Quiksilver ZQK Pierre Agnes on Q2 2015 Results

Please stand by. We’re about to begin. Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Quiksilver Fiscal 2015 Second Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. Today’s conference is being recorded.

At this time, I’d like to turn the conference over to Joe Teklits, Investor Relations for Quiksilver. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Thank you for joining us for Quiksilver’s fiscal 2015 second quarter conference call. On the call today are Pierre Agnes, Chief Executive Officer; Greg Healy, Global President and President of the Americas; and Thomas Chambolle, Chief Financial Officer. To make it easier to follow today’s prepared remarks, we have posted our script to the home page of our IR website.

Throughout our call today, items may be discussed that are not based on historical facts and are considered forward looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. In particular, statements regarding Quiksilver’s business outlook and future performance constitute forward looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from those stated or implied by these forward looking statements, as a result of risks, uncertainties, and other factors, including those identified in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, specifically under the section titled Risk Factors in our most recent Annual Report on Form 10 K and in our quarterly reports on Form 10 Q.

All forward looking statements made on this call speak only as of today’s date, June 9, 2015 and the company undertakes no duty to update any forward looking statements. In addition, this presentation may contain references to non GAAP financial information. A reconciliation of non GAAP financial information to the most comparably direct comparable GAAP financial information is included in our press release, which can
be found on our corporate website.

And with that, I will turn the call over to Pierre.

Pierre Agnes Chief Executive Officer Director

Good morning to everyone. Good afternoon here in St. Jean de Luz, and if you didn’t already know this, we have a heavy accent here in Southwest of France, so I will do my best to speak slowly so you can understand me. With me on the call today is Greg Healy, our Global and Americas President, and Thomas Chambolle, our Global CFO. We are in France for our European sales meeting this week, and the three of us are really enthusiastic to be leading this company.

I have been with Quiksilver since 1988, and have run the European business for the past 13 years. Two and half years ago, I was appointed global head of apparel across the three brands. And at the end of March I was appointed as global CEO.

Greg joined the company in 1998, and has served in many leadership roles for the past 10 years, including most recently running our APAC region.

As you know, Thomas was recently appointed global CFO, and was the CFO of our EMEA region prior to his promotion. We are very proud of the success we have had in EMEA and Asia Pac over the past years. Both regions have consistently been our most profitable business with strong and healthy brand positioning, and efficient operations.

The team is now focused on
bringing this level of execution to the Americas. I want to emphasize that the new team’s view is that we strongly believe that we can turn the North Americas market around, into a profitable business in the next fiscal year.

We have a very strong brand, and are applying the successful business practices of the EMEA and APAC regions to the North American market. I have been travelling a lot recently in the Americas, and
through many territories. I was really pleased to hear the encouragements of our retail partners, and to see how loyal they are to our brands.

But we also have to recognize that we have been through major changes over the last two years, going from three regional companies to a global one. We all believe that it
was the right thing to do in order to increase efficiency, and to improve our profitability. I don’t believe many companies have been through as many changes in such a short period of time as ours.

When I say this, I refer to: the SAP implementation and all our IT systems, the globalization of supply chain, the consolidation of the distribution center, the globalization of our retail and e com back offices. We also globalized and consolidated product design which is just starting to come through, and to show progress all the way through to the supply chain.

For apparel and accessories, instead of duplicating steps in each region, we brought our best talents from all around the world to sit under one roof in our campus in France. The team is now a melting pot of Americans, Australians, Japanese and Europeans working together, sharing best practice, and focusing on delivering the best product.

For footwear, we are also really pleased and confident with our team based in Huntington Beach. We are happy to see some original DC footwear products, coming back on trend, and ensuring strong sell through in key accounts.

Generally speaking, sell through in most of the regions is up compared to last year and reorders for the current season in Europe showing double digit growth. Fundamentally, we feel we are making progress on products.

Another important step in the global restructuring was to align the design and marketing teams. We now have a talented group of marketing staff, working in France for Quiksilver and Roxy, whereas the global DC marketing crew are now based in Huntington Beach, close to the footwear design teams.

To stay with marketing, I also feel strongly about getting back to our roots, with athletes and events that will support our brands, our most valuable assets. We have a 45 year history of leading the action sports world. We already have on board a new generation of young athletes around the world that we believe will make powerful ambassadors for our brands.

We want to remain focused on having fewer athletes but the best athletes, with a significant increase of investment behind them. We also have some exciting and innovative plans for these athletes that we will talk about in the near future.

As an example of our approach to marketing, we just had a Roxy event in Barcelona two weeks ago, where we had more than 3,000 participants doing yoga, running and stand up paddle. A week ago the same type of event was organized in Hawaii and this September we’ll have another massive event in Sydney, Australia. These successful events
reinforce our commitment in the fitness and water sport activities with young men and women.

To finish on marketing with DC , we are
the official footwear and apparel sponsor of the AMA Supercross series in America, and
we just finished activating and engaging consumers in 17 cities, with an average attendance of 65,000 at each venue.

Another way to elevate our brands is to showcase our products and tell our marketing stories in an exceptional retail environment. So five years ago, we developed a new retail concept in Europe called Boardriders. These are large retail stores which display our three brands, as well as a large selection of technical products, and they also bring our customers together with weekly live concerts, bars with lounges, and other attractions.

We now have 15 and they are all very successful, very profitable, and elevate our brands to the greatest level. This February we opened our first Boardrider in Australia, in Coolangatta, Queensland, and once again it is a great success, beyond all expectations.

Now we are looking forward to opening our next Boardrider store in Torquay in Australia, in September this year. So these are some of the highlights of the progress to date.

Now for the areas where we still need to improve. As you can see from our press release, we do not expect to achieve the previously stated guidance for the year. Currency and execution issues primarily in North America where much of the improvement was expected to come from the back end of the year, is putting pressure on our full year EBITDA outlook.

While we improve to improve our EBITDA from last year, on a constant currency basis, we are falling well short on our goals. Implemented structural changes have not yet
brought the expected results. This is largely due to poor execution, which is impacting our on time deliveries. We are fixing this as we speak, and we are confident the profit improvements will happen. We will give you further details later in the call, and Greg will speak specifically about the opportunities we see in North America in a few minutes.Articles Connexes：

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