Natural Grocers by Vitamin Cottage Inc (NGVC) 2016 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Natural Grocers first quarter fiscal year 2016 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later we will conduct the question-and-answer session and instructions will be given at that time. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ms. Ashley McLeod, Director of Finance and Investor Relations for Natural Grocers. Miss McLeod, you may begin.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for the Natural Grocers by Vitamin Cottage first quarter fiscal 2016 earnings conference call. On the call with me today are Kemper Isely, our Co-President, and Sandra Buffa, our Chief Financial Officer. As a reminder, all statements made on this conference call, other than statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. Due to a variety of factors, including the risk detailed in the Company's most recently filed Form 10-Q and 10K. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements. Our press release is available on our website and a recording of this call will be available on our website at investors.naturalgrocers.com. Now, I will turn the call over to our Co-President, Kemper Isely.

Thank you, Ashley. Good afternoon, everyone. We're pleased with our first quarter financial results. Our increased sales, although lower than our outlook range, were as expected and our disciplined approach toward operating expenses resulted in solid financial results which allowed us to continue our investments in growth. During the quarter, net sales increased 15% to $167.8 million. Gross profit increased to $48.3 million and we continue to see leverage in administrative expenses. Net income increased 5.2% quarter over quarter, and diluted earnings per share for quarter was $0.17 compared to $0.16 from the prior comparable quarter. Our daily average comparable store sales increased 3.6% during the quarter.

As anticipated, our comparable store sales are somewhat lower than recent trends. We believe this due in part to increased competition in the natural and organic sector and general economic conditions in some of our markets. We continue to focus on our directed sales initiatives, free science-based nutrition, education, outstanding customer service, and operational excellence. We believe our dedication to strict quality standards, nutrition education, and our commitment to 100% organic produce drives initial traffic at new stores and strengthens customer loyalty at existing stores.

Our directed sales initiatives remain on track. We are very pleased with the initial results from [N]power, our customer appreciation program. We have started to aggressively market [N]power at our registers and the initial push with customers has produced encouraging results. Additionally, our [N]power personalized offers are exceeding expectations. We therefore believe we're on track to meet our goals on this initiative. In addition, we just completed our first annual system wide promotional sales event calendar which is designed to execute natural sales promotion efforts across all stores.

This initiative is expected to provide scale and leverage across all stores through a comprehensive alignment of marketing, operations, training, and vendor support on a continuous basis. We saw the power of this system wide promotional sales event with last year's 60th anniversary celebration, and have several system wide events planned for the remainder of fiscal 2016. At the core of our marketing efforts, I'm very excited to announce the recent hiring of Kevin Miller, our Vice President of Marketing. Kevin joins us with over 30 years of world class retail and brand marketing experience with fortune 500 companies.

Kevin will help drive innovation and sales growth across all segments of our business with a focus on data analytics, tech and mobile with the objective of significantly increasing our reach, revenue and customer satisfaction. We are very glad to have Kevin onboard. During the quarter, we opened four new stores expanding our geographic footprint in Colorado and Utah. Our new stores are performing in line with expectations and we remain on track with our new store pipeline. We will continue to enter new states and markets and plan to open 23 new stores in fiscal 2016. Now, I will turn the call over to Sandra to highlight our first quarter fiscal 2016 financial results.

Thank you, Kemper. Good afternoon, everyone. As Kemper indicated, net sales in the first quarter of fiscal 2016 increased 15% to $167.8 million. Daily average comparable store sales increased 3.6% driven by a 1.9% increase in daily average transaction count and a 1.7% increase in average transaction size. Daily average mature store sales increased 0.4%. Gross profit during the first quarter of fiscal 2016 increased 14.2% to $48.3 million driven by an increase in the number of comparable stores. Gross margin decreased 20 bases points due to increases in occupancy costs, partially offset by improved product margins. Store expenses as a percent of sales increased 10 bases points in the first quarter compared to the prior comparable period due to increases in salary-related expenses, depreciation, and other store expenses.

Administrative expenses as a percentage of sales decreased 10 bases points as a result of the Company's continued ability to support sales growth without proportionate investments in overhead. Additionally, during the first quarter, both store and administrative expenses were favorably impacted by lower incentive comp and other discretionary benefit expense reflecting the Company's pay for performance philosophy. The favorable impact to administrative expenses was partially offset by deferred compensation expense and to a lesser extent, stocks compensation expenses.

Pre opening and relocation expenses increased $400,000 in the first quarter of fiscal 2016 due to the timing, nature and location of new store openings and relocations. We opened four new stores and relocated two stores during the first quarter of 2016 compared to opening four new stores during the first quarter of fiscal 2015. Net income increased 5.2% to $3.7 million with diluted earnings per share of $0.17 in the first quarter of fiscal 2016. EBITDA increased 11.5% to $12.7 million or 7.6% of sales. We ended the first quarter with $2.1 million in cash and cash equivalents and no amounts outstanding on our credit facility. Furthermore earlier today we entered into a new $30 million revolving credit facility with a five-year maturity and improved terms and conditions.

Now I will turn the call back to Kemper to discuss our new store growth and outlook for fiscal 2016.

Thank you, Sandra. As I mentioned at the beginning of the call, we continue to invest in new store growth. We opened four new stores in the first quarter, bringing our total count to 107 stores in 18 states. Since the end of the first quarter we have opened one new store in Little Rock, Arkansas. As of today we have signed leases for 21 stores which are scheduled to open in fiscal 2016 and 2017 for locations in Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Missouri, Oregon, Texas, Utah and Washington.

We have good visibility on the remaining stores we plan to open in fiscal 2016. By the end of fiscal 2016, we expect our geographic presence will cover 19 states west of the Mississippi. Our real estate strategy supports a broad range of communities. We continue to focus on opening new stores in both new and existing locations and in both smaller rural areas and larger metropolitan areas. Moving to our outlook, our first quarter results were in line with expectations and thus we are reaffirming our previously announced fiscal 2016 outlook.

During fiscal 2016, we expect to open 23 new stores resulting in a 22.3% unit growth, achieved daily average comparable store sales growth of 5% to 7%, deliver EBITDA margins of 7.8% to 8%, achieve net income margin of 2.3% to 2.5%, achieve diluted earnings per share between $0.79 and $0.83 and incur capital expenditures of between $54 million to $56 million. Given recent sales trends, we currently anticipate we'll come in at the lower end of our outlook. Additionally, we expect our quarter 2 comp sales to be below the outlook range. We are moving one of our expected relocations in the fiscal 2017 thereby relocating three stores rather than four stores in fiscal 2016.

As Sandra mentioned, we completed the relocation for two of the stores during the first quarter. Our fiscal 2016 guidance for the remodels remains unchanged at two remodels. We anticipate cash on hand, cash generated from operations and availability under our credit facility will be sufficient to support our capital requirements. As fiscal 2016 continues, we are excited about increasing our store base and our expectations to grow our top and bottom line.

We continue to engage with our communities and increase awareness around our high quality standards. We believe our quality standards make us a leader in the grocery and supplement industry and provide our customers with valuable competence in what we sell every day at affordable prices. More than ever, we remain focused on our founding principles and our mission of building healthier communities in the ecosystems which have significantly contributed to our success and will help guide us as we grow larger. Now, I would like to open the lines up for questions. Thank you.

We will now begin the question and answer session. (Operator Instructions). And the first question comes from David McGee, of SunTrust. Please go ahead.

Yes, hi. Good afternoon, everybody.

Good afternoon, David.

Hi, David.

I just had a couple questions on the pace of same store sales growth and I guess you just partially answered my question regarding the second quarter. But to the degree it picks up in the second half of the year to get back within the range, what do you think takes place to drive that better comp momentum?

Well, we believe that many of our sales initiatives will be in place and help. And then secondly, we have some of our busier stores coming out of, they will be analysing some competition and that will be helpful also. And of course, the way Easter falls this year is better than the way it fell last year. So that will help also.

Okay. Are you seeing any additional drag coming from stores near oil- producing areas?

The stores that are in states that have a lot of oil production are definitely having more challenges than stores that aren't in those states.

Is that a drag that's changing at all?

It seems to be getting not any better for sure.

And can you talk a little bit about supplements and sort what you saw there during the quarter as well?

We're really excited with what we saw in supplements. Essentially, at comp stores we ended up flat, you know, we didn't lose any market share in supplements so they essentially grew at our sales rate through the quarter. And so, we believe that our nutrients know about education program is really driving that part of our business and we're seeing really substantial growth in the nutrients that we educate our customers about sales growth in those nutrients. Not only in the quarter that we educate them in but in follow-on quarters afterwards, significant, up to 200% growth in those particular nutrients in the quarter and then almost 100% growth in the follow-on quarters. That's been very positive.

Great. Thank you and good luck.

Thanks.

The next question comes from Sean Naughton, of Piper Jaffray. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon.

Good afternoon, Sean.

Can you just talk a little bit more about same store sales. Can you just elaborate just in general terms kind of what the monthly cadence was kind of throughout the quarter? Were you seeing any changes from one month to the next or it was relatively consistent?

Actually, the middle of the quarter was the weakest and the end of the quarter was the strongest.

Okay. And then, you did also talk a little bit about some of the competitive dynamics as being a little bit of the reason for the slow-down and I think David, you know, got the heart of some of the economic issues that you were describing. But any additional commentary on the competitive dynamics?

Is this more stores or is it current retailers just increasing their offerings on shelf and having a more similar item overlap for the products that you're offering?

Well, part of our issue is that we've opened stores in our own markets that have cannibalized a bunch of our larger store sales, and that hasn't been helpful. And then some of our as I said to David, some of our larger stores, larger sales stores have had some competitive impacts that have been pretty significant and, you know, we should be analyzing some of those starting later this year. And that will be helpful.

Anything on the gross margin side that the product margin seems to be steadily increasing. I did notice that it looks like the mix of other and supplements just went up a touch but it sounds like it's more than that. Can you just elaborate a little bit more about the product margin increases you're seeing?

Well, mainly it's a mixed move. You know, we are able to ring out as we gain sales a little bit better margin in our food categories just from our volume discounts growing. We also are seeing some nice increases in some of our perishable, you know, for instance in eggs because of our new private label egg so that's helpful also.

And then last question from me is can you just elaborate just a little bit more, we did see in some of your stores recently it does look like a little bit more of the private label is hitting on shelf. Just anything you can elaborate on there and that would be helpful. Thank you.

You know, as I mentioned in our previous call in December, we are going to aggressively expand private label over the coming three years, and so by the end of this year you'll see a significant number of new private label offerings in our stores and I think that will be definitely beneficial to margin and also beneficial because, you know, we're going to have really good private label items in our stores. It's like our private label pasture-based egg which is the highest standard and at the best price in our industry right now for a pasture-based egg. That's what will be happening.

Okay, great. Thank you. Best of luck.

Thank you.

The next question comes from Mark Sigal, of Canaccord Genuity. Please, go ahead.

Hi, good afternoon. Just curious, you know, on the comp breakdown. It looks like in the prior quarter, you know, your count was +4.5. It looks like the count came down fairly significantly in Q1 and I think some commentary on the Q4 call was ticket was down and count was running somewhat similar. So is there anything identifiable intra-quarter from a count standpoint that changed?

Do you mean a customer count standpoint?

Correct, yes.

You know, the growth was fairly evenly split between average ticket and average customer count per day which was I believe similar to last quarter also. Let me just look real quick. Yes, so the customer count definitely decreased a little bit during the quarter.

Right. Okay. And then, you know, with regards to, you know, mature store comp came down as well. You know, is that a function of mature stores perhaps being more concentrated in oil-affected states or what do you attribute the slow-down in mature stores to?

It's that and also as I said, we've opened some of our stores in our heavily, you know, in the Denver area like when we opened our Wheatridge store, we effected three of our mature stores significantly. And then we just recently opened our Tennyson store and that affected a couple of our mature stores that were doing quite a bit of volume substantially. So those disruptions didn't help.

Okay. And, you know, based on you guys confirming the store outlook for this year, I'm assuming that, you know, any issue of cannibalization doesn't impact the way that you're thinking about the ultimate store opportunity over the next several years but perhaps impacts states and cities where you're looking?

Yes, when we have opportunities to infill in our existing markets, we have to infill and then over the long run, you know, our stores have a long, sometimes it takes a long time for it to get up to full productivity at our stores and over the long run when we in-fill, it really helps us to stay competitive. And, you know, short-term will have an effect but long run it's really positive for us. And then as far as the rest of our stores, most of our new stores for the rest of this year aren't going into where we have existing stores and so there shouldn't be a lot of cannibalization from that.

Okay. And then just lastly, is there any, you know, quantifiable impact from lapping extended store hours on the comp this quarter?

There certainly could have been. It was really hard for us to judge what the impact was of those extended hours because some of the people that were shopping in those extended hours were just shopping earlier or later at our stores, and so it was hard for us to really quantify exactly what the benefit that we did get from those extended hours, but it probably did have somewhat of an impact on the comp this quarter.

Okay, thank you.

But one thing we did do was we added a half an hour on Sunday so that will be good, you know, helpful for the rest of this year.

Thanks.

Thanks.

The next question is from Joe Edelstein, of Stephens. Please, go ahead.

Hi, good afternoon, everyone.

Good afternoon, Joe.

Kemper, I know that you kind of opened the comments and said that you had expected the first quarter of performance to be lower than the guidance range. I know you spoke about that on the last call. I was hoping you could just provide a little more color around how the 3.6 comp really came in relative to where your more internal number was? I mean I'm looking at our model that we were, you know, looking for a 4 comp and I think consensus was closer to a 4.5. It's a pretty big delta and perhaps we were just all overestimating there but where does that 3.6 come in relative to some of your own expectations?

You know, it came in slightly below our expectations but we were really encouraged by how the quarter ended.

Okay. And, you know, I was hoping also few could just come back to the competition comments and I know that Sean was trying to ask around, a number of new stores coming into markets or just others that are expanding stores and you've now mentioned the cannibalization. But in terms of a percentage overlap, I know that's a number that you've talked about in the past, is that a number that you have handy to be able to give us today and just what that outlook would look like going forward?

You know, I mean from a straight, straight standpoint, you know, it's running at about 23% for last quarter and then 20% looking like in quarter 2 and so on and so forth. But sometimes if it impacts, it depends on the stores it impacts. You know, you can't just look at it as how many of our stores are impacted. You have to look at which stores also and some of our more productive stores that are impacted, then the impact is greater than if it's not our most productive stores. If that makes sense?

Yes, it does, that's helpful. And obviously Sandra, there was some (inaudible) here and really I was wondering if you're also starting to see more wage pressures perhaps something that might be coming in a little bit greater than expected? You're certainly adding a lot of new head counts at the store levels. I just wanted to check on what you're seeing at the wage pressure side right now.

You know, I think our wage pressure has more to do, our comp run rate than it does with just adding new people. Our stores hold about the same staffing levels, labor to sales levels.

Okay. If I could just ask one more. Sandra, you mentioned the new credit facility. You know, do you think the company will be in a position to more fully fund the store growth just from the internally generated cash of the business, or are you looking to take advantage of a big portion of that new $30 million credit facility?

It all depends on where the quarter ends or the month ends as to how far we'll be in or out of the facility. But when you look at the statement of changes you can see that we've been in and out more regularly and that's been consistent over the last several quarters. We really have decreased the size of the revolver more because the pricing was outstanding and because we were able to have pricing that didn't have an unused commitment fee. So why not sort of give ourselves some room now?

I know you certainly go in and out of the facility. Would you expect to be debt-free at the end of the year?I know that's something you talked about in the past.

My expectation is it really depending on the timing, we may be in or out of the revolver.

Okay.

Which has been the case all along, yes.

Okay. Thanks for taking the questions.

Thanks.

The next question is from Rupesh Parikh.

The first topic I wanted to ask about is inflation. What are you seeing out there right now on the inflation front?

For the quarter, it was very mild and in actuality we're seeing some really good movement down in the price of the bulk commodities, particularly nuts right now. This is the first time I've seen movement down in the price of nuts in almost three years and substantial movement down.

And would you say Kemper, going forward, that you still inspect inflation for your business or maybe you can help us quantify?

Just normal, you know, it hasn't been significant and I think that in reality we're seeing some deflationary pressures on some of the bulk commodities right now.

Okay, great. And then on new stores, and I know you've lowered the comp guidance or you expect it at the lower end of the comp guidance for the new year. When you look at the plans for your new stores, has there been any changes to your expectations to what your new stores can contribute this year?

No, we expect them to be right in line with where we have projected them to be.

Okay. My last question, on the competitive front, you talked about some of the increased competitive pressures out there. Are you seeing any changes on the pricing front from some of your conventional players or other competitors in the market?

No, not really. I mean the pricing has been competitive for a number of years now, and, you know, the conventional players in this industry are very competitive particularly in this region that we have the most concentration of our stores and some of the other regions we're substantially better priced than our competitors.

Okay. Thank you

And we're adding, you know, we're adding stores to those regions so that's kind of nice.

Okay, thank you.

The next question comes from Phil Terpolili, of Wedbush. Please, go ahead.

Yes, good afternoon.

Good afternoon.

I just wanted to ask two things real quick. First on the sales initiative side. I think you mentioned a few times you expect kind of a more meaningful benefit from some of those items towards the second half of the fiscal year. Can you kind of highlight maybe one or two things that you're looking at that you're optimistic about? And then in that vein, I guess are some of the things you're talking about actually in place now and they just sort of take time to build?Or are there things maybe associated with, for example the end power program that we haven't seen yet?

Well, right now we're signing up about 1,000 people a day on to the [N]power program and hopefully by the end of this quarter we'll be at around 2,000 people on the [N]power program. And what we've noticed is with our directed offers to those people that are on the program, that they will increase their average basket size substantially. And so we're hoping that starting in the second quarter, you know, the April quarter of this year, that with those offers to those customers, we'll be able to increase basket size pretty substantially because we'll have three times as many people on the program as we did in December when we first started experimenting with those offers.

And then the second thing is that as we mentioned, we have our event calendar that we're going to be doing where we do a company-wide events where we've had, you know, some stores doing those events and had very good success with them in years past and now we are going to roll it out where 100 store does, 108 stores do it at a time, or how many other stores we have open that the time, do those and we see substantial growth in sales when we do those events. So we think that will be very helpful starting in, you know, actually starting March through the rest of the year.

We have at least one event per month planned, and those are helpful to our sales. And then as we mentioned, we just brought Kevin Miller onboard and he has some really good marketing plans to help with both our new stores and existing stores in getting excitement about what we do out and the word out to the public so that they can understand what we do better.

That's very helpful. And then just one more question on the supplement side. I think you mentioned earlier that for the quarter itself, you really didn't see any changes kind of in line with sales growth. Can you talk specifically about quarter-to-date for supplements?I know there's been some concern regarding some of the TV spots that have ran and things like that. If you could just talk to what you've seen the last few weeks?

You know, I don't really have good numbers for this month yet. I'll have those later in April, I mean in February. The very beginning of February. But I don't think that it's had much, we haven't heard any negative feedback coming in from the stores about those television whatever it was, whatever ran on the television. I mean our customers, like I said, we have a really strong initiative to educate our customers about the benefits of various nutrients. And also, we have a good reputation for making sure that we sell supplements that, you know, aren't fattish and should meet label potency. We do a little bit of testing ourselves just to make sure that our companies are fitting label potency and stuff.

Okay. I appreciate it. Thanks, Kemper.

The next question is from Scott Mushkin, of Wolfe Research. Please, go ahead.

Hey, good afternoon, everyone. This is actually Mike Otway on for Scott. Thank you for taking the questions. Just in terms of the second half and some of the sales initiatives and other factors that get you there. Are you assuming that the Company specific sales initiatives are the biggest from a magnitude perspective to get you back into the low end of that range?Or are you also assuming, you know, more stores are cycling competition?You know, how are you thinking about the economy?Do you assume it stays the same?Just kind of frame the magnitude of kind of the buckets that get you back there.

Well, I think that both the initiatives and the cycling of competition gets us back there. As far as the economy goes, you know, if the economy has more issues, that would definitely affect how things play out for the rest of the year and we don't have much control over that particular issue.

Okay. And then Kemper you mentioned, you know, the event calendar. Could you frame like what you've seen from a lift, comp lift perspective and some of the stores you've done before now that you're rolling them out?

Yes. Well like for instance in December, this was a company wide initiative that we did, we did the 12 days of Holly deals and that had a really nice impact on our sales over those 12 days. Typically a really slow time of year for us. And so this year, you know, we have a Valentine's event going on, and then we have an Easter event going on and then we have a really strong Earth Day event going on and a Mother's Day event going on.

And another thing that we're doing is we're doing, you know, like four store as month we do a spa day at our stores. That we've done sporadically at our stores and usually we'll see like a 20% lift on those spa days at our stores that do those. And then like on the Easter egg thing, that shows like about a 20% jump at that store. And then it also it brings in a bunch of young families to the store that get to know our store and it creates a lot of excitement in the community about the store. And so things like that just build on themselves, build your customer base and build excitement for the store.

That's really helpful. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Sure.

The next question is from Karen Short, of Deutsche Bank. Please, go ahead.

Hi. I had three questions. I guess Sandra, the first question on compensation, I was just confused because you said that I guess comps kind of came in or, you know, results this quarter were in line but expenses were favorably impacted by lower incentive compensation. So is that comment year-over-year or just I guess it doesn't make sense if results were in line. And then I had two other questions.

It's a year-over-year comment.

Okay. And then I guess following back up on the inflation/deflation question, I know you commented on nuts. But any other color more broadly on what else you're seeing in the rest of the store and what your expectations would be for 2016 in terms of inflation/deflation?

I would expect it to be normal inflation/deflation of about 2% inflation. But I mean if commodity prices keep falling the way the nut prices are falling, then there could definitely be deflation in the food sector this year. I mean we're seeing significant drops in the bulk pricing on almonds right now.

But what are you seeing in the rest of the categories today inside the store?

Just normal, you know, the manufacturers usually try to get about a 2% increase about this time of year.

Okay. Sorry?Except nuts?

Yes. Except for nuts.

Okay. And then I guess the last question, if I remember correctly in last year's quarter, you had this significant benefit from diffusers. So I was actually just wondering if you had any color, if you exclude diffusers in general in terms of the comp impact last year, what your comp might have been in this year's quarter?Or maybe I'm just wrong on that assumption.

[multiple speakers] The diffusers last year, yes, we equaled ourselves in the diffusers this year. It didn't really have an effect on comp this year compared to last year.

Like neutral to comp?

It was pretty neutral to comp.

Okay. Thanks very much.

Yes.

There are no additional questions at this time. This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Kemper Isely for closing remarks.

I appreciate everybody being on the call this afternoon. Have a great rest of the day. Bye.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.