Earnings Labs

Natuzzi S.p.A. (NTZ)

Q4 2014 Earnings Call· Mon, Mar 30, 2015

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Natuzzi Fourth Quarter 2014 Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Instructions will be provided at that time for you to queue up for questions. Joining us on today's call from Italy are Natuzzi's Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Pasquale Natuzzi; and the Chief Financial Officer, Vittorio Notarpietro; and the Chief Commercial Officer, Mr. Marco Saltalamacchia. As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded and I would now like to turn the conference over to Piero.

Piero Direnzo

Management

Good morning to our listeners in the United States and good afternoon to those of you connected from Europe. Welcome to the Natuzzi's fourth quarter 2014 conference call. After a brief introduction, we will give room for a Q&A session. Mr. Pasquale Natuzzi together with the Management Team will be glad to answer your questions. By now you should have received an email copy of Natuzzi's earnings results. If not, you can find this information within our website at www.natuzzi.com, or please call our Investor Relations department at 0039-080-8820-812 to receive the results by email. You can also email information requests or questions to our email address, investor_relations@natuzzi.com. We will respond to you as soon as possible. Before proceeding, we would like to advise our listeners that our discussion today could contain certain statements that constitute forward-looking statements under the United States security laws. Obviously, actual results might differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements because of risks and uncertainties that can affect our results of operations and financial condition. We have discussed that such risks and uncertainties, which have in the past affected and may continue to affect our results of operations and financial condition in our Annual Report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2013. These reports are available within our website or from us upon request. You may also obtain a copy of our Form 20-F filing from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. And now, I would like to turn the call over to the Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Vittorio Notarpietro. Please, Vittorio.

Vittorio Notarpietro

Chief Financial Officer

Welcome everybody. As already discussed in previous conference calls, 2014 was characterized by some events that have deeply affected the operating performance of the Group. Anyway, our improvement expectation for the future were and still are lien to our 2014-2016 transformation plan that was approved and announced in February 2014. As a quick recap, following are the founding elements of the plan. One, definition of a new brand and distribution strategy coupled with a new commercial organization; two, a fixed cost reduction plan, both in the Group's trading subsidiaries and headquarters; three, rationalization of our directly operated stores network; four, product innovation, that is reduction in complexity, product reengineering in order to get a positive impact on quality and production efficiency; and five, integrated production process innovation setting up of moving lines, then integration between internal processes and supply chain, overall review of planning logics, development of the IP system for better, more efficient production management. With the first four just mentioned points of the plan have been and still continue to be substantially in line with the scheduled timing envisioned by the transformation plan, as for the fifth and last point that is production process innovation and more in general the efficiency recovery in our plans, we experienced in 2014 significant problems in its implementation. Obviously, this had different effects if compared to our initial expectation as discussed and anticipated during the previous conference calls. Such events can be linked to the Chinese plants and the Italian plants. Let's see China. During the first weeks of 2014, the Group made important investments aimed at starting the new moving line based industrial process, replacing the traditional ones. Towards the real, let's say, industrial revolution for our Group that was however, executed with a very aggressive timing, which caused problems in…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]

Pasquale Natuzzi

Analyst

Good morning to the European listener -- good afternoon to the American one and good afternoon to the European one. This is Pasquale Natuzzi, the CEO of the company. I really would like to interact with you people, you guys, you shareholders, you potential shareholders. We have really a lot of things to share together. So please don't hesitate. If you like to ask a question we'll be very pleased to answer to you. [Operator Instructions] We'll take our first question from Yura Barabash with Primary Capital.

Yura Barabash

Analyst

Mr. Natuzzi. Hello. A -

Piero Direnzo

Management

Hello this is Piero Direnzo speaking. So it feels that there no further questions and of course ladies and gentlemen, should you have any further information you would like to ask us, please don't hesitate to contact us or email me and we will reply exhaustively as soon as possible. We have so many things to communicate to you and would like to share our plans and goals with you in a short time. Okay. Thank you all and have a nice day.

Operator

Operator

And this does conclude today's conference. Thank you for your participation.