Yahoo Finance Crocs, Inc. (NASDAQ:CROX) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
Crocs, Inc. (NASDAQ:CROX) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript February 15, 2024
Crocs, Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $2.58, expectations were $2.37. Crocs, 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 morning and welcome to the Crocs Fourth Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in 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 Erinn Murphy, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Strategy. Please go ahead.
Erinn Murphy: Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us to discuss Crocs Inc. fourth quarter and full year results. With me today are Andrew Rees, Chief Executive Officer; and Anne Mehlman, Executive Vice President, incoming Crocs Brand President and current Chief Financial Officer. Following their prepared remarks, we will open the call for your questions, which we ask you to limit to one per caller. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that some of the information provided on this call is forward-looking and accordingly is subject to the Safe Harbor provisions of the Federal Securities Laws. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding our strategies, plans, objectives, expectations and intentions including our financial outlook.
These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, which may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially. Please refer to our annual report on Form 10-K and other reports filed with the SEC for more information on these risks and uncertainties. Certain financial metrics that we refer to as adjusted or non-GAAP are non-GAAP measures. A reconciliation of these amounts to their GAAP counterparts is contained in the press release we issued earlier this morning. All revenue growth rates will be cited on a constant currency basis unless otherwise stated. At this time, I will turn the call over to Andrew Rees, Crocs Inc. Chief Executive Officer.
Andrew Rees: Thank you, Erinn, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. 2023 was a record year for the Crocs Enterprise and we're starting off 2024 from a position of strength. Our teams are focused on continuing to drive market share gains and sustainable profitable growth. We ended the year strong delivering better than expected fourth quarter. Let me start by sharing a few highlights from the full year of 2023. Total revenues grew 12% year-on -year to almost $4 billion dollars, driven by 19% direct-to-consumer growth at the enterprise level. Crocs brand revenues surpassed the $3 billion mark, increasing 14% versus last year. HEYDUDE Brand revenues were approximately $950 million and delivered over $200 million in operating income.
We expanded our gross margins and once again delivered industry-leading margins with adjusted operating margins of almost 28% exceeding our guidance. We grew our adjusted diluted earnings per share by 10% versus last year to $12.03. Our strong cash flow generation allowed us to repay $666 million of debt as we resumed our share repurchase program during the year. Finally, we're pleased to see the Crocs Inc. achieved the number 20 spot on Fortune's 2023 top 100 fastest growing companies. Before I provide strategic updates by brand, I want to speak to the recently announced executive transitions. Michelle Poole, Crocs’ Brand President will be retiring from the company following a distinguished 32-year career in the footwear industry, the last decade of which she had a tremendous impact on Crocs.
Michelle Poole maiden her role through early May and transitioned to a special advisor through early 2025. In keeping with our succession planning. I'm pleased to promote our current CFO Anne Mehlman to Crocs Brand President. Many of you have the opportunity to work closely with Anne and know she brings a strategic and consumer-focused commercial lens to her leadership. I have strong confidence in her commercial acumen, deep knowledge of the Crocs business and global mindset. Anne will remain CFO until a replacement is named an active search for her successor is already underway. Moving on to our performance against our key strategic pillars, starting with the Crocs brand. We continue to invest in our Crocs brand to our socially led usually first marketing playbook and product innovation naming a few of our accomplishments this year.
Our marketing wins range from creating height to mainstream moments including the MSCHF Yellow Boot, Aespa K-pop brand that featured a stump line clog and we ended the year unveiling Armada clog the perfect friend to Lightning McQueen. Complex, a leading culture publications set it back Crocs can't stop going viral in 2023. We celebrated our most successful Crocs over year fueled by the span inspired Crocs Cowboy Boot that sold out in 24 hours. We were awarded Collection of the Year by Footwear News Salehe Bembury Times Crocs Pollex Clog for partnership. Moving on to products, innovation and ongoing diversification remain important areas of focus. While we've had great success creating consumer moments through partnerships and collaborations, our core franchisees are our fundamental growth engines and all three of our product pillars Clogs, Sandals and personalization grew double-digits in 2023.
Clogs grew 12% supported by solid growth in both our core Classic, as well as new Clog franchises filled by height and product innovation. Sandals surpassed the $400 million mark growing 29% versus last year and now makes up 13% of our Crocs sales mix. We gained market share across our four Sandal segments that we prioritize everyday Style, Sport Street and Adventure. Beyond the revenue milestone the sandals category brings diversification not only to our overall product mix but to our customer mix. In 2023, 61% of consumers that purchase Sandals on own ecom channels were new to the brand. These consumers shop more frequently carried a higher average order value and purchase multiple Silhouettes. Our Sandal consumers skew more female versus our other buyers.
Our Jibbitz business grew 17% to over a quarter billion dollars making up approximately 9% of our total mix. We continue to view personalization as a mega consumer trend and see opportunity to further grow our Jibbitz penetration in 2024, notably through improved wholesale execution, deeper international penetration and increased speed to market. We're elevating our franchise management capabilities and have built several sustainable multi-product platforms including the Echo, Brooklyn and Crush to name a few. Each of these franchises caters to unique customer groups and diversified wearing occasions. The echo franchise which was developed a breadth of products across Clogs, Sandals, Boots and now Sneakers has bringing a largely male explorer consumer.
In fact 71% of consumers who shopped our Echo franchise on our owned ecom channel in 2023 were new consumers. We're becoming faster and more agile and we see opportunities to further capitalize on these attributes in 2024. In the fourth quarter, we tested slippers in four color ways and we're able to get these to market 60% faster than our normal product cycle. This test sold out in two and a half weeks and we're building this into a full line for 2024. We're expanding our speed to market capabilities across other areas of our product portfolio, including emerging new franchise such as a Getaway assortment. As we think about distribution, I'm pleased by the broad-based growth of the Crocs brand for the year. The 2023 North America grew 8% and international grew 23%.
In fact fourth quarter represented our 12th consecutive quarter of strong double-digit growth outside of North America. Globally, South Korea and the UK grew double-digits Australia and China each grew triple-digits. While we reported a record revenue in China, it still only represent 4% of revenues underscoring the untapped potential we have in the region. We continue to see our organic foundation in China grow as evidenced by our hashtag known as Dong Men or Clogs followers. We now have 70 million Dong Men hashtags on red highlighting the consumer engagement and excitement for the brand. Three weeks ago, I had the opportunity to visit several of our Tier-1 countries in Asia alongside our broader leadership team. It is evident that the brand’s trajectory is taking hold across the region.
The Asian consumer is embracing personalization at a rate higher than other parts of the world. Another anecdote that gives me confidence broadly in our international growth agenda is that South Korea, a most established market in the region carries a highest market share of any discrete market globally and is one of the best representations of our core strategies across Clogs, Sandals and Personalization. This strong market position highlights the potential upside of opportunity across our other international markets. The Crocs brand has entered 2024 with momentum. From a product perspective we expected to deliver more height for her, street for him and drive personalization at scale. We expect Sandals to continue to gain as a percentage of sales, driven by newness as we relaunched the classic Sandal 2.0 and scale, our recently introduced Getaway Sandal franchise.
From a sustainability perspective, I'm incredibly pleased to announce that we achieved our 2023 goal to reach 20% buyer base Crocs life material across our portfolio. A significant milestone on our journey to 50% buyer base this Crocs life by 2030. We also saw promising results in our Pilot Shoe recycling program that we launched in late October and we now plan to expand this initiative to All-Stars. We will share more on these and many other initiatives in our mid-year comfort report. Turning to HEYDUDE, we generated almost $950 million of revenue and over $200 million in operating income in 2023. This year I did share our learnings, but I'm very confident that the HEYDUDE brand benefits from the lightweight, comfortable, easy on and off and value remain top of mind with consumers.
While our brand awareness significantly improved year-over-year reaching 32% in the second half, it is still low by Eddie Global Brand standing, but our brand love and affinity are high. As we talked about in our third quarter call, we made a number of strategic pivots in September, which impacted our sell-in within the wholesale channel, curtailed smaller, non-strategic accounts and focused our efforts around improving full price sell-through on digital. We're pleased with the initial impact of our decisions as evidenced by improved gross margins and healthy channel inventories and expect sell-in and sell-through to normalize as we move throughout the second half of 2024 and prioritize returning to a full market position. In the fourth quarter and on a full year basis, we gained market share among our key strategic accounts underscoring our confidence in the brand’s underlying demand with consumers.
In 2023, The Hated Brand gained approximately 200 basis points of US market share versus 2022 in the casual fashion category, according to Cicada’s Retail Tracking Service. During the first quarter, the HEYDUDE brand had some big moments with Dude Perfect as a face of a happy holiday programming. Leveraging our consumer insights we know that 50% of our buyers give HEYDUDES as gifts and we saw evidence of this during the fourth quarter. Looking forward, we plan to create consumer moments through scaling our collaborations and partnerships. We recently collaborated with actor Chase Stokes from the popular Outer Banks Netflix show to launch the Wally MID. Later in Q1, we will be expanding our Collegiate program to more schools during March Madness to deepen consumer engagement.
From a product perspective, during the fourth quarter, our icons the Wally&Wendy were top sellers. Our Bradley boot rounded out by top three selling styles overall with exceptional sell-through as consumers responded to its compelling price point, lightweight and attractive styling despite a soft overall industry boot season. Once Again our seasonal Ugly Sweater Christmas Styles were standouts. As we move into 2024, we will focus on continuing to invest in core and expect the Wally&Wendy franchises to remain the lion's share of our offerings, driven by newness in color, graphic and heights. We will capitalize on our successful sneaker franchises including the Karina and the Sirocco and build on our fashion boot offering in the fall. We're taking a focused approach to how we allocate inventory by account and expect to see more evidence of account and channel segmentation as we move throughout the year.
From a distribution perspective, we're in the early days of implementing our outlet retail strategy for the HEYDUDE brand leveraging Crocs’ successful retail playbook. On the HEYDUDE side, we opened five outlet locations in the second half and have been pleased with the results thus far. We plan to open up 30 outlet stores in 2024 spread throughout the year. For context retail is roughly one-third of our North American business for the Crocs brand and it’s highly profitable. Turning to wholesale, while our spring order books are down versus last year as we discussed on our November call, we expect sell-in and sell-through to normalize as we move throughout the back half of the year. As it relates to international we remain in test mode in a few direct markets in Europe, as well as in several distributor markets leveraging the success of the Crocs brand playbook.
This will lay the groundwork to expand into new international markets in the next two to three years. Well coming into the year from a position of strength. While there are question marks around the global macro backdrop and the broader consumer health, I'm confident in our brands, our people, and our purpose and are looking forward to another year of outside share gains, industry-leading profitability and top tier cash flow generation. Anne will now review our financial results in more detail.
Anne Mehlman: Thank you, Andrew, and good morning, everyone. I'm very pleased by our fourth quarter results, which exceeded the high end of our guidance across all metrics. We generated $960 million in consolidated revenues, growing 1.5% over last year led by the Crocs brands. We delivered top-tier profitability with adjusted gross margin up 240 basis points to 55.7% adjusted operating margin of 24.1% and adjusted earnings per share of $2.58 ahead of our guidance of $2.05 to $2.35. Our strong profitability and focus on net working capital enabled us to repay $277 million of debt in the fourth quarter. We also repurchased $25 million of stock in the fourth quarter at an average cost of $86.34 per share. As discussed earlier in January, at the ICR Conference, we made a change to our segment reporting that will now be reflected in our 10-K.
Our reportable operating segments will now be the Crocs brand and the HEYDUDE brand. We plan to continue sharing our progress against our strategic growth pillars, key country call outs and channel dynamics. Turning to the Crocs brand in the fourth quarter. Revenues were $732 million, growing 10% relative to prior year, driven by strong DTC growth of 12% and wholesale growth of 7%. Brand ASPs were up 12% to $26.76, led by both channel and product mix, higher international pricing and lower discounting. The brand sold 27 million pairs of shoes, a decrease of 1% to Q4 last year or up 5% excluding the impact of the termination of our African distributor. For the year, the brand sold 120 million units of 3.5% versus last year, an ASP growth of 10%.
Now, let's review the Crocs brand highlights by country and channel. In the quarter, North America revenues are $471 million were up 3% from 2022, a strong DTC growth of 7% was partially offset by a 5% decline in wholesale. The decline in wholesale revenues reflect a full quarter of impacts for e-tail distribution change, partially offset by double-digit growth in our brick and mortar wholesale. Crocs brand in the fourth quarter was led by international with revenues up 25% driven by DTC which grew 37% in the quarter against 2022. In fact, all six of our Tier 1 markets grew in the fourth quarter, China, India, Japan, South Korea, the US and Western Europe. As Andrew noted, two of our countries group grew triple-digits for the year, Australia and China.
China was a record Revenue year ending the year at $120 million. In Western Europe, we saw strong double-digit growth in the UK and France, while Germany ended the year flattish despite a tough macro backdrop. Turning to HEYDUDE. Revenues were $228 million, down 19% from last year, but ahead of our guidance. During Q4, the brand sold 7.4 million pairs of shoes, a decrease of 18% from last year as we lacked pipeline sell and as we took decisive actions to reduce channel inventories, HEYDUDE average selling price during Q4 was roughly flat to last year at $30.65. Relative to Q3, our e-commerce ASPs were up 15% as we pulled back on price matching online. We continue to make progress against great disk cleanup and expect to be in a substantially better position exiting the first half of 2024.
Wholesale revenues were down 28% from Q4 last year as we left 2022 pipeline fill. Right sized our non-strategic wholesale accounts and faced a more challenging wholesale environment. The DTC channel contracted 9% as we forfeited sales for better pricing and margin. Consolidated adjusted gross margin for the fourth quarter was 55.7%, up 240 basis points from last year as freight was a key tailwind for both brands. Crocs brand adjusted gross margin was 59.5% or 340 basis points higher than prior year. The increase in adjusted gross margin is attributable to approximately 240 basis points of freight tailwinds, increases in international pricing and favorable promotions and customer mix, partially offset by negative currency impacts of 100 basis points.
HEYDUDE brand adjusted gross margin for the quarter with 45.5% and came in better than expected. The margin decrease of 170 basis points from Q4 2022 was driven by excess distribution costs and product mix. This was partially offset by reduced freight and storage costs. Our Q4 adjusted SG&A at 31.6% of revenues deleverage by 430 basis points, compared to prior year. For full year 2023, adjusted SG&A deleveraged 200 basis points to 28.7%. The significant increase in adjusted SG&A rate for the quarter and the full year is attributable to continued marketing investment, talent and infrastructure to support future growth and durable market share gains. Taking these drivers together, our fourth quarter adjusted operating margin declined 190 basis points to 24.1%, compared to 26% for the same period last year.
In Q4, the company recorded a one-time GAA tax benefit of approximately $112 million, primarily related to the closing of our HEYDUDE activity in Hong Kong and the related transfer of our intellectual property. Fourth quarter adjusted diluted earnings per share decreased 2.6% to $2.58, when reflecting our non-GAAP tax rate of 19.6%. For the full year, our adjusted diluted earnings per share increased 10% to $12.03. We ended the year with clean inventory on our balance sheet and in the channel. Our inventory balance on December 31st 2023 was $385 million, a decline a 18% against this time last year. The Crocs brand inventory balance was $281 million, down 7% from last year and were roughly flat to Q3 2023. HEYDUDE inventory was down 38% from last year to $104 million and down 6% versus Q3.
We ended 2023 with a strong liquidity position, comprised of $149 million of cash and cash equivalents and $570 million of borrowing capacity on our revolver. Through strong cash flow generation and diligent management of net working capital, we have reduced total borrowings to $1.7 billion and our net leverage stood approximately 1.3 times. Since acquiring HEYDUDE in February 2022, we have repaid $1.2 billion in debt and resumed our share repurchase activity in the second half of 2023. On a full year basis, we repurchased $175 million of stock at an average price of $104 per share. Our strong liquidity position, investing cash flow generation will enable us to continue to pay down debt and buyback stock in 2024. In February, we successfully refinanced our Term Loan B and achieved a 75 basis point reduction in borrowing rate from silver plus 3% to silver plus 2.25% with no change to our leverage covenants or maturity dates.
Nowm turning to the future, I would like to share our current outlook for Q1 and then full year 2024. For Q1, we expect consolidated revenues to be down 1.5% to up 0.5% at year end currency rates with the Crocs brand growing between 6% to 8%. We expect HEYDUDE revenue to be down 20% to 23% as we lap pipeline sales from last year and given our aforementioned spring order book trends. We expect adjusted operating margins to be approximately 22% and adjusted diluted earnings per share of $2.15 to $2.25. For the full year 2024, we are reiterating our revenue outlook of 3%, to 5% growth assuming year end currency rates. For Crocs brand revenues, we expect to grow 4% to 6% with growth led by international. For HEYDUDE brand revenues, we continue expect growth to be flat to slightly up.
In terms of shaping, we expect HEYDUDE sales trends to improve throughout the year. We expect gross margin improvement over 2023 at the enterprise level, we expect stable Crocs brand gross margin and expect HEYDUDE gross margin to be up for the year, as we start to realize the benefit of our newly opened Las Vegas DC and our planned ERP implementation. We expect to reinvest these dollars into brand accretive, and strategic SG&A investments resulting in consolidated adjusted operating margins for the year of approximately 25%. Following our tax structure changes, for full year 2024, we expect our underlying non-GAAP tax rate, which approximates cash taxes paid to be approximately 18% and GAAP tax rate 21.5%. We anticipate non-gaap diluted earnings per share to be approximately $12.05 to $12.50 in 2024.
This range incorporates a recent tax changes in Term Loan B refinancing, but does not assume any impact from potential future share repurchases. We also expect to incur $10 million of one-time charges, primarily in the first quarter related to the completion of our distribution and logistics project for HEYDUDE. To support growth for both brands we expect to invest approximately $120 million to $130 million in capital expenditures in 2024 and continue to expect best-in-class cash flow generation. At this time, I'll turn the call back over to Andrew for his final thoughts.
Andrew Rees: Thank you, Anne. Crocs Inc. had a record breaking year in 2023. As we move into 2024, we are on the offense. I'm proactively making the decisions to invest incrementally in our business to set us up with continued durable market share gains, while delivering top-tier total shareholder returns. At this time, we'll open the call for questions.
See also 20 Popular Brands That Use Shopify and Top 20 Motorcycle Brands in the World.
To continue reading the Q&A session, please click here.
