Dorel Industries Inc. (DIIB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Dorel Industries Third Quarter 2024 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Before turning the meeting over to management, please be advised that this conference call will contain statements that are forward-looking and subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. I would like to remind everyone that this conference call is being recorded today, November 14, 2024. I would now like to turn the call over to Martin Schwartz, President and CEO. Please go ahead, sir.

Okay. Thank you. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for Dorel's Third Quarter Earnings Call for the period ended September 30. With me are Jeffrey Schwartz, CFO; Frank Rana, Chief Strategy Officer; and Jayson Kwasnik, VP of Finance. We will take your questions following our comments. Again, all figures mentioned during this call are in U.S. dollars. Dorel Juvenile earnings again exceeded last year's comparative quarter, driven by an organic revenue increase of over 9%. Impressively, this revenue growth was in all 3 of our regions: North America, Europe and International. We had several significant customer events in the quarter and the reception to our new product launches in all regions has been very strong, with key deliveries beginning in the quarter. Conversely, Dorel Home faced significant challenges, resulting in a 14% decline in revenue compared to the same period last year. We initiated substantial cost reductions in the quarter as we continue to rightsize the business to current realities. A look now at our 2 segments in more detail. In Juvenile, our quarter-over-quarter earnings improvement continued. Our organic revenue growth and better gross margin is allowing us to deliver improved earnings and cash flow. Our second quarter product launches, as detailed in our last conference call, continue to fuel the segment's results, and demand outstripped availability in many cases. So we are very optimistic about the fourth quarter and beyond as customer anticipation and demand remains strong. The marquee event in the quarter was the annual Juvenile products trade show held in Cologne, Germany. Our layout showcased Dorel's global footprint, and while the majority of customers attending are European, the breadth of our product portfolio across the globe was on display. All of our divisions attended and we had customers from around the world visiting our location. Europe, in particular, introduced the Maxi-Cosi Emerald 360 Pro car seat featuring SlideTech. The seat is the first premium all-in-one car seat in Europe designed for 12 years of comfort and protection. This innovative car seat targets the fastest-growing category in the market, offering a unique and competitive solution that combines premium quality, styling and safety for all ages, and is set to provide a strong and long-term competitive advantage for Maxi-Cosi and its customers. In North America, Maxi-Cosi Cosco Kids and Safety 1st were recognized at The Bump 2024 Editorial Awards. These awards celebrate the top pregnancy, postpartum and baby products of the year, evaluated by real parents and industry experts. This recognition underscores Dorel Juvenile's commitment to innovation and quality. We want also to recognize Safety 1st, which celebrated its 40th anniversary this quarter. As evidenced by The Bump Awards, Safety 1st as well as Cosco Kids remain an important part of our portfolio. Safety 1st partnered with CAMP, a family experience company, to offer a free day of fun at CAMP stores across the U.S. This event hosted well over 2,000 children and parents nationwide. It featured immersive show parties, hand-on craft activities, exclusive giveaways and a showcase of Safety 1st innovative products. Influencers amplified the event's reach through social media, contributing to a substantial brand impact for Safety 1st. A post-event study revealed that participants were 87% more likely to purchase Safety 1st products, 81% more likely to feel the brand aligned with its mission of safety and exploration. I want to congratulate our teams across the segments on their success and the way in which we are delivering our message of best-in-class safety, comfort and innovation to the market. If we look back just a couple of years, our Juvenile business is quite different. We were losing money and market share. I'm very proud to say that with our many new senior executives and their local teams, Juvenile has gained market share, it become the leading brands in many areas and is profitable. Now turning to Dorel Home. Sorry to say the situation is not like Juvenile. The industry in Dorel Home is still finding its challenges. Although overall revenues declined, we observed positive momentum in the indoor seating, TV stands and step stools within our Home categories. However, this was insufficient to counterbalance declines in other categories. We are driving sales through promotional pricing, which when combined with lower production efficiencies, led to gross margins being lower than anticipated. From a cash perspective, we reduced inventories again this quarter, positively contributing to our cash flow. Following the end of the quarter, we attended the Annual High Point Furniture Show in North Carolina. Our new product designs were very well received at the market, which will help position Dorel for the future. Our Cosco Home and Office division continues to perform well and showcase several new innovative products in High Point, which should continue to drive growth for that division. Despite this, the furniture industry continues to face challenges due to the lack of a significant increase in demand, exemplified by the recent cancellation of the annual European Furniture Show in Cologne, scheduled for January. We are rightsizing the business and initiated the previously announced closure of the RTA manufacturing facilities in Tiffin, Ohio, transferring production to Cornwall, Ontario. This move is expected to result in one highly efficient and profitable facility for domestic RTA furniture production starting in 2025. We are committed to finding more cost reductions within the segment and expect to take further actions by the end of the year and into next year. While the return to profitability is taking longer than desired, the actions we are undertaking in 2024 position us for improved earnings in the future. As we look ahead, Dorel Juvenile remains committed to driving sustainable growth through strategic investments in product innovation, market expansion and operational efficiency. We anticipate continued strong performance in our key markets, supported by our robust e-commerce channels and successful partnerships with key suppliers and retailers. Despite potential challenges from currency fluctuation and container costs, we are confident in our ability to navigate these headwinds and deliver sequential earnings improvements for the fourth quarter. We at Dorel Home are on a process to reduce its cost and match its footprint to current revenue expectations, which are substantially lower than our peak years of 2020 and '21. We have expanded our restructuring plan announced at the end of '23, with the consolidation of our RTA facilities in the third quarter, and we'll be initiating other aggressive actions going forward to rightsize the business. We acknowledge that we are operating within a challenging industry, but we believe we can operate profitably with our dual sourcing business model of efficient domestic production coupled with overseas imports. With our recent success at major brick-and-mortar retailers and traditional leadership in e-commerce, we will focus on key profitable categories and targeted promotional activities. We remain confident in our ability to adapt to market conditions and deliver value to our shareholders. I will now ask Jeffrey to review the financials.

Thank you, Martin. I'll try and go through this quickly and get into some of the more strategic issues. For the third quarter, our overall revenue decreased by $5.4 million, it's around 1.5%. The organic revenue decline was actually less than 1% through removing the variations on foreign exchange rates. The revenue and organic revenue decline was all in Dorel Home and was partially offset by improvements in the Juvenile. The gross profit for the quarter decreased by $400,000 or less than 1% compared to last year. Gross margin for the third quarter actually increased 20 basis points to 18.5% from 18.3%. Excluding restructuring costs, it actually went from 18.3% last year to 18.7%. Again, increased significantly in the Juvenile, which was brought down by the issues in the Home Furnishing. One of the issues, we had an impairment loss on a trade account receivable with a bankruptcy by one of the Home Furnishings U.S. customers in the third quarter, $2.1 million. That remains -- that number is comparable to last year's third quarter when we had another issue. The operating loss for Dorel was $11.1 million compared to $3.7 million last year. Excluding restructuring charge, the operating loss increased by $5.5 million to $9.2 million from the $3.7 million last year. If we move over to look at the Juvenile business, revenue increased by $16 million or 7.8% to $222 million. This year, the organic revenue actually went up by 9.2%. The improvements in revenue and organic revenue was in most markets. So we're pretty proud of that. The big 3 are the U.S., Europe and Brazil. We've had some big increases as well in some of our other smaller markets. The only area of concern right now continues to be Chile, which we're dealing with. Gross profit for the quarter increased 14% compared to last year. The gross margin in the quarter was 28.3%, an improvement of 160 basis points from the 26.7%. The increase in gross profit and gross margin was driven by higher sales volumes, the lower cost, better mix, the foreign exchange rate, that was positive to us as well. The operating profit was $7.2 million during the quarter compared to $3.2 million last year. If we look -- if we exclude restructuring costs, it improved by $4.8 million to an adjusted profit of $7.9 million. If we switch over to Home, not such a good story. Revenues declined $21.6 million or 14%. The decline was mainly from online sales. Brick-and-mortar sales were relatively flat compared to last year and even sequentially. Again, current environment is very tough, it's very competitive, and demand continues to be a big issue in this area. Particularly on the lower end, there is some better demand at the higher end of the furniture industry and unfortunately, we don't really play a lot in that area. Gross profit for the quarter decreased $8.2 million or 74% compared to last year. Gross margin was down to 2.1%, representing a decline of 500 basis points. The decrease in the gross margin is mainly due to lower efficiencies, lower volumes while we still maintain the large footprint that we have as well as due to increased promotional incentives as we clear out our older products, and also the reduced online business where we generally have higher margins. In addition to that, there was an accelerated depreciation on equipment and some inventory write-downs related to the closure of the Tiffin, Ohio plant. I mentioned that we had a trade accounts receivable adjustments due to the bankruptcy of one of our customers. From an operating loss standpoint, Dorel Home operating losses increased by $9.6 million to a number of $13.2 million. Excluding restructuring costs, the number is $12 million. The only other issue I do want to address is a reclassification of our debt from long-term to current on the statement. The reason for that is on November 1, we amended our ABL facility and our term loan facility to facilitate compliance with covenants. As a result, we became compliant with everything with the amended September 30 covenants. However, given that the amendments were done on November 1, they were classified as current in our statements. However, as of right now, they are no longer current so back to a long-term debt area. With that, let's open up for some questions, I guess, Martin.

Okay. So operator, okay, please open up the lines for questions. And I ask -- whoever who asks a question to limit it to 2 in the first round.

[Operator Instructions] Today's first question comes from Derek Lessard with TD Cowen.

I just want to hit maybe mostly on the Home side. It looks -- congrats on Juvenile. It looks like the profitability and sales are coming back nicely in that business. But on Home, do you have any sense as to what's driving like this incredible weakness in Home? Is it oversupply? Is it the consumer? I mean, we're now 4 years removed from COVID at this point.

Well, we're 4 years removed from the beginning of COVID. But I think there's still an overhang where people bought a lot of furniture, they really did. That was a real spike. So a lot of -- what does that mean? So that means that, first off, you've got a lot of new furniture in the homes. Second, there was a lot of product in the channels. Otherwise, I think today, it's pretty safe to assume that most of the COVID product is out of the channel. And third, it put a lot of new people into the furniture business. And what's happening now is demand is down because people don't need as much furniture. Housing starts and housing is down. Inflation is up. So people -- and again, keep in mind, we're at the lower end to the midpoint of the furniture market. So people are more concerned about the cost of groceries and food and fuel and all of the everyday items as we saw from the last election, that was the #1 issue. It's just caused a real lackluster industry. And nothing to me shows it more that when the massive Cologne, Germany trade show in January is canceled for this year. The industry is just not doing a good job. So what does that mean for Dorel? We cannot and will not continue to operate the way we're operating today or in the last 9 months, let's put it that way. We've made changes already. But we can't do that. We can't afford it. We cannot wait for demand to come back. Our previous strategy in the last 12 to 18 months has been to reduce costs and do everything we can to get our sales back up. Going forward, we are going to assume, for planning purposes, that our sales do not necessarily increase and we need to be profitable and have a cash flow business based on today's volume. And that's a lot of work to get to rightsizing or restructuring -- we use the word restructuring as much as rightsizing, the business to be able to do that. And it starts with closing one of the factories that we already announced, the Tiffin facility. By the way, in Q3, we still had the Tiffin facility operating at a significantly underutilized pace. So costs were much higher in Q3 because we were in the process of closing it down. But there's other things to do. And the commitment that we have today is to put a plan together to be effective next year, unlikely to start in January, but we need to get to a point where we're making money and we're making cash as well next year. And that's what we're working on. We hope to come to market hopefully by the end of this year, if not early, early January, where we can talk about the plan and how we're going to get there. But it is going to be a simpler version. We have some great product lines. We have great margins. We probably have too many things we're trying to do that's dragging down the averages. And of course, all of the overheads in that with all of that. We've got some great people and we want to sort of move forward with the best of our business and just make it into a smaller, more profitable business. And we're optimistic that we're going to get there. We're just -- we're not at a point where we can disclose all the details yet, unfortunately.

Okay, Jeffrey. A bit of a segue into my other -- my next question was in terms of the categories that were struggling the most and might not be viable. Can you just sort of -- could you give us some color on some of the more...

Yes, I'd rather not. Yes, I'd rather not talk about which categories we want to discontinue. We haven't finally decided. And again, I'm not sure I want to go to the market at this point because if we have inventories, we want to make sure they are good inventories. But we're looking at everything and which ones carry good margins. And some of them are just so competitive today that we find that competition from Asia is just making them not sustainable. So we're picking and choosing the best of what we have. We are optimistic. Martin talked about the show. I know we talk about shows a lot, but we got some great feedback on some great new products that we've shown. And I think some of the products we're designing today is as good as anything we've done in the last 3, 4 years. And we want to get back into that where we think, again, newer, more exciting stuff is going to carry higher sales potential and better margins. And that's the focus. But we got to get this footprint shrunk because we can't make money when we have the footprint that we have today.

Okay. And then maybe one last one for me. Are there any other customers or retailers that might be struggling or are in financial distress that you could talk to?

I think a lot of people that are struggling in this industry. There's no question. Not all were -- I mean, again, it might be smaller chains. It's a struggling industry. But our biggest customers are still Walmart, Amazon, Target, Wayfair. These are our biggest 4 customers. So I'm not worried about those customers per se. But yes, it's still -- it's a struggling industry. We keep hearing about competitors of ours that are closing or going Chapter 11 or stuff like that. But it's not our intention to get there. We have enough really good stuff in this business to make a really good business. And it's not tiny. We still are selling quite a bit of stuff. We just have to rightsize the effort we put behind it and simplify it as well.

The next question is from Nevan Yochim with BMO Capital Markets.

Hoping we could just stay on the Home segment. If you're able to comment on the health of the consumer. Just wondering if you observed the sequential deterioration in Q3 relative to what you have seen in Q2? And then any change in that consumers' behavior into Q4 so far?

All I can say is it's just -- we keep waiting for it to come back. We keep waiting to see an acceleration, and we're just not seeing it. It's a steady business. We did notice, and I think we've talked about all year that the brick-and-mortar end seems to be much more stable than the online. The problem with brick-and-mortar or the, I guess, the difference, the biggest difference from us from brick-and-mortar is that you need to prepare your business months in advance. That's always been the way brick-and-mortar works, right? So we know today, we have new listings next year on the floors of some of our customers. But we don't have the orders today, but we know we're going to have them in Q1, Q2, Q3, whatever it is. Online, the beauty of online used to be we can put something on tomorrow and it could start selling this week type of thing. And it's faster to get new stuff done. So if we had a big online demand, we'd be able to be more confident in the speed that we can get our new stuff to market. But today, the brick-and-mortar is just a steadier business. It's easier to plan for and that's the area where we're rebooking. It seems strange in today's world, but we're talking about more business in brick-and-mortar, given what we went through in the last 5 years with online. But it is what it is right now.

Yes. Okay. And that's the only comment I have on the customer in that area. And then just on the inventory in the Home segment. I guess I was under the impression that inventory was relatively normalized. It sounds like you're still selling through a little bit older inventory that was higher priced. Where do you sit today? And is this inventory just in products that you're looking to discontinue? Or do you sort of have excess inventory across the Home channel?

Okay. So it's a good question. So let's take the first part of it. No, I think what I said was that, that was a big feature of the COVID boom, but we are today no longer sitting on COVID inventory, right? So that's gone through the channel. I don't believe many retailers or even competitors have much of that. Going forward, we will have items we discontinue, and that's because we're making a smaller go-forward line of products. We won't be in every category we're in. We're, like I said, we're judging it for margin, for volume, for all of those things. So yes, we will have items that we discontinue. Going forward into next year, we'll be much smaller. I hope to be able to address all of that when we talk about the changes that we're going to make in our business. But for sure, '25 will have significantly less clear out, but like whatever that word is, I got to be careful. I don't want to step on a land mine there. But good that we don't go forward with anymore.

Yes. Okay. Fair enough. And so then I guess in the near term, as you sort of think into Q4, using these promotions, may be working through some of these items that are going to be discontinued as well as the restructuring that's ongoing in the Home segment. Would you expect to see a sequential improvement in profitability in the Home segment in Q4? Or would that be reserved for 2025?

It's probably 2025, and you probably hit the nail on the head as to why. I mean we're going to continue to move through these goods. The faster the better, right? We want to get into cash as soon as we can. And the second part is, again, inefficiencies as we move to more and more efficient model. I know we won't be spending all the money in Q4 at Tiffin that we spent in Q3 because Tiffin is gone. So that's a positive there. But there's other areas that we're going to be winding down and because of that, we'll get some inefficiency. So it will start in 2025, January will not be as good as Q4. But we -- that's all part of our plan and going to have all of that analyzed and hopefully, like I said, communicated to the market shortly. But the one thing I can ensure to everybody is that we are committed to getting this business to a positive run rate during -- and I don't have the date exactly, during 2025 because we don't have a choice. And it's not a luxury that we can afford anymore to deal with, hoping for a return to business, hoping for the market to come back. If it does and we do our plan, we'll make even more money. But right now, our focus is making money with the business that we have committed for 2025 today.

Understood. And I'm just going to sneak one more quick one in here before I pass it over. More positively on the Juvenile segment, it's nice to see the operating margin coming back. If these current trends continue, would you expect to see your EBIT margins back into that historical mid-single-digit range next year?

I hope so because we're actually planning and we're working on getting beyond that. There's a lot more to do. That's, I guess, where our excitement lies is we've seen some great numbers this year. We've seen some good numbers. We hope to take them to much better numbers in the future and we have a pathway to get there. Some of them are cost related. There's ability to take costs out. A lot of it is product-related, market share related. We've gained significant market share in car seats in Europe. We've gained market share in Europe and U.S. Certainly, continue to gain market share in South America, primarily Brazil. We've got some great stuff coming through the pipeline for next year. A lot of what we did this year, we haven't shipped in volume. So we talked about a great stroller that we introduced earlier in the year called the Fame in Europe. It's doing very well, but it's been restricted by supply. We haven't been able to get -- we haven't matched demand yet. We're hoping to -- we hope we can actually ever get to match demand, that would be great. But more realistically by Q4, we'll be putting a lot of products into the market. And again, high price points, higher margins. In the U.S., we introduced the Kindred line of high-end Maxi-Cosi products, only got introduced in mid-October. So we're only a few weeks in, very excited about it. It's a product that's pretty much sold at the high end, the independent stores. There's a few other places, but check it out, it's all over Instagram and stuff like that. But it's a real high-end look, very different, very excited about it. Again, it won't have a material impact on '24 numbers, but hopefully by '25. And then there's all the stuff we're introducing in '25. So really excited. Like this is the best I've felt about our business in many, many, many years because not only is it great today, but we see all the paths on why it's going to be great tomorrow.

The next question is a follow-up from Derek Lessard with TD Cowen.

Jeff, I just wanted -- just another question just for -- to clear something out. You said you hope to get back to the market with more specific details around the plan in early 2025. You don't report Q4 until March. So can we or can investors anticipate an update before that?

I would like to say, yes, I believe so. I mean I would want to do that because I believe it's material what we're going to do. And I know that, that's overhanging a lot of fears that an investor would have is about if you don't turn this business around and you let it go as it does today, is it a viable company? And the answer would be no. We can't afford to continue to lose big money every quarter. So I think it's super important. And therefore, I think coming to the market and explaining what it is we've done and where the goals are and some timelines and all of that on the Home Furnishing side, I think that's very important. So yes. There is one other issue I just want to address, we didn't get a question on it, and that's our liquidity level. So we are very much aware that liquidity is an issue that is on the minds of everyone, including ourselves. We are in the process of looking to increase our liquidity. I know we've said we've done it before. But realistically, we can't tell the market what we're doing until it's done from a disclosure standpoint. But we have numerous paths that we are currently working on. Again, I'm not going to discuss them. But other than tell you that we have levers to pull to increase our liquidity. We are working on all of them at the same time. So I think all of them are going to work, but don't need all of them to work to get us to the point where we have enough liquidity to operate properly. It is tied to not losing money at Home Furnishings. So we need to get to the cash flow positive next year, and we need to increase some liquidity. And all of that is about getting to be able to get the value out of the Juvenile business that we think we're going to get in the next -- call it the short term, it's more than a year. But as you know, we are, at some point, looking to monetize that, but it's not today. And we're doing everything we can to make sure that business thrives and shareholders are rewarded.

Thank you. This concludes the question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Schwartz for any closing remarks.

Okay. I just want to thank all of you for joining us this afternoon, and I wish you all very well. Thank you.

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating, and have a pleasant day.