Felise Glantz Kissell - Vice President, Investor Relations Judy Schmeling - Chief Operating Officer & Chief Financial Officer Mindy Grossman - Chief Executive Officer & Director.

Neely J. N. Tamminga - Piper Jaffray & Co (Broker) Eric J. Sheridan - UBS Securities LLC Alex Joseph Fuhrman - Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC Bart E. Crockett - FBR Capital Markets & Co. Matthew J. Harrigan - Wunderlich Securities, Inc. Victor Anthony - Axiom Capital Management, Inc..

Ladies and gentlemen, good morning, and welcome to the HSN, Inc. Fourth Quarter 2016 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. This call is being recorded. Following the conclusion of today's discussion, the HSNi team will be taking your questions.

With that, I'd now like to turn the conference over to Felise Glantz Kissell, Vice President of Investor Relations. Ms. Kissell, please go ahead..

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. On this morning's call, we have Mindy Grossman, Chief Executive Officer of HSNi, and Judy Schmeling, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer. Judy will initially review our financial performance. Mindy will then strategically discuss the business.

As always, some of the statements made on this call may be forward-looking and as such are subject to many factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements.

Additional information regarding these factors, as well as various risks and uncertainties, can be found in HSNi's earnings release filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and available on the company's website. HSNi does not undertake to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements.

In addition, on today's call, there will be references to certain non-GAAP financial measures. These are described in more detail on the company's earnings release and SEC filings available on the HSNi website.

You are encouraged to refer to the press release and SEC filings and to review the reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP results. I would now like to turn the call over to Judy Schmeling, HSNi's COO and CFO.

Judy?.

Thanks, Felise, and good morning, everyone. On the earnings call, we articulated that the first quarter would be impacted by a challenging retail environment and a repositioning of certain merchandising categories and brands. As we focused on our merchandising initiatives to drive top line growth, we continued to aggressively manage our cost.

At HSNi, sales were down 3% with digital sales increasing 3%, comping 8% sales growth and 12% digital sales growth in the prior year. Our gross profit rate was down 30 basis points to last year and operating expenses excluding non-cash charges declined $3 million or approximately 1.5%.

Adjusted earnings per share was $0.54 compared to $0.63 a year ago. At HSN, sales decreased 4% to $578 million following sales growth of 10% last year. Sales grew in electronics, wellness, and culinary, offset by sales decline in categories such as fitness and jewelry. Digital sales grew 4% with digital penetration increasing 310 basis points to 44%.

HSN's return rate improved 90 basis points with units shipped unchanged and average price point down 5% primarily driven by product mix. We deliberately wound down our Keith Urban infomercial in the first quarter, an area we always viewed as opportunistic, and this impacted our sales decline by 2%.

We continued our replenishment of the Ingenious Designs products associated with the Joy Mangano brand into other retail outlets. The sales from this wholesale expansion contributed less than 1% to our sales performance as the majority of these sales were recognized in the fourth quarter of 2015.

Gross profit decreased 4% at HSN to $199 million with gross profit margin down 10 basis points to 34.5% primarily due to an increase in shipping promotions and changes in product mix offset by lower procurement costs. Operating expenses excluding non-cash charges decreased 2% to $139 million.

This improvement was primarily from lower compensation expense and decreased marketing expense associated with our Keith Urban infomercial offset by increased advertising costs for the Ingenious Designs wholesale business that I just mentioned and higher distribution costs largely associated with additional carriage for HSN2.

HSN's adjusted EBITDA decreased 8% in the first quarter to $61 million. Excluding the impact of the Keith Urban infomercial, HSN's adjusted EBITDA would have decreased 4%. Turning now to Cornerstone. Sales were down 1% to $238 million with digital sales up 2%. We had sales growth in the home brands with the exception of Ballard Designs.

Garnet Hill continues to execute its merchandising strategy, resulting in solid sales growth, while the remaining apparel brands had a sales decline in the quarter which included a reduction in circulation. Gross profit at Cornerstone decreased 3% to $90 million.

Gross profit margin decreased 60 basis points to 37.8% largely from increased promotional activity particularly in the home brands. We continue to see strong commercial activity in the external home marketplace.

As part of our focus to continuously review our organizational structure to ensure we effectively align our investment in talent with our greatest growth opportunities, similar to HSN last quarter, we consolidated resources in several areas within the Cornerstone portfolio.

We expect these actions to reduce annual operating expenses by $3 million going forward as we eliminated approximately 35 positions. At HSNi, these combined efficiency efforts result in annual expense savings of approximately $12 million.

Operating expenses excluding non-cash charges decreased 1% to $85 million, primarily reflecting lower catalog costs as we tightly managed circulation with sales demand. We did incur severance-related costs associated with the organizational changes that I just mentioned.

Cornerstone's performance resulted in adjusted EBITDA of $5 million, a decrease of $2 million from the prior year. The first quarter normally represents the lowest sales and EBITDA quarter for the business with the important outdoor season immediately ahead. At HSNi, our first quarter effective tax rate was 37%, consistent with the prior year.

Our annual effective tax rate for 2016 is estimated to be approximately 37%. In the first quarter, we repurchased approximately 181,000 shares and more than 1.1 million shares since inception of our share repurchase program initiated early last year, with 2.9 million shares remaining under our existing share repurchase authorization.

Additionally, our board just approved a quarterly cash dividend of $0.35 per share payable June 15 to shareholders of record as of June 1. As I mentioned on the last call, we are carrying some excess inventory in certain brands and categories that could impact margins in the immediate term as we continue to work our way through this merchandise.

Where applicable, we will be implementing pricing and promotional strategies to stimulate demand as well as tightly manage inventory levels.

We continue to diligently manage our operating expenses through ongoing talent realignment and strategic initiatives such as our supply chain automation project which is scheduled to have a soft launch later this quarter. We believe this project will save us $5 million to $10 million this year and approximately $20 million on an annual basis.

In summary, we don't underestimate the immediate work ahead of us in this challenging retail environment with improving our top line performance as our top priority. We are focused on driving profitable growth, expanding our digital presence, and strategically investing in the business to offer a compelling customer experience.

Mindy will now discuss our strategic initiatives to drive sales growth in more detail..

the Traditional Home New Orleans Showhouse and the House Beautiful Kitchen of the Year. And as I stated previously, we are focused on the upcoming launch of our Tysons Corner design studio. Garnet Hill will continue its seasonal location in Bridgehampton, New York.

Given its success, we will be selectively creating pop-up locations in other high-profile markets. And at Grandin Road, we are identifying strategic opportunities to dramatically showcase our product in innovative ways, particularly with seasonal offerings.

In closing, we've critically evaluated the business and are taking decisive actions from our proprietary product assortment to customer engagement, content creation, and digital innovation for sustainable long-term growth. We are implementing these strategies while maximizing the return from our investments.

We anticipate that these combined efforts along with our differentiated position in the marketplace will favorably impact the business over the course of the year as we ignite our strong brands and unique products, extensive content and frictionless commerce experience.

I look forward to updating you on our progress and I also look forward to taking your calls..

Thank you. Also, to allow everyone the opportunity to ask questions, we ask that you have one question and one follow-up if needed. The first question is from Neely Tamminga of Piper Jaffray. Your line is now open..

Many thanks for the strategic overview, as usual. I'm wondering if we can dig a little bit more into the idea of new channels of distribution, thinking maybe even the traditional brick-and-mortar. You've mentioned some success here on Ballard Designs. You've also talked about Ingenious Designs wholesaling into folks like Target.

We're also noticing a brand that you guys are known for, Diane Gilman, over at Christopher & Banks. Just wondering kind of where you're seeing some success stories of maybe new customer acquisition lift from these dynamics. Does this make sense? Are you seeing assimilation? Things like that would be helpful in how this could play out.

And a housekeeping question for Judy. If we excluded the whole Keith Urban dynamic on the customer acquisition or the customer active file, which you said, I think, on a 12-month is down slightly, if you exclude the Keith Urban dynamic, are you guys actually up? And if you could quantify, that'd be great, Thanks..

Okay. Great question on the channels of distribution. Specifically, in Ballard and a number of our brands, we do feel that giving the customer a 360-degree experience will have a positive implication from the business.

As I mentioned, what we're seeing in the markets where we do have the physical design studios, not only are we seeing performance in that environment, we're seeing a lift in performance in the marketplace as well as elevated awareness and engagement.

So, we do feel that there is a significant opportunity for us, as you have seen evidenced by a number of other retailers, to be able to service the customer in a very broad way. So we will be looking at that in our brands.

Specifically in the Joy Mangano business, as you mentioned, we've had very strong success with Macy's, for example, and we really represent a category that is not robustly done as a collection within these environments. And we feel it's very complementary to our business to be able to have a physical presence.

But we still continue and we feel it's very important to be as proprietary as possible, even with the brands that we have similarly to prestige beauty or electronics or footwear, where we may have designers and/or brands that have other distribution, where we still have the opportunity and the brands are creating exclusive products just for us.

So we still can have a very significant point of differentiation. So, again, we feel strongly that creating this 360-degree platform, obviously, is going to be very unique by brand and by category where we have a filter and where we think it makes sense, but we do feel it is a growth opportunity for the company..

Hi, Neely. This is Judy. Regarding your question on customer bases excluding Keith Urban, we were still slightly down but the vast majority of it was related to the Keith Urban.

I would point out that the other big driver of that was our core HSN infomercial type products that Mindy had referenced particularly in fitness and our NutriBullet business, which generated a lot of sales and new customers last year. Based upon that huge success, we're not able to comp that this year.

So excluding those, we would've been relatively flat..

Now, I would say something to note is that the new customer acquisition on the infomercial side is a very low lifetime value. It skews more mail, lower income. So that's important to note in terms of what those comps are..

Okay. That's helpful context. Thanks, y'all. Good luck out there..

Thank you..

Thank you. The next question is from Eric Sheridan of UBS. Your line is now open..

Thanks for taking the questions. One, on the customer analytics that you mentioned during your commentary, wanted to understand sort of how that will roll out through the year, what you think that might do to the business as you sort of continue to push that forward, not only in 2016 but beyond.

And then based on the commentary, there are a lot of puts and takes on places where you're looking to invest in the business in 2016 but also places where there could be cost savings and leverage in the business.

Can you help us understand a little bit how those puts and takes will move as we go through the year just so we don't get too far ahead of ourselves in terms of thinking about projections? Thank you..

Sure. As far as – I can let Judy talk on some of the puts and takes and all of that..

Yeah. I'll take your second question first. On the operating expenses, you're correct in the fact that we have a lot of expense savings that we really have been pushing forward in terms of talent realignment and operating expense reductions, whether it be in circulation or our supply chain management optimization program.

We are going to be reinvesting some of that back into areas of growth, particularly in some of the things regarding our customer analytics and digital marketing. So there will be some puts and takes as we continue to see the business have opportunities to grow the top line.

Having said that, we are very focused on that operating expense leverage as we continue to move forward and should continue to see savings for the balance of the year. However, if we do see pockets of opportunities to reinvest, we will do so. But again, we're very focused on driving operating expense reduction to the extent that we can..

So, in terms of our investments and what we look to see from those investments in tools, systems, talent around data, it really is around data to provide us a greater level of customization and personalization. And we continue to do a significant amount of testing and rollout, testing and rollout.

And we're very pleased with what we're seeing in those areas as we begin to ramp up. And we continue to invest and whether that's in our seamless capabilities across all of our sites, the individualization on the customer level, and we have plans across all of our businesses to be able to leverage that.

But very specifically at HSN, you will continue to see that ramping up across the year..

Great. Thank you..

Thank you. The next question is from Alex Fuhrman of Craig-Hallum Capital. Your line is open..

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Just want to try to get a sense of the kind of base case revenue scenario here in the second quarter and beyond. I mean, it looks like for most of the last four years or five years typically there's a meaningful drop-off sequentially from the first quarter to the second quarter.

2014 was obviously a notable exception to that and last year was pretty strong in the first quarter. So just trying to understand, I mean how you kind of think about the base case here of what it would be reasonable to think of the second quarter and the third quarter looking relative to the numbers you just reported here in Q1..

Sure. To your point, in the second quarter, the drop-off does occur on the HSN businesses. It is the lowest quarter of sales volume absolute dollar-wise that we have. And then it continues to build up for the balance of the year. So the third quarter normally is higher than the second quarter and then obviously the fourth quarter is the largest.

So for HSN historically, the fourth quarter is the strongest followed by the first quarter, third quarter and then the second quarter is our lowest quarter. So, there is some changes in the dynamic which I think you can see in every quarterly filing that we've had since we've been public.

As well as on the Cornerstone side, though, it's the inverse in that the second quarter is typically a very large quarter as it relates to outdoor specifically for Frontgate and Ballard Designs. So we do have a larger sales volume there than the first quarter.

In terms of how we're looking at the business, I think as we articulated on the HSN side of the business, we're continuing to repositioning a lot of these merchandising categories that we have and we do expect that's going to continue to take some time to progress throughout the year and we'll continue to see improvement, as Mindy articulated.

And, Mindy, is there anything else that you'd like to add to that?.

Yeah. As Judy said, I mean, we're definitely seeing progress in certain areas of the business that we feel good about. And there are still some areas that we are working to accelerate and develop. But, certainly, there's no lack of work being done and we feel good about the teams and how they're progressing..

Great. That's really helpful. Thank you very much..

Thank you. The next question is from Barton Crockett of FBR Capital Markets. Your line is open..

Okay, great. Thanks for taking the question. I just wanted to drill down a little bit more on how to think about the revenue trends. And I understand revenue is not the full story. We've got to think more about kind of gross profit per hour. And the gross margin trends here were encouraging relative to what we were fearing.

But on the top line, your comps did get easier in the first quarter relative to the fourth quarter on a one-year basis. They got about 400 basis points easier. But in TV shopping – and this is in core HSN TV shopping – in TV shopping, your trend worsened on the top line by about 200 basis points.

As we look ahead to the second quarter, it seems like the comp might get, on a one-year basis, about 700 basis points easier.

So when we look about these comps, is that a reasonable way to think about the revenue trajectory from here? Does that really matter? Or is there something different happening and shift in the environment where we should just kind of ignore the comps and look at the business differently?.

Sure. Yes, our comps were slightly easier in the first quarter than they were in the fourth quarter. As I articulated on the call, excluding that Keith Urban, sales were down 2%, so it wasn't quite as dramatic shifting as the decline.

I would say, though, to the point that I made earlier, as we continue to reposition these categories, it has taken us more time to be able to comp some of those and we will continue to see that improvement towards the back half of the year. So I think that does make the comp situation a little bit different this year than perhaps historically..

Okay. And then if I could follow up, we were looking for a little bit of more gross margin pressure than we saw. You guys managed that very well.

What's your feeling about gross margin potential for stability going forward? Is there anything we should be cautious about? Or do you feel reasonably okay at this point?.

Sure. As I mentioned on the call, we are still carrying excess inventory that will continue to pressure our margins in the near-term. I do feel good about it over the longer term, but definitely, as you can see in the first quarter, we did everything we could to offset some of that pressure.

But combined with some of that excess merchandise as well as the competitive environment out there, I would say in the near-term we're going to continue to be pressured. But we're trying to do as much as we can from an efficiency standpoint in our warehouses, et cetera, to try and offset that as much as we can..

Yeah. We're also extremely focused on everything from pricing to promotion, again, to accelerate certain categories that by nature of the category is higher-margin. So certainly mix is going to have a lot to do with that as well as looking to get back to a better strategic balance of unit and price point growth..

Okay. Great. Thanks a lot..

Thank you. The next question is from Matthew Harrigan of Wunderlich Securities. Your line is open..

Thank you. Firstly, Comcast X1 is about I think 35% of their video base now and certainly has some characteristics akin to OTT platforms, Roku being cloud-based and just behaviorally what it offers the consumer.

Can you give us any sense of how you (44:07) HSN is faring in that category in terms of viewer activity and how that translates to purchases? And then, secondly, as much activity as I've seen with you on the merchandising side right now, but I'm curious whether you're still going to replace your – I think still open Chief Merchandising Officer position?.

Do you want to take the first one?.

Sure, Matthew. And we saw you also on CNBC earlier this week. You looked very good and sounded very smart relative to Hulu and over-the-top.

So regarding the Comcast X1 platform, we have not seen any differences between the performance on X1 versus other cable providers platforms, with the exception of the fact that with that moved to the X1 platform, we no longer have our Shop by Remote technology on that.

We are working with Comcast to get that back on the platform because we know that that's a huge driver of customer engagement. So I would say that is the one difference that we're seeing on the X1 platform..

And then on the merchandising side, to your point, we have done a lot of work in each of the categories of the business with very strong Senior Vice Presidents. We have made some organizational consolidations, so there are five key platforms of business.

As you know, we brought in new Senior Vice President of Beauty not too long ago, who's very strong; Alicia Valencia, who had run Bobby Brown North America. We just brought in Catherine Coquillard for jewelry. We consolidated culinary, electronics, and fitness under Sandy Conrad, who's been certainly successful long-term in the company.

Chris Nicola in Home. And then Vanessa Dusold in Fashion, very strong. And they have really been driving a lot of the efforts in the business, certainly along with Bill Brand and myself.

Having said that, we continue to look for an appropriate head merchant but again, we are going to be very specific and stringent into the qualities we are looking for and we're leveraging our strong team in the process..

Thanks, Mindy..

Thank you. The next question is from Victor Anthony of Axiom Capital. Your line is open..

Thanks. Thanks for taking the call. Mindy, the retail environment has certainly been challenging across the board except for the pure play Internet retailers, with the exception of eBay, which I think has its own set of unique challenges.

To what extent do you think your business, the TV shopping business, the Cornerstone brand, has been impacted by threats on the Internet?.

I think the entire retail environment, as you say, is going through a tremendous amount of change and volatility as everyone really looks to find a very specific point of differentiation. And that's competition from everywhere, not just pure play.

And the way we think about it is, in order to really compete effectively, we need that maniacal focus on very differentiated and exclusive product. We need to create experiences beyond just a commerce relationship with our customers.

We need to use our data to create significant personalization and meeting with the customer and in the right selected instances create that 360-degree experience like what we are doing with Ballard and where we're looking.

And that's what we have to be very, very focused on, not just us but in general that's going to be very key to differentiation going forward..

Thanks. And for Judy, you mentioned again the supply chain automation that you expect to save $10 million to $20 million annually.

Just help me understand better how you get to that $10 million to $20 million annual savings number?.

Sure. It's a much more efficient operation. We are able to consolidate two warehouses into one warehouse. It utilizes less labor and it's more efficient from a supply chain getting the packages out faster to the customer..

Okay. Thank you..

Thank you. There appears to be no further questions. I will now turn the call back over to Ms. Grossman..

Very well. Thank you, everyone, and I look forward to keep you updated on our progress. Have a great day..

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference. You may now disconnect. Good day..