly one of our core competencies and strengths. One of our key focuses has been and will continue to be to leverage our portfolio of brands, following a strategic approach to growth by prioritizing opportunities that are big, fast growing, and profitable. Multiple sources indicate that the global watch market grew about 2% to 3% in the year 2014. The U.S., one of the world’s largest watch markets, is growing at 3%. This is our home market, representing approximately 50% of our global sales. Movado, our flagship brand, continues to strengthen its leadership position in this market, growing sell-through by 18% in the holiday season and gaining two full market share points in our price segment of $300 to $3,000 for the full year. We’re extremely pleased with the strength of Movado in the US, which is driven by the strength of our core assortment as well as our Movado Bold collection.…

Thank you, Ricardo. And good morning everyone. For today’s call, I will first review our income statement and balance sheet and then discuss our outlook. Before I review the quarter and the year in total, I would like to point out the special items included in our fourth quarter and full-year results for fiscal 2014. Please refer to our press release for a description of these items as well as a table of GAAP to non-GAAP measures. Our results for the fourth quarter in fiscal 2014 include an $8.3 million pre-tax charge in connection with our ESQ strategy. On a GAAP basis, net sales include a $7.8 million charge for anticipated sales returns associated with this strategy. This charge, along with the related write-down of excess inventory, impacts gross margin on a GAAP basis by $7.5 million or 240 basis points for the fourth quarter and 60 basis points for the full year. Operating expenses on a GAAP basis include an $800,000 charge for excess ESQ displays and point-of-sale material. The ESQ strategy impacted diluted earnings per share by $0.20 for the quarter and fiscal year. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2014, we recorded a $2.5 million or $0.06 per diluted share pretax duty refund from US. .Customs and Border Protection to recover payments made in prior year for watches subsequently exported out of the United States. On a GAAP basis, the duty refund impacted gross margin by 190 basis points for the fourth quarter and 40 basis points for the full year. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2014, we recorded a contribution to the Movado Group Foundation. The pretax donation was $2 million or $0.05 per diluted share, and this donation is also reflected in the full-year results. During the first quarter of fiscal 2014, we recorded…

Thank you. [Operator Instructions]. We’ll take our first question from Oliver Chen with Cowen & Company.

Thanks so much for the details and the announcements about the innovation ahead. Efraim, I’m just curious about your context about the slowing category growth. I know it’s been happening in terms of the past quarters. Can you just give us color or rationale for how that may be happening and why? Also there does seem to be this continuation of this gap between sell-in versus sell-out. Is that a trend we should expect for the full year to continue? And to your comments on wearable technology, they sound new and innovative to me. Could you give us color about the role that you might seek to play in terms of which brands may embrace this, and also the context from how might your products evolve and be differentiated? Thank you.

Sure, okay. Well, on the first question of market growth, I think you’ve actually seen that it’s been in combination with a slower growth retail environment overall, and I’m sure everybody here follows our retail customers. Overall, comp stores have grown in the low single digits, and I think that the watch category has mimicked that. What we’re pleased with is that a number of our brands, our largest brands have significantly surpassed that growth rate, but that still causes retailers to focus on inventory control and productivity overall. So, we’re not the only brands that they carry, they carry multiple brands in multiple categories, and I think you’re seeing that in a slow growth retail environment but it is continuing to grow. So, we’re pleased with that. So I think that kind of answers part one and part two of your question. On the wearable front, as a company, we’ve always been a leader in embracing innovation to make beautiful products. So when technology allows us to do that, we will embrace it and those are the projects that we are working on. I think you’ve seen a lot of wearable products out there so far that are not beautiful products or commensurate with what a watch company would produce and much more commensurate with what a consumer electronics company would produce. So those are the projects that we’re working on, and that’s really probably all I’m going to say other than the fact that we are partnering with several technology companies on that front, and as soon as we have more news to announce about that, we will.

Okay, but the disparity has been so large, so do you think retailers, they’re just carrying less inventory but still selling through at a strong rate? Will that trend continue? Is this sustainable, and is this just a one-year kind of process? It seems like the sell-throughs have been healthy, but the sell-ins have been just a lot more modest.

So we believe that that’s a continuing trend, and we’ve modeled our business assuming that retailers will continue to focus on inventory growth. I think you also have the combination combined with that of part of our retailers’ sales moving into the ecommerce world, and I think you hear that typically it’s between 10 and 15%. So you need to carry less inventory in the ecommerce world as it’s now one location and in some cases drop-ship locations doing significant amounts of business.

Last question, just to follow-up -- thanks, Efraim, is on the strategy of the price increases. Could you just give us some comfort or magnitude in terms of where your -- the degree to which these will be, and if you’re able to comment on which parts of the portfolio may be most conducive to this, just because we’re looking for you to get these increases in the context of a slowing watch growth environment, and we wanted to get a sense of achievability and price increases. Thank you.

Well, overall we have looked at price increases, and they are selective, of approximately 5% to 8%. We have chosen, I think to use Ricardo’s words here, gross profit over volume. So recognizing and building into our model that we will have some effect on overall volume. We felt it was the prudent thing to do in this type of environment where our costs have materially increased due to currency fluctuations.

I’d just like to add that there are many price points that remain untouched. So was very selective. It was not a flat percentage across the portfolio.

Yes, that’s really helpful. Thanks for the details, and looking forward to the next year. Best regards.

Thank you.

We’ll take our next question from Ed Yruma with KeyBanc Capital Markets. Your line is open. Please check your mute function. We are unable to hear you.

Hi, sorry about that, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Sallie, I think when you negatively pronounced 4Q, you indicated at that point SG&A was largely baked in and you were unable to pull it back, and that was the main reason for the pre-announcement. I guess, taken within context of today’s release, it looks like you were able to pull back some of those expenses, I guess. Could you talk about where SG&A might have come in a little bit better than you had expected in December?

We were -- obviously we’re very good at controlling at our expenses and we were forecasting to really invest everywhere around the globe and by the end of the year, what ended up happening was a lot of our international locations did come in slightly lower in some marketing expenses. So it was a little bit here and there around the world, and we’re a very complex organization but primarily international and primarily around some of the local marketing spend.

I’ll add to that that you also had the effect of in some places sales coming in lower. So because of that, some of our commitments to our partners came in lower, as well as currency. So, you had a strengthening US dollar which changes some of those expenses as you translated them back into US dollars.

Got it. On the impact of FX, the $26 million top line and $13 million op profit, is that net of the price increase or is that if you hadn’t taken the price increase?

I’ll get that one, Ed. That is in isolation. That is just the FX--

Had we not taken the price increase?

Yes, had we not taken the price increase, and then offsetting that obviously, because we are seeing some growth in our overall forecast, is due to price increases.

Got it. So, your expectation is that the price increases should offset completely all of the FX shifts?

Yes and then there will be some growth as well. It’s the major component offsetting the FX.

Got it. I guess a final question, just asking about Oliver’s kind of sell-in versus sell-through, are you embedding any improvement in sell-in through the balance of this year, or do you think that—you know, as you talk about some of this de-stocking trend or move to eComm, is this going to kind of reset at the end of this year and hopefully rebounds to the beginning of next year? Thank you.

Well, we see that trend continuing throughout this year. Hopefully sell-through will accelerate towards the second half of the year, and things will rebalance, but right now we’re seeing the trend to continue throughout the year.

Great, thanks so much.

Thanks, Ed.

We’ll take our next question from Rick Patel with Stephens Incorporated.

Hi, thanks for taking the question. Ricardo, great to have you on the call. Can you talk about where you are in terms of infrastructure projects? You talked a little bit about ecommerce and digital investing, but are you where you need to be in terms of other IT projects, distribution facilities and headcount, that sort of thing? Just given the growth potential of the company, I’m curious if you’re going to have to make some other investments later this year or beyond.

We’re very comfortable with where we are from an IT perspective, as well as from a facility perspective. While we are saving approximately $5 million this year in our overall overhead, that is net of investments that we will make in growth in certain markets around the world where we believe we have opportunities. So we will continue to invest in the company, but that’s built into our forecasts and our models for the year.

As a follow-up to that, what’s the right way to think about operating margins longer term? I know in the past you drove a lot of upside through SG&A leverage. This year is a little bit tricky given FX, but once that normalizes, have you changed your thinking about where long-term margins can go for the business?

I think we still feel comfortable that long-term margins can go into the mid-teens, but I think we’d have to see FX basically stabilize for a while and then see volume growth.

Great. Then just one more, if I may. Can you talk about the Movado distribution footprint and what it looks like internationally? I’m curious which inning you’re in, in Europe and the UK in particular, and where the white space is as we think about geographic expansion over the next few years.

Well right now, Movado has -- we just launched very recently in the UK. That is one of our international markets of focus. So we’re not thinking of expanding to many different markets. There is markets we’ve already had a position where we need to grow the business. But we want to be very thoughtful. It’s not adding doors, it’s building one door at a time. So we have a position in China now that there are certain concessions that we run which are performing really well. So we want to be, again, very focused on how we build this, and again it’s not every market. Right now, the main focuses are the UK, certainly China, and in Brazil we’re also, as I mentioned in my remarks, seeing very good traction.

Thanks very much, and good luck next year.

Thank you, Rick.

We’ll take our next question from Jeremy Hamblin with Dougherty & Company.

Hi guys, this is Kyle calling on behalf of Jeremy. I noted that performance-based pay was down $2.1 million. Any idea what a normalized number would look like for 2016?

So just want to -- the performance-based pay was down for the quarter, $2.1 million. I think at the end of the third quarter we also announced that it was down for the whole year. We don’t give out specifically that number, but based on the performance of the company this year, we did not have any performance-based compensation.

Okay, thanks. With the buyback, I see the stock’s north of $30. Is that still going to be falling within the automatic buyback mechanism?

I guess, I’ll address a piece of that and then others can follow. We don’t disclose obviously what our grid is for the program, but you are correct we do have a 10b5-1 program in place which we will adjust accordingly when the window is open. It’s still a strategy of ours to continue to invest back into the company.

Okay, last question, for the fiscal year ’17 strategic plan, any changes being made to that?

I think we announced that that plan is no longer valid at the end of Sallie’s remarks, based on the current environment and currency rates, and we have no plan at the current time to reissue a longer term plan.

Okay. All right, that’s all. Thanks guys.

Thanks Kyle.

We’ll take our next question from Kristine Koerber with Barrington Research Associates.

Good morning. A couple of questions. First, you mentioned streamlining your business. Can you give us some more color what specifically are you planning to do? Richard J. Coté: This is Rick. From a standpoint of -- we always look at our operations from around the world, and our intention here is to always look at efficiencies. We believe we have some opportunities of further improving efficiencies, particularly as it relates to strengthening our regional operations. So certainly that would be an aspect that we’re looking at and we think there’s added benefit in there. But this is an ongoing program that we always have and we think it’s important to putting a number of things together all at once to basically help us deal with the currency situation, that is the reality out there.

Okay. If we look at the inventory levels, you were down about 6% coming out of the year, how should we think about inventory for 2016? Richard J. Coté: And again I think from the standpoint -- we’ve been very conscious on inventory. Our supply chain organization and our operational teams have done a good job of improving our speed to market and reducing our lead times and all that. So therefore we’ve been able to react to the marketplace situation that took place in the second half of last year. So our intention is to basically either keep inventory flat, or if it does grow, it certainly will grow at a lower level than our growth out there, so we believe we have further opportunities of improving our inventory turn performance levels.

The inventory that you have, is it pretty clean at this point? Richard J. Coté: The inventory we have is in excellent shape, both in our facilities as well as our retail facilities. So again we have done -- this has been a major focus of ours over the last five, six years. I think as an organization, we’ve done a great job. So very pleased with our inventory levels again and the composition of that inventory, both at retail and in our own distribution centers.

Okay, and then lastly, can you talk about marketing spend, what your plans are for fiscal 2016?

We will increase marketing spend this year and continue to invest in our brand building efforts around the world. So that is a continued focus of ours. Obviously we’ll do it in line with our sales growth.

Okay, great. Thank you.

And we’ll take our next question from Oliver Chen with Cowen & Company.

Thanks for having me back. Ricardo, congrats, and also Rick, congrats on your promotion. Ricardo, I just wanted to ask you a broader question about what are the main -- how are you mainly spending your time in terms of role, and also if you had any color in terms of your prior background and what kind of attributes have been most helpful in your prior background at leading consumer product companies in terms of your experience at Movado thus far. Thank you.

Thank you, Oliver. You know, I’ve spent my time learning. This is a new industry for me. So the majority of my time has been learning, learning internally from the leaders around the company, the people at every level inside of the company, traveling to the different markets, meeting with key customers, meeting with consumers, and getting the flavor of the strength of our different brands around the globe. So it’s been a process of learning, to summarize, and also starting to learn the talent that we have and putting together strategies that restore us to growth, because growth is a very important thing for us. So that’s been the majority of my time. As you know, if you read my bio, I spent 15 years at the Estee Lauder Companies and that was a great training ground for me. I worked with some amazing people. So I’m taking some of those learnings now to Movado Group, and one of the main learnings is to put the consumer first and really understanding what consumers want, and also executional excellence. Execution is the only part of strategy the consumers see, and that is one of the renewed focuses that we have in the company. And I’m very pleased to see that our talent around the globe is really embracing this as a key strategy going forward.

Have there been aspects -- what’s surprised you most thus far, like have there been surprises relative to your expectations? And lastly, I was just curious about your time in geographies, like do you expect to spend a lot of time in a certain geography or will it be pretty broad? Thank you.

Well, I’ll tell you that the most -- surprises, there’s been several good surprises. I knew there was great talent in this company, but as I was able to spend more time, not only here in our headquarters but traveling throughout the different regions I was pleasantly surprised to see we have great people in this organization. So I was very excited about that because talent is such a key driver for success for any organization. My time, I am spending time here in the U.S., this is our core market, but also making sure that the market, the priority international markets are visited and we work together. So I’m spending a lot of time here, but also a lot of time on the plane.

Thank you. Best regards.

Thank you, likewise.

We have no further questions and I would like to turn the conference back over to management for any additional or closing remarks.

Okay, I would like to thank everyone for participating today, and we look forward to talking with you on our next conference call. Again thank you very much.