Greetings, and welcome to the Byrna Technologies fiscal third quarter 2022 earnings conference call and webcast. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded and all participants are in a listen-only mode. Before turning the call over to Bryan Ganz, Byrna Technologies Chief Executive Officer, I will read the Safe Harbor statement. Some discussions made today may include forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from the statements made today. Please refer to Byrna's most recent 10-K and 10-Q filings for a more complete description of risk factors that could affect these projections and assumptions. The company assumes no obligations to update forward-looking statements as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise.
As this call will include references to non-GAAP results, please see the press release in the Investor section of our website, ir.byrna.com, for further information regarding forward-looking statements and reconciliations of non-GAAP results to GAAP results. I'll now turn the call over to Mr. Bryan Ganz. Sir, please go ahead.
Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Byrna's fiscal year 2022 third quarter earnings call. As usual, David North will be discussing our financial results, after which time I will provide some additional color on the quarter and discuss recent events. I'd like to start by turning the call over to David so he can discuss our third quarter financial performance. David and I will be taking questions at the conclusion of the presentation. David?
Thanks, Bryan, and thanks everyone for joining us today. Let's start with a walk down the third quarter's income statement. Third quarter revenues came in at $12.4 million, an increase of 43% over revenues of $8.7 million in the third quarter of 2021. Revenues were also up $0.8 million from the second quarter of this year, making this the third consecutive quarter of revenue growth in 2022. We ended the quarter with $1.7 million of unshipped orders, all of which we expect to ship this quarter. Byrna's gross profit margin was 55.4% after $0.2 million of charges for inventory reserves and another $0.2 millions of unfavorable manufacturing variances.
Our move of our manufacturing operations into our larger new greenfield facility in Fort Wayne, Indiana, went well, and we're back up, running smoothly and experiencing higher levels of both efficiency and quality in this larger, more efficient facility. Nevertheless, some minor startup inefficiencies are inevitable in such a move, and the unfavorable manufacturing variances were a result of those. Gross margin was favorably affected by a variance of about $0.1 million as a result of receiving our first raw material shipments by ocean freight. We anticipate further margin benefits as we transition more of our incoming shipments to ocean freight from the far more expensive air freight shipments that the company's been relying on for the past two years.
The reason we're now in a position to transition to ocean freight is that we've built up adequate inventory levels, so we can wait the 60 days or more that it takes to sail a container across the Pacific. The increase in levels of both finished goods and raw materials should significantly reduce the risk of any unforeseen supply chain disruptions. Operating expenses were $8.3 million in the third quarter, which is up from $6.7 million for the same period one year ago, but is relatively flat in comparison with the past three fiscal quarters. Our non-GAAP Adjusted EBITDA measure, which we use as an estimate of cash flow from ongoing operations, was a positive $0.3 million in the third quarter compared to a loss of $0.8 million for the third quarter of fiscal 2021.
Now let's take a look at the balance sheet. Despite our positive adjusted EBITDA, cash dropped $1.4 million from $25.9 million at the end of the second quarter to $24.5 million at the end of the third quarter of 2022. That's because inventory increased by $1.9 million from $13.5 million at the end of the second quarter to $15.4 million. As I've explained, we've built inventory during the third quarter to allow for less expensive but slower ocean freight. We've also built inventory levels in anticipation of the traditionally very strong fourth quarter. We expect to see a reduction in inventory levels by year-end as a result of the expected surge in holiday sales during the fourth quarter.
Total assets were up $1.2 million from the end of the second quarter to $58 million. At the same time, total liabilities were down $0.4 million, with an increase in shareholders' equity of $1.6 million in comparison to the end of the previous quarter. The company continues to have no current or long-term debt. Now I'll hand it back over to Bryan.
Thank you very much, David. Financial results for this third quarter demonstrate continuing improvement on both top and bottom lines. The company posted its third consecutive quarter of top line growth. Excluding the second quarter of last year, which included $8 million of incremental sales from an unexpected endorsement from Sean Hannity, this quarter's sales of $12.4 million set a new record. Moreover, it marked an important inflection point for the company as Byrna was profitable on an adjusted EBITDA basis. The improving profitability is due to improving operating leverage. As David pointed out, sales grew by 43%, while OpEx grew by only 24%. Byrna expects to see further improvements in the fourth quarter of this year. We've issued revenue guidance of $16 million-$18 million for the quarter.
This would be a new record for the company, without any exception, and compared to the same period of last year, would represent 52% growth at the midpoint of the range. With operating expenses expected to be in line with the run rate over the last four quarters, we expect further improvement in all measures of profitability in the fourth quarter. We expect to see continued top-line growth in 2023 as Byrna continues to benefit from growing brand awareness. We can see evidence of increased consumer awareness in our web traffic numbers. For the first nine months of this year, 2022, Byrna registered 5.7 million web sessions on byrna.com and another 2.3 million on amazon.com, for a total of eight million web sessions. This compares to 4.2 million total web sessions during the same period of last year.
In particular, in fiscal year 2023, we expect to see continued growth in Amazon sales as we're seeing momentum build in that channel. We also expect to see significant growth in sales of aerosol products under the Fox Labs and BYRNA BAD GUY REPELLENT labels, as we have only had these products for sale during the second half of 2022. Moreover, these price point products may prove to be particularly strong sellers during what we perceive to be more difficult economic times in 2023. Along the same lines, we expect sales of the launcher products acquired with the Mission Less Lethal acquisition, specifically the TCR and the M4, to add to 2023 sales, as they also were not available for the full year of 2022.
Finally, we plan to introduce 12 Gauge ammunition and the Byrna LE launcher within the next several months, and these products should have a material impact on 2023 sales. Despite our expectations for a strong fourth quarter and for continued growth through next year, the economy is clearly softening, and whether we experience a soft landing or a recession in 2023, we do expect that the headwinds will negatively impact the demand for discretionary consumer products such as the Byrna SD launcher. As a result, we do not expect to see continued 40%-50% growth in 2023 as we have seen these last several quarters, and we have accordingly tempered our expectations.
We are expecting more tempered growth in 2023, with revenues growing by 10%-30% rather than the 40%-50% year-over-year growth we've seen recently. Given our expectations of more difficult economic environment in 2023, Byrna is in the process of trimming operating costs. Our goal is to reduce operating expenses by 5% year-over-year, excluding such variable expenses as credit card fees and so forth. As part of this process, we will be de-emphasizing less productive areas of the business. This past year, Byrna embarked on a number of initiatives designed to drive growth. Some, like the Fox Labs acquisition and the Mission Less Lethal acquisition, have been extremely successful, resulting in annual sales that will be a multiple of the purchase price with little incremental overhead.
Others, like the Ballistipac's acquisition, which formed the basis of our School Safety Program, have been less successful despite our best efforts and our sincere belief in the project, as high overhead costs associated with this program and slow sales have resulted in poor ROI. Accordingly, Byrna will be shutting down its School Safety initiative, although we will continue to offer the School Safety products, specifically the Byrna Shield and Byrna Ballistipac, online and through our dealer network. This should result in annual savings of more than $600,000. In conjunction with other planned cuts, Byrna intends to reduce its operating expense budget by more than $1.6 million in 2023.
As we are now cash flow positive from the perspective of adjusted EBITDA, and we have no acquisitions planned, we should have more than adequate cash on hand to fund operations for the foreseeable future. We do not believe that the market is valuing Byrna's stock appropriately. Accordingly, we plan to reinstitute our previously approved stock buyback program. In conclusion, we've made excellent progress so far this year in terms of both growing the top line and controlling expenses. We believe we've reached the point in terms of operating leverage that will allow us to consistently generate positive cash flow with strong year-over-year revenue growth. Now I'd like to turn it back to the Operator, and we'll be happy to take questions from our analysts. Thank you.
Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment please while we poll for your questions. Our first question has come from the line of Jeff Van Sinderen with B. Riley. Please proceed with your questions.
Hi. Good morning, everyone. Just wanted to start with a couple things on the P&L. Maybe thoughts on expectations for gross margin for Q4? Maybe outlook there directionally for next year. Just wanted to follow up also on SG&A. I think you said $1.6 million was what you were planning to reduce SG&A by for next year. Any other color you have in terms of how we should be modeling SG&A for Q4 next year?
Yeah. I'm going to discuss the margins, and then I'll turn it over to David for the SG&A part of your question. We expect margins to dip slightly in Q4 as a result of the holiday specials that we will be offering. We saw this last year, and we expect it to impact one or two margin points. We do expect there to be a continuing upward trend. As David pointed out, we benefited from a $100,000 favorable freight variance in Q3, and that was the result of a single shipment of components coming in from Malaysia by ocean freight rather than air freight.
As we start to put more and more of the components and ammunition on the water, we expect that to have a continuing positive impact on margins. Next year, we expect our average margin to be several percentage points higher than it is this year. David, can you address the SG&A issues?
Yeah. Would you repeat the exact question, please?
Yeah, sure. I'm just, you know, was just trying to get a sense of how you're thinking about operating expenses for Q4 next year. Realize that you're making some cuts. I think you pointed out $1.6 million or so for next year. Just trying to get a sense of, you know, how we should or how you're thinking about that $1.6 million or whatever that total is.
Sure
For next year.
Sure. I mean, you know, a year ago, a little more than a year ago, we had a very successful public issue, and we had quite a lot of funding and we said that we would invest a lot of that working capital in growing the business, and we did. We've gone through a phase of big, you know, spending on seeing what would work here and there. Bryan mentioned the School Safety Program and so on. What we've done now is, as part of the annual budget preparation process, Senior Management has gone through very carefully line by line to look at what of these investments are performing and what aren't.
Bryan mentioned one example, as I said, was with School Safety, but we've gone much more down into detail than that. Specifically, you know, one of the places where we really ramped up spending was marketing spend. We have said that we would look at that and we would analyze return on advertising dollars to decide what was working and what wasn't. As part of this review, we've gone through in detail exactly where we're spending. The result is that we've found this $1.6 million worth of detailed expenditures that we think can be eliminated because they aren't returning or because we can be more efficient. It's really been that kind of a detailed review of the whole organization.
I would add that I feel strongly that we've not cut into muscle or bone. We've identified, as David said, $1.6 million of expenses that we really felt we were not getting, you know, any significant return on investment. We were able to remove those, I think, without having any negative impact on the growth prospects of the company.
Yeah. I was just saying to Bryan yesterday, a lot of my background is in more mature industrial manufacturing, and I'm used to going through this process on a regular basis. But I'm used to it being a lot more difficult, I think, because in a more mature company, you've done it so many times that it's very difficult to find you know, more marginal success in this sort of thing. Byrna is a very young company. It's you know, it was quite a productive exercise to go through and find these efficiencies.
Okay. Fair enough. That's helpful. Just as a follow-up to that, given that broadly speaking, let's say, the more affluent consumer generally seems to be holding up better than the lower-end consumer, how are you thinking about that phenomenon as it relates to your product line? I guess, thoughts on evolving marketing to go after maybe more of that high-end consumer. I know you mentioned the aerosols as being perhaps more accessible.
Yeah. Look, I think that, you're correct. We're seeing auto sales start to fall off, except in the luxury segment of the market. It is clear that, the high-end consumer is not being affected to the same extent as, the average Joe. Our product is a relatively high-end product. We think our demographic is a relatively wealthy demographic. As we start planning our marketing push for next year, we will be focusing on demographics that are wealthier. We're going to be targeting, RV owners. We're gonna be targeting boat owners. We're gonna be targeting business owners, people that own liquor stores and convenience stores. We're very cognizant of the fact that, in the infamous words of John Dillinger as to why he robs banks, because that's where the money is. We are going after the market where the money is, and that is the wealthier consumer.
Okay, thanks. If I could just squeeze one more in here, and I'll turn it over. Just anything you could tell us about the response to the BAD GUY REPELLENT launch in the dealer channel and then on Amazon and Walmart.
The BAD GUY REPELLENT launch has been very well received. We started off with just the Fox Labs brand, and we are continuing to offer the Fox Labs brand because it is so well known in law enforcement. What we're beginning to see is sales of BAD GUY REPELLENT are starting to eclipse sales of the Fox Labs spray. We think we're just at the very, very early stages of this. These aerosol markets are very, very large markets, you know, well in excess of $100 million domestically. We think we can take a significant share of that market.
Okay. Thanks very much. I'll jump back in the queue.
Thank you. Our next question has come from the line of Jim McIlree with Dawson James. Please proceed with your question.
Thank you. Good morning.
Hey, Jim.
Hi. Can you talk about what needs to be done in order to get the LE and the 12 Gauge launched? You know, what are the final steps on getting that to the market?
The LE is in testing right now. We've done our first engineering build. We're now in a pre-production build. As you can imagine, with products like the Byrna, we have to ensure the safety of our consumers, and there's a lot of testing that goes into it. We are extremely pleased with the Byrna LE. We think that consumers and law enforcement will find it to be significantly improved from the SD in terms of both the speed of the rounds, the feel of the launcher, the trigger pull is significantly lighter, in terms of its range, operating range. It will be able to operate at, you know, at very cold temperatures. It does require a lot of testing.
We would expect this to go into serial production. I think we're scheduled for November 15th for it to go into serial production. Between now and then, we're just gonna be doing, you know, a significant amount of testing of the products. The 12 Gauge, we were forced to pivot a little bit on the 12 Gauge because of the unavailability of 12 Gauge hulls. We had originally designed the product to work in a standard hull, like a Fiocchi hull. Because of the shortage of ammunition, these hulls are not readily available. We've pivoted to producing this in a plastic injection molded hull. We think over the long run, this is a much better solution for two reasons. One, it differentiates the product.
It will not look like a 12 Gauge Round, so it will never be confused 12 Gauge Round. I think one of the risks with a less 12 Gauge Round is that people might think they're using less-lethal and instead put a lethal round in their shotgun. By going with a plastic injection molded hull, we will be able to get away from that risk. Secondly, we're able to control our own destiny. Right now, you know, this was a good wake-up call when we were unable to get, you know, the number of hulls we wanted. We were able to secure hulls in the tens of thousands when we need them in the hundreds of thousands or frankly, millions of hulls.
By going with the plastic injection molded hull, we'll be able to control our own destiny. We do have a lot of experience with plastic injection molded hulls, because if you remember, the genesis of this business was the 40 mm business, and we use a plastic injection molded hull for that. That put us back a little bit, but we do expect to be in production later this quarter. We are going to have an official kickoff at SHOT Show in Las Vegas the week of January 20. We'll be introducing the 12 Gauge at Range Day, so we'll be able to allow people to fire these rounds. I think, you know, we expect it to be extremely well received.
Great. Thank you. I was a little bit confused about your answer to the questions on gross margin in Q4. I was uncertain as to whether or not you were talking about the total gross margin being impacted by 100 or 200 basis points, or if there was just an aspect of gross margins that was getting impacted from incentives in Q4. Can you clarify that for me, please?
Yeah. We think the total gross margin will be negatively impacted by 100-200 basis points. Keep in mind that we will be offering large specials. We've got the second Amazon Prime Day coming up in a couple of days. In order to participate in Amazon Prime Day, we need to give a 20% discount. We will be giving, you know, relatively significant discounts on our own website for our Black Friday sales and Cyber Monday sales. Of course, we also then have to give, if not the exact same discount, somewhat commensurate discounts to our dealers when we drop below our MAP pricing and we create a MAP holiday. For Q4, we do expect overall margins to decline by 100-200 basis points. That said, we expect to see sales volumes increase pretty substantially.
Right. That decline is measured against Q3, or it's measured against the prior year quarter?
No, measured against Q3.
Fantastic. All right. Thanks a lot, guys. That's all for me.
Thanks, Jim.
Thank you. Our next question has come from the line of Jeff Van Sinderen with B. Riley. Please proceed with your questions.
Thanks. Just a quick couple follow-ups here. What were the inventory reserves taken in Q3? I think you mentioned inventory reserves.
There were various things. About half of it was South Africa really went through all their inventories and did a cleanup so that we would avoid that kind of a thing in Q4, where it's happened in the past. We put a small reserve on inventory in transit to Amazon, where there are some things that we can't quite reconcile with, but that's maybe $40,000. We also put a reserve in for certain product that we intend to send to customers who have already purchased things. Some of the first shipments of our 7-Round Mag had some slight problems in them, so we sent out some merchandise to those customers, and that was part of it as well. A bunch of small things.
Okay. Wanted to just turn to international for a moment, if we could. If you could speak more about the opportunities you're seeing internationally.
The international opportunities are starting to really take off over the last several quarters, as you've seen in our results. The international market for Byrna is somewhat different than the domestic market. Domestically, we are, you know, very significantly focused on the consumer market. Internationally, law enforcement is a much bigger channel for us. We did have a sale in Q2 of over $1 million that went to the Indonesian federal police. We are talking to a number of other large police agencies right now. We expect to see those sales go through in Q4. As we've announced, we have a cooperation with one of the two gun companies in South America, Bersa.
They think that because of the restrictions on owning firearms in Argentina and throughout South America, frankly, that the Byrna will be a really attractive product. We expect to see continued growth. The one caveat of continued growth internationally is that our margins are lower. We project our margins for sales into South Africa at only 40% and our margins generally for international at 50%. We expect to see a relatively rapid growth next year in international sales, albeit at somewhat lower margins.
Okay. Thanks for taking my questions and best of luck.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. Our next question has come from the line of Jim McIlree with Dawson James. Please proceed with your questions.
Yeah. Thanks again. You talk about gross margins improving because of your shift to ocean freight, and there's been recent stories about significant declines in ocean freight costs. I'm wondering if the margin projections that you've talked about include that significant reduction in ocean freights recently, or if that could be an even larger improvement than what you're suggesting.
We are not building in the significant reduction in ocean freight costs because we are not currently shipping by ocean freight. Ocean freight, even at its peak, even with these crazy ocean freight rates, was a fraction of the air freight rate. Because we've sort of been operating behind the eight ball from the day we sold the first Byrna, and we've, you know, been in short supply, we've been shipping everything into our factories by air freight, and we've been shipping everything out of our factories by air freight. To give you a very quick example, our landed cost for a kinetic round is 700% higher than our FOB cost.
If you think about that for a second, we have the opportunity to save about 600% of our cost, our landed cost, by transitioning the shipment of these kinetic rounds to ocean freight. We do see a significant improvement in bottom line. How much? You know, is somewhat difficult to quantify. I think the bigger issue for us is not what is the rate of ocean freight, but rather what is the availability of ocean freight. You know, as David spoke about in the earlier part of this discussion, he said that, you know, we built up inventory so that we could, you know, deal with a 60-day delay of containers coming across the water. Right now, a lot of what we're faced with is the inability to find containers.
I think as the economy softens a little bit and containers free up, that will be more meaningful to us in terms of reducing our cost of freight than the actual ocean freight rates.
Yeah. You asked how much is built into the estimates that we just discussed for the fourth quarter, and the answer is, what's built in is what we expect to happen. What we expect to happen is only a little bit of the potential that's still out there. In other words, we're starting to experience this, but getting everything on the water and getting all, you know, all the potential that we can out of it, it's slow going.
Yeah. That's gonna take most of next year to transition everything to ocean freight.
And so-
We expect next year to see improving margins quarter by quarter.
Would it be fair to say that most of the shipments right now are air freight and most of the shipments by the end of next year will be ocean freight? Is a good estimate linear or moving from zero to 100?
Yeah. I said in this third quarter, we saw the very beginnings of favorable impact from ocean freight. We got, you know, our first,
One shipment.
Yeah. Our first container shipment in from the Far East in this quarter. We haven't even really started working on ammo. We've just started, you know, measuring the potential for what that will be. As Bryan said, forgetting, you know, all the stuff that's that is coming from the Far East, either resourced into the United States or securing containers and ships and getting them to leave China, that's gonna take a long time. Then over, you know, the course of next year, we expect to see improving margins, mainly because of this. But we also, you know, are seeing that potential, a great potential for international sales is gonna cause a slight shift in our sales mix to those lower margin international sales.
We'll be putting all of that together as we budget next year. The net of it, though, we have run through the budget numbers already at a first pass. The net of it is that we expect moderately improving gross margin percentages.
All right. Very good. Thank you.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to Bryan Ganz for any closing comments.
Thank you, Daryl. I just would like to thank everybody for joining us this morning. As always, you know, we are open to speaking with the analysts whenever they'd like to set up a call. Thank you very much and have a good day.
This does conclude today's teleconference. We appreciate your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Enjoy the rest of your day.