Haverty Furniture Companies, Inc. (HVT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Greetings, and welcome to Havertys' Fourth Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Richard Hare, Chief Financial Officer. Thank you, sir. You may begin.

Thank you, operator. During this conference call, we'll make forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those made or implied in such statements, which speak only as the date they are made, in which we undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise. Factors that could cause actual results to differ, including economic and competitive conditions and other uncertainties detailed in the company's reports filed with the SEC. Our President and CEO, Steve Burdette, will now provide additional commentary about the quarter.

Good morning. Thank you for joining our 2024 fourth quarter and full year conference call. Our fourth quarter sales were $184.4 million, which was down 12.5% with comps down 13.7%. Total written sales were down 6.7% with comps down 8.7%. Total sales for the year were down 16.1% to $722.9 million and comps were down 16.7%. Gross margins did remain strong for the company, coming in at 61.9% for the quarter and 60.7% for the year. Our pretax profit for the quarter was $9.6 million or 5.2% operating margin, and for the year, we produced a $26.2 million pretax profit or 3.6% operating margin. We ended the year with 0 funded debt and over $120 million in cash. The interest rate cuts late in Q3 and in Q4 have not translated into lower mortgage rates. In fact, we have seen mortgage rates rise, continuing to put in question the affordability of the housing market. Getting the elections behind us was a positive lift as we saw traffic improve over the quarter, which gave us our first positive gain year-over-year in traffic and was low single digits for the quarter. Conversion rates stabilized over the quarter as we saw written sales improve throughout the quarter. Average ticket rose during the quarter by approximately 4% to just under $3,400. Our design business continued to improve during the quarter to approximately 32% of our business or 15.5% of our tickets driven by our special order business. Our designer average ticket grew to over $7,200, which was up over 8%. The new merchandising team is really collaborating well together as they are actively visiting vendors, stores, and competitors as they look to shore up any holes within our good, better, and best lineups. We continue to see upholstery perform at a high level but also saw a nice lift in bedrooms and mattresses during the quarter. We will begin to roll out our new point-of-purchase and tagging program to all stores beginning in Q2. This will be a 2- to 3-year project to get fully implemented. It is a collaboration of our merchandising, marketing, and store operation teams, which will provide our stores with a revamped mattress department, an enhanced design center to improve the presentation process for our customers, a more centralized area for special order fabrics to improve the ease of choice, and a new tagging system that simplifies for our sales consultants and customers the configurations that are available within the specific collections. During the quarter, our marketing team pushed new technology from Adobe onto our website to improve performance. In fact, after implementing to the homepage, which makes up approximately 20% of our site traffic, we saw a double-digit lift in organic traffic. Our plans are to have this rolled out to all our product listing pages and our product display pages by late Q1. As you know, we brought in our new media partner in April 2024, Carmichael Lynch, who we believe has contributed to the changes in our traffic patterns over the year. They made some adjustments with our advertising mix, moving to more broadcast in some of our larger markets for the bigger events, shifting our digital optimizations from product views to store visits, overhauling our search program and adding Pinterest in Q4. In early November, we opened new stores in St. Petersburg, Florida, followed by Greenwood, Indiana. And then in mid-December, we opened the Woodlands store, marking our return to Houston after 40-plus years. All 3 openings are meeting our expectations. In 2024, this totals 6 new stores and 1 closure, giving us a total of 129 stores at year-end. Earlier this month, we opened our second store in southeast Houston in the Baybrook Mall area and have planned a relocation of our Daytona store in the Orlando market in Q2. We are finalizing leases to open a third Houston store in late '25, followed by 2 additional stores in 2026. This will give us 5 stores, and our plan is to have 6 to 8 stores to serve the Houston market. Our supply chain team has effectively managed our inventories, reducing them over 11% for the year. However, we see an opportunity to work with our partners to increase inventories on our bestsellers, which will help us serve our customers quicker. We have relied on our just-in-time system with our partners in a time when there are too many unknowns. To support our new initiative and store growth, we expect inventories to rise approximately 5% to 10% over the next few quarters. On a positive note, we were fortunate to avoid the port disruptions from the potential strike that was looming in January, as it was resolved with no real impact on our flow of products. However, we are dealing with tariff issues with China, Canada, and Mexico. The tariffs have already begun in China, with Canada and Mexico being pushed out to the beginning of March. We are hopeful that this is the administration posturing for other concessions from Canada and Mexico, but we are getting prepared as if this will happen. We are fortunate to have great partners who are willing to work with us as they did in 2018, 2019. We will have to deal with each of our partners based on their capabilities regarding production opportunities and/or pricing opportunities. We will adjust retail pricing or look to reassort the lineup but do not expect this to impact our current margin guidance or flow of product. Our distribution, home delivery, and customer service teams continue to increase productivity across all areas. We ended the year at just over 2,330 team members, which is approximately down 9.5% from year-end 2023. I am expecting to see this number increase in 2025 as we continue to grow the company. I want to conclude by recognizing all our team members as we celebrate our 140th year in business. This is something special as we continue to do the same thing today that we did 140 years ago but with different people and different assets. We remind our team members every day that at the point of contact with the customer, you are Havertys. Our team is committed to getting our company back to $1 billion. I will now turn the call over to Richard.

Thank you, Steve. As we reported in the fourth quarter of 2024, net sales were $184.4 million, a 12.5% decrease over the prior year quarter. Comparable store sales were down 13.7% over the prior year period. Our gross profit margin decreased 50 basis points to 61.9% from 62.4%. The decrease was driven primarily by the change in the LIFO reserve, which generated a $900,000 positive impact on gross profit margins in Q4 of 2024 compared to a positive impact of $2.8 million in the fourth quarter of 2023. Excluding the impact of our LIFO reserve, our gross margins increased 40 basis points over the prior year quarter. Selling, general and administrative expenses decreased $8.9 million or 7.7% to $105.8 million. As a percentage of sales, these costs approximated 57.4% of sales, up from 54.4% in the prior year quarter. We experienced decreased selling cost, advertising, administrative, warehouse and delivery costs during the quarter. Our other income expense in the fourth quarter of 2024 was $200,000, and interest income was approximately $1.5 million. Income before income taxes decreased $8.9 million to $9.6 million. Our tax expense was $6.2 million for the calendar year, which resulted in an effective annual tax rate of 23.6% compared to an effective tax rate of 22.5% in the prior year. The primary difference in the effective rate and the statutory rate is due to expected state income taxes and nondeductible items. Net income for the fourth quarter of 2024 was $8.2 million or $0.49 per diluted share of our common stock compared to net income of $15 million or $0.90 per share in the comparable quarter last year. Now turning to our balance sheet. At the end of the fourth quarter, our inventories were $83.4 million, which was down $10.5 million from the year-end balance of last year and down $5.3 million versus Q3 2024 balance. At the end of the fourth quarter, our customer deposits were $40.7 million, which was up $4.9 million from the December 31, 2023 balance and down $3.2 million versus the Q3 2024 balance. We ended the quarter with $120 million of cash and cash equivalents, and we have no funded debt on our balance sheet at the end of the fourth quarter of 2024. Looking at some of our cash flow usage. CapEx was $32.1 million for the year 2024. We also paid out $20.5 million of regular dividends in the 2024 calendar year. We did purchase approximately $5 million of common shares under our share repurchase program during the fourth quarter of 2024, and we have approximately $8.1 million of existing authorization in our buyback program. Our earnings release lists out several additional forward-looking statements indicating our future expectations of certain financial metrics. I will highlight a few but please refer to our press release for additional commentary. We expect our gross profit margins for 2025 to be between 60% and 60.5%. We anticipate gross profit margins will be impacted by our current estimates of product and freight costs. Our fixed and discretionary type SG&A expenses for 2025 are expected to be in the $291 million to $293 million range, which is an increase over the prior year, resulting from our store growth and inflation. The variable-type costs within SG&A for 2025 are expected to be in the range of 19% to 19.3%. Our planned CapEx for 2025 is $27.1 million. Anticipated new or replacement stores, remodels and expansions account for $22.7 million. Investments in our distribution network are expected to be $1.8 million, and investments in our information technology are expected to be approximately $2.6 million. Our anticipated effective tax rate in 2025 is expected to be 26.5%. This projection excludes the impact of vesting of stock awards, discrete items and potential new tax legislation. This completes my commentary on the fourth quarter financial results. Operator, we would like to open up the call for questions at this time.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Anthony Lebiedzinski with Sidoti & Co.

Thanks for sharing some of the color about the traffic trends. And just curious if you could provide maybe more details, maybe put some numbers as far as what you saw in the monthly trends either for written sales or delivered sales, however you want to address those. Just curious to get comments on that.

Sure. Anthony, it's Richard. On the delivery side, it was pretty consistent during the quarter. October, November, December were down in the low teens. The average was about 12.5% for the quarter. On the written business, it was a little different. We were down low teens in October, mid-single digits in November, and then we were almost flat in December in terms of written business. And then the quarter, as you know, was down 6.7% so we saw a nice delta there in the last month of the year.

Got you. That's definitely reassuring. And has any of this positive momentum carried over into the first quarter? Or I don't know if you can comment on Presidents Day holiday, which is an important holiday for Havertys?

Anthony, I appreciate your persistence on trying to get us to give guidance. You know we don't talk about the current quarter and what's going on there so we're going to maintain that -- basically that place outstanding on that. We're not going to comment on Q1.

All right, I figured I would try. All right. And then just in terms of regional differences, did you see much in the fourth quarter, much variation? Or was it consistent also throughout the Havertys operating area?

We did see some. I mean, Florida has seen a little bit of a bounce back, obviously, in kind of up to the central part of the country. A little bit of the west and the east has been a little bit weaker, but not a huge difference, though, between all of them. But certainly, Florida up through Georgia and Central Park has been a little bit stronger.

And my last question before I pass it on to others. So in terms of your gross margin guidance, you mentioned product and freight costs. Can you expand on that and also share with us what you're thinking as far as what the potential impact from tariffs might be?

Yes. So let me start and Steve can finish. As Steve indicated in his remarks, we're going to mitigate the tariff impact on our margins. So we will work with our vendors and take the appropriate steps in terms of our relations with them. And then if we have some exposure there, we'll certainly pass that along in terms of our retail pricing. So we've got some experience with that, as he said, in 2018 and 2019. And then on the normal product cost and freight, we -- in the prior years, I think we've kind of indicated the margins are going to go up. I think we're saying we feel like they're going to be like stable in 2025.

Yes. And I think, Anthony, we are committed to driving volume. And so we are comfortable where the margins are. And we want to try to use every lever we can to try to do what we can do to try to move the volume needle and then get us back into positive territory. So that's kind of where we maintained our flat margin guidance on that side going forward. And as Richard said on the tariffs and as I mentioned to you, we will make our adjustments. Our merchandising team is already working on that. Obviously, that will change. Canada is not much of an impact on us. Mexico will be a bigger impact. But we will either look to reassort or work with our vendors to make pricing adjustments and move forward with that. But we do not see any of that having an impact on our margin guidance going forward.

Understood. Best of luck.

Our next question comes from Cristina Fernández with Telsey Advisory Group.

I wanted to see if you could talk more about the demand environment you expect in 2025. It's positive to see traffic improve and the sequential improvement through the fourth quarter. But at the same time, you talked about higher mortgage rates and the impact that's having on affordability. So I guess based on what you've seen in the fourth quarter and to date, I guess, how are you thinking about the demand environment for 2025?

I think we think -- Cristina, this is Steve. We believe it's still going to be tough. I mean, I don't think there's any question about it. I mean, housing is still a struggle. The election is behind us. And as we move forward into 2025, you're dealing with, after the inauguration, a lot of tense things going on or change going on with the wielding of the pen from the President. And so we'll have to just see how things proceed forward. And then obviously, all the talk about tariffs, that's not helping things. It's getting people into place. To where they are from tariffs of 2018 and '19, it's not the same deal. There, we were dealing with production and moving. We don't have those kind of disruptions that we would expect out of these tariffs. And obviously, the China tariffs are already in place. So we feel like it won't be any disruption of product flow like we experienced in 2018, '19. So there will be no supply issues going into 2025, which will be a positive. We hope, certainly as we move toward the latter part of the year, that we see things start to ease, the Fed makes some cuts, and we see a relief in the mortgage rates and we see a little bit of a bounce. But that's kind of our -- that's an industry overview and I guess things you've gathered from others that you've already heard from.

Yes, that's helpful. And as you think about capitalizing on that traffic increase, what's the biggest challenge? Is it -- I guess, is it conversion that's really, I guess, preventing from translating more of that traffic increase into orders?

Well, obviously, we're not having an issue with average ticket. We continue to drive average ticket. It's nice to see the traffic trends starting to improve, and we'll see how those move forward into 2025. So I do believe that conversion is still our opportunity. And we're working with our teams. And we're testing things, as I outlined with you, to see what we can do to move that needle. And we'll have, hopefully, more to report to you when we give you a Q1 update on how those tests are working.

And then my last question is on the fixed SG&A guidance. It's about a 4% increase year-over-year. So could you give more details about what's driving that? I guess, what are the buckets that you're seeing, inflation? And how many stores do you plan to open this year?

Yes. So our goal is to make -- Cristina, it's Richard. Our goal is to open 5, so we've got a few that we've already announced but that's our standing goal. In terms of the fixed, nonvariable piece, the guidance is $291 million to $293 million. It is within that range of 4% to 5% increase. In terms of the buckets, I'd say half of that is just general inflationary. And then the other half, I'd say, is around $4 million or so was occupancy costs. We have new stores that we opened up in the latter part of last year and the ones we just announced. And then we're also planning on spending some additional funds in advertising and marketing in 2025. On the variable piece, we came in at, I think, 18.9% in the fourth quarter and so we ended the year at 19.3%. So we're pretty comfortable with the 19% to 19.3% for 2025 on the variable side.

There are no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the floor back over to Steve Burdette for closing comments.

We're excited for 2025 as we build on our 140-year brand strength, debt-free financial position, increasing store count and expanding design business appeal. We look forward to talking with you in the future when we release our first quarter results later this year. Thank you, operator.

This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.