Superior Group of Companies Inc (SGC) 2024 Q3 法說會逐字稿

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Superior Group of companies' third quarter, 2024. Conference call with us today are Michael Benstock, Chief Executive Officer and Mike Campo, Chief Financial Officer. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded.

This call may contain forward-looking statements regarding the company's plans, initiatives and strategies and the anticipated financial performance of the company including but not limit to sales and profitability.

Such statements are based upon management's current expectations, projections, estimates and assumptions, words such as expect, believe, anticipate, think, outlook, hope and variations of such words and similar expressions identify such forward-looking statements.

Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause future results to differ materially from those suggested by the forward-looking statements. Such risks and uncertainties are further disclosed in the company's periodic filings with the securities and exchange commission including but not limited to the company's most recent annual report on form 10-K and the quarterly reports on form 10-Q shareholders, potential investors and other readers are urged to consider these factors carefully in evaluating the forward-looking statements made herein and are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements. The company does not undertake to update the forward-looking statements except as required by law. And now I'll turn the call over to Michael Benstock. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator and welcome, everyone to today's call. I'm going to start with third quarter financial highlights and then discuss our three business segments. After that, I'll hand it over to Mike who will walk us through a more detailed financial discussion as well as our outlook for the rest of the year when Mike is done, we'll open the call for your questions. Our overall third quarter performance improved versus the second quarter as well as the year earlier quarter with top line growth and greater profitability. While we still sense some hesitancy on the part of customers given the uncertainty that's existed all year around inflation interest rates, the Presidential election and geopolitical conflicts. We achieved the acceleration over the first half results that we spoke about on our Q2 call.

You might recall that we contemplated the benefit of the revenue shift into the third quarter, resulting from the second quarter supply chain issues. We continue to execute internally to make the most of these still somewhat soft market conditions on a consolidated basis we produced revenues of $150 million up 10% versus the year ago period driven by double digit growth in both health care apparel and branded products. We are proud to say that these are the highest quarterly revenues ever achieved in our core products and services. The only other time we have ever slightly exceeded this was in Q2 2020 when our revenues were largely made up of PPE in response to the early stages of the pandemic, EBITA of $11.7 million was up 26% from $9.3 million and our EBITA margin expanded a 4% point to 7.8% point Breaking this down further, our gross margin percentage climbed 130 basis points over the prior year. And we were able to hold SG&A as a percent of sales almost flat at 34.9% which includes the growth-oriented investments mentioned in prior quarters. Putting this all together our third quarter, the PS rose to $0.33 from $0.19 a year earlier. On top of all this good news, we also continue to strengthen our financial foundation by generating another quarter of positive operating cash flow which allowed us to improve our already strong net leverage ratio going forward. Our financial strength will allow us to continue our strategic investments to capitalize on the compelling growth opportunities within our three very attractive end markets. Before turning to a discussion around our segments, reiterate what I mentioned on prior calls from a big picture standpoint Spirit Group company still has a very small but expanding share of three large growing and highly fragmented end markets. We are intelligently investing in our people services, products and technology to continue to take more than our share of new customers with an emphasis as always on excellent retention of existing customers. Now let's shift to our business segment. Starting with health apparel. Our third quarter revenue was up 11% versus the prior year quarter. Benefiting from growth in our online channels, both wholesale and direct consumer. Despite continued soft market conditions in the wholesale channel of our business selling to health care apparel retail stores. Our third quarter revenue also benefited from the timing of revenues as compared to last year due in part to the supply chain issues in Q2, that we already mentioned, the increase in our gross margin percentage of more than 300 basis points was partially offset by an increase in SG&A as a percentage of sales of 200 basis points. While the SG&A rate was at its best level. So far in 2024 the rate did increase year over year, mostly due to sales and marketing investments to drive awareness of the brand and to support our online channels as well as continued investments in top talent. As a result, our EBIDA our health care apparel segment of $3.8 million was up from the year ago, $3.1 million.

Let's move on to our branded product segment which also achieved revenue growth of 11% compared to last year. The revenue increase was mostly driven by increased volume with existing customers including the revenue shift discussed earlier as well as the addition of many new customers, for now we're taking market share by adding new customers which is helping to offset some legacy customers largely coming in with smaller orders and which we believe will further fuel our growth once the environment improves overall, the business is played out as indicated on our prior call. Similar to the second quarter, demand trends were reasonably solid even though there's still a fair amount of customer caution. In addition to the top line growth during the quarter, our gross margin expanded 160 basis points and we were also able to reduce SG&A as a percentage of sales by 180 basis points. As a result, our EBIDA was up more than 50% over the prior year to $10.7 million and our EBIDA margin expanded more than 3% points.

Next up is contact centers. Our highest margin segment which had a 4% year over year sales increase driven by new customers, partially offset by lower sales from existing customers. Our investments in talent and satellite offices to support future organic growth are reflected in our healthy win rate and pipeline of new business but are also currently affecting our gross margin. SG&A as a result, our EBIDA was $3 million versus $4.1 million in the prior year period.

Our longer term strategy for contact centers is to grow our customer count, catering to small and medium sized enterprises. In addition to significantly launching and growing our sales team and increasing our marketing spend, we're also deploying the very latest technology to benefit the customer experience, enhance our efficiencies and competitive edge and to profitably grow over time. With that. I'll turn it over to Mike who will take us through our third quarter, results in detail and update you on our full year outlook, Mike.

Thank you, Michael and thanks, everyone for being on today's call. Starting with our high-level consolidated results for the third quarter. We grew revenues 10% year over year, which was our strongest growth rate so far this year despite still soft market conditions, taking a look at what drove this performance, health care apparel revenues were up 11% to $33 million and branded products revenues were up 11% to $93 million as we expected the timing of revenues due in part the supply chain delays we referenced last quarter benefited our third quarter results for these two segments.

Contact centers also grew year over year with revenues up 4% to $25 million. As new customer growth was partially offset by lower revenues from existing customers.

We expanded margins and profitability during the quarter with our consolidated growth margin growing 130 basis points over the prior year. Third quarter to 40.4%.

Both health care apparel and branded products saw stronger growth margins of 310 basis point and 160 basis points respectively. Benefiting from cost of goods favorability associated with health care production at our Haiti manufacturing facility during the quarter. As well as favorable sourcing mix and pricing within branded products, gross margin for contact centers was down 60 basis points mainly due to wage increases for our agents, turning to SG&A versus the prior year, we were able to hold expenses almost flat as a percent of sales up just 20 basis points to 34.9%.

Our SG&A expenses were $52 million up from $47 million a year earlier, primarily driven by increases in employee related costs, commissions, marketing investments within health care, apparel, professional fees, and satellite office expansion and bad debt expense for contact centers.

Moving to the EBITA line, our third quarter grew to $11.7 million up from $9.3 million in the year ago quarter, representing a full percentage point expansion in our EBIDA margin as previously mentioned. On a segment-by-segment basis, our health care apparel, EBITA margin expanded 110 basis points to 11.4% driven by higher growth margins partially offset by investments in marketing and talent.

The branded product EBITA margin was up 330 basis points to 11.6% benefiting from both expanded growth margins and operational leverage on the top line strength.

However, contact centers, our smallest segment saw an EBITA margin decline from 16.8% to 12.1% driven by increased aging costs. And the aforementioned investments in talent to drive the pipeline for future growth. Moving further down our income statement, our third quarter interest expense was $1.6 million improved from $2.5 million in the prior year period. Driven by a $36 million reduction in our weighted average debt outstanding as well as a 110 basis point decrease in our weighted average interest rate.

Our net income for the third quarter also improved to $5.4 million up from $3.1 million in the third quarter of 2023.

This equated to $0.33 per diluted share up from $0.19 in the year ago period.

Shifting gears. Our balance sheet remains solid. We ended September with cash and cash equivalents of $18 million compared to $20 million at the start of the year. While debt outstanding was $85 million at quarter end improved from $94 million at year end 2023.

These results include $6.3 million in share repurchases during the quarter which I'll touch on in a moment.

Our operating cash flow remained strong having generated $24 million year-to-date. And our net leverage ratio for the third quarter was 1.6 times trailing 12 month covenant EBITA an improvement relative to two times at the end of 2023 and 2.9 times a year earlier.

Regarding our share repurchase plan announced on August 12th during the third quarter, we repurchased approximately 452,000 shares for $6.3 million translating into an average price of $14.05 per share.

We ended the quarter with roughly $3.7 million remaining under our buyback authorization and continue to view our shares as a compelling value.

Now, turning to our outlook, we're reaffirming our full year 2024 expectations which reflects the acceleration over our first half results that we mentioned last quarter, largely driven by our strong third quarter results. Therefore, we continue to expect revenues in the range of $563 million to $570 million in full year earnings per diluted share in the range of $0.73 to $0.79.

With that operator Michael. And I would be happy to take questions. If you could please open the lines.

We will now begin the question-and-answer session to ask a question. (Operator Instruction)

And our first question comes from Kevin Steinke with Barrington Research. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon.

I wanted to start off by just asking about. Yeah, you talked about last quarter and obviously today, just some supply chain delays and some of that revenue being pushed out in the second quarter into the second half of the year. Would you kind of characterize the benefit to the third quarter here from that pushed out revenue, still kind of fill in a few million dollars range.

Hi, Kevin, this is Mike. Yes. As I mentioned last quarter, we estimated that impact to be about a few million dollars and, and that in fact was the case, all largely received here in the third quarter.

Okay. And you mentioned still some customer hesitancy, although maybe some modest improvement in sentiment, maybe if you could just dig a little bit more into what you're hearing from your customers in terms of their outlooks and their spending plans and if things kind of start to improve now that we're post-election or any other factors that you might want to touch on there.

Okay you have to take it by business segment, so we'll start off with the branded products and we're hearing much the same that we were hearing last quarter, demand is edging up. we had a very nice third quarter, obviously in branded products. But still the uncertainty, I mean, hopefully after last night and this morning, with certainty around at least the Presidential election, that there's one thing off the table that will become more certain and stabilize things, but people are still managing their budgets very tightly.

And there always a little a few surprises in the fourth quarter. Sometimes very good surprises like last year, we had fourth quarter. So, there could be those kinds of surprises this year again in fourth quarter, we're in brand new price, we're going up against some pretty tough numbers. But we none of this is really an excuse for us not performing, we're performing well right now, we should perform well in the future. As I said, yeah, we're going up against tough numbers from last year. But as Mike said, we're, keeping our guidance is we're feeling very, comfortable within the range of our guidance that we can hit those numbers.

But I say it over and over again, the market is huge, and we have a lot of shares, we can take in the market and we continue to do so and be very aggressive and we don't manage the business from a quarter-to-quarter basis. We have much more long-term view of the business. And we think that there's going to be some real growth in our future with some of the, the great strategies that Jake and team in our brand and products has put together when you get to health care apparel, we're seeing all of all of the different channels that we sell in are doing quite well except for brick and mortar. the trade accounts are definitely seeing a slowdown of traffic in their stores as things move to more digital.

But we've seen soft consumer spending during this election season in our consumer facing business and again that's mostly in the retail distribution they're cautiously optimistic, we just went to a show last week where it's a retailer. It's called the URA. It's the Uniform Retail Association show where we were the Belle of the Ball. everybody was really excited about all the newness that we brought to the market with our new team. We were inundated with people walking into our booth while the rest of the show was pretty quiet. So, we believe that demand will return post-election. But, on the, I know you're going to ask me this question, but I don't answer it now. And that's on the industrial laundry side of our business. We've really seen no discernible difference in that business. That business is going along just fine.

Now. On the, I don't think the contact centers is so much, it's not a buying and replenishment type of business like the other businesses are. But we have seen slow decision making. We said it before our pipeline is really robust. Our new sales team is I think is crushing it for being a young and so they've only been at it for now a few months, really most of this year. And I think they're making great progress. We go through all the opportunities that they're putting on their prospects that they're bringing to the table every single week. Our win rates are nice. We have a couple offsets to those win rates and then we had some customers scale back considerably as sometimes they do seasonally. And in some cases, and Mike spoke about an AR write off which he can speak to later on, but that was also lost customer as well as an AR write off. So, but things are progressing in the right direction, and I would hope the fed certainly is going to make a move soon on interest rates or he made one, the Presidential election is behind us. I think there's a lot less noise in the future. I'm, excited for next year and I think our budgets for next year will reflect our optimism.

Okay, excellent. That's excellent insight, and you mentioned some slow decision making and and contact centers, but I think you had also referenced just some lower revenue from existing customers. I mean, there's again, I guess is that just due to the overall hesitancy in the market environment, maybe some customers have taken out a few seats or maybe what's going on there.

I think it's a combination of a lot of things. one of the things we haven't spoken much about is we're constantly on the lookout for new geographies that are less expensive, those customers, they are looking for more cost-effective solutions for many years. And still the near shore that we provide is a very cost effective solution, but we know that we might have to go further away than near sure to find cost effective solutions and within the process of building up strategies around that over the next year that we think will at least give us an alternative to customers who might leave us because they found a cheaper environment somewhere. And there are less expensive environments in India, South Africa, the Philippines and many other places in the world. So we're in the exploration phase of that and we're not very far along. But I would imagine a year from now, we'll be able to tell you a different story.

And Kevin, this is Michael. I would just add as it relates to existing customers from quarter to quarter, we could see increases or decreases. I certainly wouldn't look at the lower revenue from existing customers this quarter as any sign of a trend. In fact, we had added seats for existing customers the first half of this year. So, it's typical that there can be ebbs and flows in addition to obviously our focus on adding new customers going forward.

Okay. That's helpful. And just lastly, so with you maintaining the guidance range and the strong third quarter revenue, the top end of the revenue outlook implies revenue kind of flattish sequentially compared to the third quarter, down a bit as you move down the guidance range. I guess would you attribute that to some of the factors you've mentioned here a year ago comp and just, I guess customer hesitancy, supply chain push forward in the third quarter, etcetera. Is that the way we should think about it?

I think that's right, Kevin. I think, we certainly had some, I call it the tailwinds here in the third quarter. you touched on the shift that we benefited from out of the second quarter, which gave us again, as Michael mentioned, I'll say near record sales for the third quarter. So, and it would imply that we're in the fourth quarter, going to be flat to down sequentially. But again, that's also a tough comparison given the strong quarter that we had. But as Michael said still comfortable within the guidance range.

Okay, thanks for all the insight. I'll turn it back over for now.

And the next question comes from Jim Sidoti with Sidoti and company. Please go ahead.

Hi, good afternoon. Thanks for taking the questions. It sounds like you were able to bring some new sales folks on board in the quarter. How long does it typically take for them to start to contribute?

Yeah, what we're speaking of is new salespeople that we brought on for TOG and so you got to keep in mind, Jim that prior to about a year ago, we didn't have the sales force at TOG. We built that business without a sales force. we, use brokers, use referrals, our website, word of mouth and really, we've been very fortunate that we have a sales force. So, my answer to you is we don't know yet because we don't know. We know that we've had a salesperson who started with us not very long ago, I think within six weeks I had signed up a new customer.

That's not typical. But if they come to us from the industry, which is where we're trying to hire them, they typically come with some connections. We would hope to be able to turn some of their connections into customers within a year. But they're prospecting the whole time. They're with us, not just their, the people they know. We come up with some very good we list, we have pretty good recognition and a pretty good story to tell. The goal would be that they're paying for themselves very quickly within six months. But certainly within a year, they should be producing many times in revenue, at least of what we're paying them.

And, how would you describe your pricing power at this point? I know you put in a price increase about a year ago, is that stuck? And do you think you can continue to raise prices? Did your cost go up?

It's an interesting question for people who have never outsourced before, which has been largely how we built our business. Our pricing is just fine because it's considerably less than their costs in the United States. Sometimes as much as 60%, 70% lower than what they're paying in the United States on a per hour basis. When they think of all the other overheads, they have to recruit people and, pay bonuses and all the other things that they have to do, as well as office space and computers, we provide all that. So ours is a flat rate that's saves them a lot of money.

So for them, it's like stars in their eyes that can save that kind of money. for people who have outsourced for a long time in different countries and are looking at us as an alternative because they've been recommend somebody's recommended us to them and that's gets more than a price, nailing down the right price, which is we want to be all things to all people, which is why I said earlier, we are going to find a lower cost solution in the future and we feel like it would be a great advantage even to some of our customers who want a blended cost between a much lower cost and a near shore. And so, it's price sensitive.

We're not without competition, we have a ton of competition out there. So, we've got to be very price conscious up until now. It hasn't been as much of an issue because it's been smaller customers who haven't outsourced. But we're going to grow this business double digits, which is our intention to get back to that again. You're talking about having to put on, literally, as you grow 34 years down the road, we have to be putting on 1,000 people a year. You're not going to do that with 25 C customers. So you've got to find a value proposition for larger folks as well.

All right. And then the last one for me, it looks like you bought back about $6 million worth of shares in the stock in, in the quarter. I think it was a $10 million buyback authorization. Do you expect to complete that in 2024?

Yeah, Jim. So as of the close of business yesterday, we had about $2.6 million remaining under our $10 million authorization. So we obviously continue to believe that our stock is a good value and, we'll certainly manage the plan going forward and get into the market where we feel like there are good opportunities. And continue to buy against the authorization as we deem fit and obviously, we continue discussions with the board in the context of our overall capital strategy, to determine to what extent we may want to do more in the future. But again, that's ongoing dialogue that we have with our board on a regular basis. But again, we'll continue to monitor the share price and purchase as we see fit under the current authorization.

Okay. All right. Thank you. That's it for me.

Question comes from Keegan Cox with DA Davidson. Please go ahead.

Hi, Michael and Mike. How are you?

Good, thanks.

I just had a question on the branded product segment.

I was wondering if you were seeing any pockets of strength in that business. Are there any specific industries or macro factors impacting it

I Think what I would say is a year ago, we saw a big downturn in our tech customers buying and a lot of that has resumed now. So that's good news and that's what was maybe dragging things down a year ago, even though the fourth quarter, we had a great quarter last year. But throughout the year, we're struggling a little bit. So I think we're seeing a lot healthier customers out there today. There's still budgetary concerns and it's amazing to me how many people we've done more RFPS than we've ever done before, but literally, we get to the finish line and with some of these, and more so now than ever, they're coming back to us and these are multi-million dollar bids coming back to us and saying, I ran this by my board and they asked me to defer until next year and that, it's very frustrating to jake when they work on these things because under normal circumstances, those things would have closed already and we probably would have seen some of that revenue in fourth quarter and first quarter next year and even into second quarter and some of the more customized items. So it's kind of a mixed bag.

And I would add Keegan much like we just explained in the second quarter. We're continuing to see more orders, smaller order size, which again, as we mentioned before, we think is actually an advantage to us because obviously we can work especially with new customers to grow that share of wallet over time. So continuing to see that trend. But to Michael's point, not a particular weakness or concern in any one particular industry.

Awesome. And then just to follow up, you mentioned a little bit of sourcing, favorability and pricing in health care apparel and branded products. I just wonder if you could give a little more color on that.

Sure. I mean, in terms of pricing, it's, an area obviously that we're always focused on and where we have opportunities to push for higher pricing. We certainly continue to do that in the branded product space where particularly in a promotional space where we're pricing order by order, it gives us that flexibility again to where we can take advantage of price where we have an opportunity from a sourcing standpoint, we had some favorability and what I refer to as sourcing mix where for some of our larger customers, we had a higher margin based on the source of production in the quarter. So kind of a combination of product and sourcing mix working together, which drove a higher margin for us here in the third quarter.

Thank you.

And the next question comes from David Marsh with Singular Research. Please go ahead.

Hey guys, thanks for taking the questions. Just I guess one quick housekeeping. I mean, in terms of the shipping delays that you guys have experienced in Q2, I mean, would you say that they're completely resolved at this point or are you still seeing a little bit of that?

well, good question. I'd say that we planned around a lot of them that adding time to our lead times to make things happen so that, they're less impactful to us. But now we're seeing, I mean, I had our sourcing group from each of our businesses, the brand of products and both our health care. Do a write up for me recently on all the different places where there are delays and there isn't a country in the world that, there's container shortages in Bangladesh and Pakistan. The Middle East conflict obviously is impacting Suez Canal traffic. Residual delays from rerouting shipments to the west coast that were destined for the East Coast because of the strike, they had to be rerouted. It's a little bit, I mean, there's I can name 8 or 10 other things that are impacting the logistics side. It's not the factories, it's the logistics side. We in getting a container picked up in some of these countries is becoming, a very competitive environment and prices have gone up accordingly. We'll pay the price, we've contemplated some of that in our pricing already., we got to see what happens.

There also was a huge shift of people ordering in advance and trying to get product into this country prior to Trump. Sitting in the White House which then it was if now it's when and so there was a lot of pressure on a lot of factories as well as logistics companies to move product quickly. And a lot was reserved which has created delays.

And Dave, like we mentioned in last call, we obviously made adjustments to our planning and our lead times of when we began to see issues in the second quarter. So we wouldn't expect those delays to create, have a significant impact on us in the near future.

And just as a follow on to that, I mean, your inventory is down decent amount from the end of the prior year. And it's kind of one of the lower numbers you've had in a while. do you guys have the inventory to supply the orders if they come in and if they come in kind of roaring back here in the fourth quarter.

Its a great question. I'd say overall we do. With that said, of course, there's always, I would say pockets of inventory that we have been chasing, due to just changes, in certain customer demand for certain product. So we are overall in a good position. And again, just the supply chain together with our planning team, just working to plug some holes in select products. But again, overall, we feel comfortable that we've got the inventory to fuel the fourth quarter. And obviously, we're working toward our planning as we had in the 2025 to make sure we're positioned appropriately as well.

If, we ran out of inventory in fourth quarter would mean we had the most incredible quarter imaginable. So, I don't know if I should say I welcome that happening or not, but that is the truth.

Yeah, always be careful what you wish for. And then just lastly for me, just curious on kind of on the acquisition landscape if you will. You guys have not really done anything this year it doesn't look like. But I'm guessing there are some opportunities out there. Perhaps. Could you just talk about maybe order priority where you might try to pick up some assets if you can find some that are attractively priced.

As we've said in the past, we don't speak about acquisitions before we do them except to say we're always in talks with people and obviously with our leverage ratios, what they are right now, we got a lot of room to do pretty much whatever we want to do. And at least in the markets we serve, there aren't a lot of larger competitors, it's mostly smaller competitors. So we kind of pick and choose the size of the and the nature of the acquisitions we want to do. we are active, I can tell you in both branded products where we think there's just a ton of opportunity there always has been and there always will be to do some roll up, 123, however many we're able to do in the near future and then on call centers, we're also looking particularly in areas that might give us a geography that would be very advantageous to us.

Sounds good. Thanks guys.Congrats on the quarter.

Thank you.

And the next question comes from again, Kevin Steinke with Barrington Research. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks. I just wanted to see one more in here. So in your earnings release, you mentioned ongoing growth oriented investments while at the same time, striving to further optimize efficiencies and margins SG&A year-to-date has been up as a percentage of revenue, although as you mentioned, it kind of flattened out here in the third quarter just trying to think about the balance going forward, do those both investments continue at a similar pace to where they've been? And even if that continues, do you think you can get some SG&A expense leverage or does the pace of growth investment, you slow down here just trying to think about the SG&A line and potential leverage opportunity there as we go forward.

Sure, I think for the for the balance of the year, Kevin, I think our SG&A rate will be pretty well in line with the year to day trend. and So I'd say here in the near term, I'd say overall, I would not expect significant increases in additional investments, in each one of our segments. We talk a lot about talent and in particular investing in sales talent, Michael mentioned in our contact center business, which obviously has been an incremental investment. in this past year, we've been obviously making a lot more of a marketing investment. Now that we're in year two of our direct to consumer launch. So I think we've made some bigger investments this year that we would expect to begin leveraging as we go forward. And again, we recognize that these investments have put some pressure on our rate in the shorter term. But we feel like we'll get leverage in and get top line growth off of those investments as we shift to 2025.

Okay. That sounds good. That's very helpful. Thanks a lot.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Michael Benstock for any closing remarks.

Thank you everyone for being with us today. We of course, look forward to providing our next update with full year results. Please reach out if you have any further questions, enjoy the evening and thank you as always for your interest in SGC.

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