Oxford Industries, Inc. (NYSE:OXM) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Oxford Industries, Inc. (NYSE:OXM) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript March 28, 2024

Oxford Industries, Inc. misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $1.9 EPS, expectations were $1.92. Oxford Industries, Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Operator: Good day and welcome to the Oxford Industries, Inc., Fourth Quarter, Fiscal 2023 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Brian Smith. Please go ahead.

Brian Smith: Thank you, and good afternoon. Before we begin, I would like to remind participants that certain statements made on today's call and in the Q&A session may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Federal Securities Laws. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees and actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. Important factors that could cause actual results of operations or our financial condition to differ are discussed in our press release issued earlier today and in documents filed by us with the SEC, including the risk factors contained in our Form 10-K. We undertake no duty to update any forward-looking statements. During this call, we will be discussing certain non-GAAP financial measures.

You can find a reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP financial measures in our press release issued earlier today, which is posted under the Investor Relations tab of our website at oxfordinc.com. And now I'd like to introduce today's call participants. With me today are Tom Chubb, Chairman and CEO, and Scott Grassmyer, CFO and COO. Thank you for your attention, and now I'd like to turn the call over to Tom Chubb.

Tom Chubb: Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. We are pleased with our results for fiscal 2023, which represent the second-strongest annual earnings in our 82-year history. The conclusion of FY'23 also caps the end of a five-year period during which we delivered compound annual adjusted EPS growth exceeding 18%. In addition, we generated strong cash flow from operations of $244 million in fiscal 2023, allowing us to invest in both organic growth and acquisitions, return capital to our shareholders via our quarterly dividend and opportunistic share repurchases, and pay down almost all our outstanding debt. On today's call, we'll walk through our recent performance and provide an update on the initiatives we have planned for fiscal 2024 that we believe will position us to continue to deliver sustained profitable growth and drive long-term shareholder value for many years to come.

In terms of how we wrapped up the fiscal year, January was a bit softer than expected, and as a result, both our fourth quarter and full year came in at the low end of our forecast with sales for fiscal 2023 totaling $1.571 billion and adjusted earnings per share coming in at $10.15. The January softness continued into the new fiscal year, and February was also down as we cycled strong double-digit comps in February of last year. In March, as comparisons eased, business has picked up, and month-to-date, we are comping modestly positive. We believe the choppiness we have experienced is reflective of a somewhat unusual situation where most economic indicators are actually fairly positive, and yet consumer sentiment remains materially below where it was for the four or five years prior to the pandemic.

The muted consumer sentiment is manifesting itself in consumers who have the ability to spend but are being much more cautious in their spending on discretionary items such as the fashion apparel, which is the core of our business. Experience has shown us that during times like this, when near-term demand is choppy, it is best to stay focused on the long-term opportunity and strengthening the fundamentals of the business that have created our strong foundation, and that is exactly what we plan to do during fiscal 2024. First, we will double down on our efforts to make sure that we have fresh, new, differentiated products that gives the consumer a good reason to open her wallet. Second, we will make sure we maintain the elevated, happy, and optimistic messaging that is representative of each of our brands.

Third, we will make sure that we are being diversified and creative in the media channels that we use to try to communicate our brand messages to the customer. And finally, we will make sure that we are making our product available to our customer when and where she wants it, including our own stores, e-commerce websites, restaurants and bars, and wholesale accounts. Across all our brands, there are initiatives planned for fiscal 2024 that touch on each of these four fundamentals. In Tommy Bahama, our biggest brand, we are focused on continuing to develop and grow our hospitality business. Our hospitality business, including our new Tommy Bahama Miramonte Resort, our full-service restaurants and bars, and our unique, upscale, fast, casual Marlin bars is a key part of the success of our brand.

Hospitality helps complete the dream that is Tommy Bahama in the customer's mind and in that way helps evolve the brand, acquire new customers, retain existing customers, and increases the annual spend of the brand's guests. As we have mentioned in the past, our stores that are connected to one of our restaurants and bars almost uniformly do a higher percentage of business in women's than the fleet average and have higher sales per square foot by a significant margin than the fleet average. Hospitality has been a big part of our success in growing our women's business over the last several years so that women's has now grown to 36% of our total Tommy Bahama direct-to-consumer business. Our efforts during the 2024 calendar year include opening six new Marlin bars, including one in Winter Park Village in Florida, which opened in January, and one in La Cantera outside of San Antonio, Texas, which opened in February.

Both of these new additions to the fleet are off to a terrific start. Four additional Marlin bars are planned for the second half of fiscal 2024, including one in South Park Mall in Charlotte, King of Prussia Mall, which is one of the nation's premier malls, the Oaks in Oklahoma City, and the Sarasota, Florida area's upscale Lakewood Ranch community. 2024 marks the 65th anniversary of the Lilly Pulitzer brand. Exciting plans for the brand are already underway, including a higher-priced, more elevated capsule collection celebrating the anniversary, which has retailed extremely well and makes us believe that we have the opportunity to expand the price continuum of our assortments. We also have a number of exciting collaborations underway, several of which have already launched.

On the product side, we have rolled out a Lilly Pulitzer print-wrapped Mocha America resort cruiser, a special edition Lilly Pulitzer Natalie's Juice, a line of Pottery Barn home goods, and a beautiful capsule collection done in collaboration with Badgley Mischka. Lilly Pulitzer and Vogue have also partnered to produce an exciting collection of collaborative media content under Vogue's Styled by Vogue banner. On the commercial front, Lilly Pulitzer remains focused on mixing things up to continue to delight and surprise the customer. We have changed several of the promotional events that we ran last year during the first and second quarters, such that we expect Lilly Pulitzer's first quarter to be materially smaller than last year and the second quarter to be materially larger than a year ago.

We believe this decision will make for a successful first half, albeit one that lays out across the two quarters differently than it did last year. In Johnny Was, we were delighted during fiscal 2023 to complete most integration activities post the acquisition. During 2024, our focus will be on enhancing the profitability of this business. The two main elements of this improvement plan are increasing store productivity and improving the effectiveness and efficiency of our marketing activities. Last year, Johnny Was achieved a 10% operating margin, a respectable level that we believe we can expand on in 2024 and even further in the years ahead. We remain extremely enthusiastic about the Johnny Was brand and expect it to be an important part of our ongoing objective to grow long-term shareholder value.

In the emerging brands group, starting with Southern Tide, during 2023, we opened a number of stores and acquired a number of our signature stores, bringing our total company-owned Southern Tide stores to 19 by the end of the year. We have plans to open several more during fiscal 2024, along with at least one store for the Beaufort Bonnet Company. A 2024 priority for both brands is driving performance across their newly established retail store platforms. We are also delighted to have added the iconic Jack Rogers Footwear brand to the emerging brands group in late fiscal 2023. Jack Rogers is a well-known brand that is based around an iconic product. The pandemic and post-pandemic years were challenging for the Jack Rogers business. While Jack Rogers will be slightly diluted to earnings in 2024, we are going to use this year to focus on resetting the brand, cleaning up inventory, and preparing the brand for future success and profitability.

Finally, on an enterprise-wide basis, we will be working hard during fiscal 2024 on our new state-of-the-art distribution center in Lyons, Georgia, which will allow us to house and ship more of our product much closer to the markets where we do a very large portion of our business. This should allow us to get product in consumers' hands more quickly, replenish our stores faster, and ultimately allow us to do more business on less inventory. The initiative also allows us to leverage our long history in the Lyons community and the excellent workforce that we have there. We believe we will be able to do all of this while maintaining highly competitive shipping costs. We also have exciting plans to explore opportunities to expand our use of artificial intelligence across the enterprise.

We already employ AI in a wide variety of specific situations and believe that we will continue to find incremental use cases where we can employ AI to improve our efficiency and effectiveness. As we look to our forecast for fiscal 2024, as outlined above, we have excellent plans for each of our brands this year. That said, we expect the costlessness of the consumer to persist throughout the course of the year. The current operating environment has led to caution among many retailers, and as a result, we expect our wholesale business to be down meaningfully in the first quarter compared to a very strong first quarter for wholesale last year. We expect wholesale to be positive on a year-over-year basis for the balance of the year, which will partially but not fully offset the first quarter decline, meaning that we will be down slightly in wholesale for the full year.

Scott will provide more detail in a minute, but as a result of the wholesale decline, the cadence change in Lilly Pulitzer that I mentioned a few minutes ago, and the weak February, we expect the first quarter to be materially below last year's first quarter results. For the full year, we expect mid-single-digit top-line growth with new stores and modestly positive comps offsetting the headwinds that I have outlined. From a profitability standpoint, gross margins will be flat to up slightly, while we will experience some pressure at the SG&A line due to the effects of inflation across expense categories, as well as the new stores, Marlin bars, and other investments we are making in the future. We are very proud of the portfolio of brands that we have built and the strong connections we have forged with our customers.

Most of all, we are incredibly proud of the amazing team of people that bring them to life every day. As always, we are committed to delivering on our near-term targets while staying focused on the initiatives that will strengthen our brands and business fundamentals over the long term. I'll now turn the call over to Scott for additional color on 2023 and our plans for 2024. Scott?

Scott Grassmyer: Thank you, Tom. As Tom mentioned, we are pleased to report top and adjusted bottom-line results within our guidance range for both the fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2023. Despite facing headwinds from a challenging consumer environment, our operating groups focused on what they could control and delivered solid results going against positive DTC comps of 9% and 17% for the fourth quarter and full year fiscal '22, respectively. In 2023, consolidated net sales grew 11% to $1.57 billion, including an increase of $130 million in sales for Johnny Was, which we owned for 19 of 52 weeks during fiscal 2022. The 2023 net sales also includes an approximate $16 million benefit from the 53rd week, resulting in $10 million of additional gross profit.

In the aggregate, Tommy Bahama, Lilly Pulitzer, and emerging brands delivered growth across most of our full-price distribution channels, with increases of 6% in restaurants that have delivered strong results all year, 3% in full-price ecommerce, and 1% growth in an especially difficult wholesale channel. Full-price bricks and mortar were relatively flat compared to 2022. Additionally, we also had increases in sales in our outlets of 5% and 3% in the Lilly Pulitzer ecommerce flash sales, both benefiting from consumers looking for deals and promotions. In addition to increased sales, we were able to expand adjusted gross margin 50 basis points to 64%, while also meaningfully lowering inventory balances. The increase in adjusted gross margin was driven by a full year of higher margin sales from Johnny Was, a decrease in inventory markdowns, and decreased freight costs.

These were partially offset by increased promotional sales of both Tommy Bahama and Lilly Pulitzer. Adjusted SG&A expenses were $807 million compared to $684 million last year, with approximately $76 million, or 62% of the increase, due to a full year of SG&A from Johnny Was. The 2023 total also includes approximately $11 million of incremental SG&A from the 53rd week. During 2023, we incurred higher costs related to increased employment costs, advertising costs, variable costs, and other expenses to support sales growth and our expanded store footprint. The result of this yielded $216 million of adjusted operating income, or a 13.8% operating margin, compared to $234 million, or 16.6% in 2022. The decrease in adjusted operating income reflects planned growth in SG&A investments in our people and business outpacing gross and revenue.

We also incurred startup losses related to the Tommy Bahama Miramonte Resort and saw modest declines in royalty income, resulting from lower income from our licensing partners. Moving beyond operating income, we incurred more interest expense as a result of higher interest rates and higher average debt levels, but benefited from a slightly lower adjusted effective tax rate. With all this, we achieved $10.15 of adjusted EPS, solidly within our guidance range. In connection with our annual impairment test for goodwill and definite lives and tangible assets performed in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2023, we concluded that the fair values of the Johnny Was Goodwill and trade name did not exceed the respective carrying values, resulting in a total impairment charge of $111 million.

The impairment charge reflects the macroeconomic challenges faced by all our brands subsequent to our acquisition of Johnny Was in September of 2022, and the significant prolonged increase in interest rates. Management strongly believes in the health and long-term prospects of the Johnny Was business, despite these challenges, and are diligently looking ways to fuel growth into business and manage expenses. I'll now move on to our balance sheet, beginning with inventory. During 2023, we were able to decrease inventories by 18% or $51 million year-over-year on a FIFO basis, while being able to expand adjusted gross margin, as noted earlier. The decrease in inventories resulted from our continued inventory discipline, as well as reduction of incremental inventory previously built into our supply chains in 2022 to mitigate potential disruptions that were largely resolved in 2023.

From a liquidity standpoint, we used our robust cash flows to significantly repay our borrowings used to fund the Johnny Was acquisition. We finished 2023 with $29 million of borrowings under our evolving credit facility, down $90 million from $119 million of borrowings at the beginning of the year. Our $244 million of cash flow from operations in 2023, compared to $126 million in 2022, allowed us to reduce outstanding debt while also funding $74 million of capital expenditures, $42 million of dividends, $20 million of share repurchases, and $12 million of acquisition-related expenditures for the acquisition of Jack Rogers and six former Southern Tide signature stores. I'll now spend some time on our outlook for 2024. For the full year, we expect net sales to be between $1.63 billion and $1.67 billion, growth of 4% to 6%, compared to sales of $1.57 billion in 2023.

The increased sales plan in 2024 includes growth in all brands, with growth in the mid-single-digit range for Tommy Bahama and Lilly Pulitzer, and low double-digit range for Johnny Was and emerging brands. The growth consists of full-price brick and mortar, ecommerce channel growth, growth in food and beverage and outlets. We expect wholesale sales to be challenged in 2024, with approximately $10 million in lower wholesale sales than in 2023, with reductions in the first quarter and partially offset by modest growth for the remainder of the year. We anticipate gross margins will increase slightly in 2024, including the expectation of higher proportion of full-price direct-to-consumer sales and a lower proportion of wholesale and all-price direct-to-consumer sales.

These higher sales and improved gross margins are expected to be offset by increased SG&A, which is expected to grow at a rate higher than sales in 2024, primarily due to investments in people, information technology, and marketing, as well as investments in additional brick and mortar locations opening in 2024, including five new Marlin bars. Our net brick and mortar count is expected to increase by approximately 25 locations. As Tom mentioned, we acquired the Jack Rogers brand in the fourth quarter of 2023. We have decided to add this iconic brand with an iconic product to our portfolio and expand our presence into the footwear category. We have diligently looked for the right opportunity in this space and believe that it is a natural fit for their stable, happy, differentiated lifestyle brands.

While we believe in the potential of the brand, we do expect the brand to generate an operating loss of approximately $2 million in 2024, as we reset and refocus the business. Additionally, we anticipate lower interest expense at $3 million for the year, compared to $6 million in 2023, and higher royalty and other income, primarily from a full year of the Tommy Bahama Miramonte Resort. We also expect a higher adjusted effective tax rate of approximately 25% compared to 23% in 2023, which benefited from certain favorable items that are not expected to recur in 2024. Considering all these items, we expect that operating margin will decrease modestly from 2023 levels and expect 2024 adjusted EPS to be between $9.30 and $9.70, versus adjusted EPS of $10.15 last year, with decreases in our businesses and a higher effective tax rate being partially offset by the lower interest expense and higher royalty and other income.

In the first quarter of 2024, we expect sales of $395 million to $415 million, compared to sales of $420 million in the first quarter of 2023. The expected decline in the first quarter is driven primarily by decline in wholesale sales of between $15 million and $20 million, compared to the first quarter of 2023. Due to continued softness in that channel, the non-anniversary of a successful 30% off promotional event in Lilly Pulitzer in the first quarter of 2023, and a slow start to the year in February in our direct-to-consumer businesses, followed by improving trends in March. Many of the other factors driving our results include flat gross margin, some SG&A deleveraging, and lower interest expense of approximately $1 million will affect the first quarter.

Although we do expect our effective tax rate to be approximately 25% and consistent with the first quarter of 2023. We expect this to result in first quarter adjusted EPS of between $2.60 and $2.80, compared to $3.78 in the first quarter of 2023. Expanding on the investments we intend to make in 2024, I'd like to briefly discuss our capital expenditure outlook for 2024. Capital expenditures in fiscal 2024 are expected to be approximately $200 million, compared to $74 million in fiscal 2023, with approximately $100 million related to the significant multi-year project to build a new distribution center in Lyons, Georgia, to enhance the direct-to-consumer throughput capabilities of our brands. The remaining capital expenditures relate to the execution on our pipeline of Marlin bars, including five expected to open in fiscal 2024, increases in store count across Tommy Bahama, Lilly Pulitzer, Johnny Was, and Southern Tide, and increased investments in our various direct-to-consumer technology system initiatives.

We expect this elevated capital expenditure level to moderate in 2025 and beyond. We also have a positive outlook on our cash and liquidity position as well. Cash flows from operations are expected to be very strong, giving us ample room to fund the previously mentioned investments and a 3% increase to our quarterly dividend. Thank you for your time today, and we will now turn the call for questions. Betsy?

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