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Medifast Inc (MED 0.92%)
Q4Â 2018 Earnings Conference Call
Feb. 26, 2019, 4:30 p.m. ET
Contents:
- Prepared Remarks
- Questions and Answers
- Call Participants
See all our earnings call transcripts.
Prepared Remarks:
Operator
Good afternoon and welcome to Medifast Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2018 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. (Operator Instructions) Please note today's event is being recorded.
I would now like to turn the conference over to Katie Turner with ICR. Please go ahead.
Katie Turner -- Investor Contact
Good afternoon and welcome to Medifast's fourth quarter and full year 2018 earnings conference call. On the call with me today are Dan Chard, Chief Executive Officer; and Tim Robinson, Chief Financial Officer.
By now, everyone should have access to the earnings release for the period ended December 31, 2018 that went out this afternoon at approximately 4:05 P.M. Eastern Time. If you've not received the release, it's available on the Investor Relations portion of Medifast website at www.medifastinc.com. This call is being webcast and a replay will be available on the company's website.
Before we begin, we'd like to remind everyone that the prepared remarks contain forward-looking statements and management may make additional forward-looking statements in response to your questions. The words believe, expect, anticipate, and other similar expressions generally identify forward-looking statements. These statements do not guarantee future performance and therefore undue reliance should not be placed on them. Actual results could differ materially from those projected in any forward-looking statements.
Medifast assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking projections that may be made in today's release or on today's call. All the forward-looking statements contained herein speak only as of the date of this call.
And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to Medifast's CEO, Dan Chard.
Daniel R. Chard -- Chief Executive Officer
Thank you, Katie. Good afternoon, everyone. We're pleased to discuss our fourth quarter and full year 2018 results with you today. I will provide a brief overview of our business performance. In addition, I will share the progress our team has made against the objectives that we've set out to accomplish two years ago and provide a clear perspective of what we plan to do moving forward, as we continue our growth in 2019 and beyond. And we'll then review our financial results in more detail and share our 2019 first quarter and full year guidance. We will then be available to answer any questions.
We're very pleased with our fourth quarter and full year 2018 results and reflect the unified and aligned execution by both our corporate and field leaders against the plan we began to focus on two years ago, allowing us to achieve over $500 million in annual revenue, an increase of 66% year-over-year, a tremendous corporate milestone for Medifast. The success can be attributed to our efforts to align the organization and our field leadership behind a repeatable business rhythm focused on our long-term mission to offer the world lifelong transformation, one healthy habit at a time.
Importantly, we generated these results, while accelerating a level of strategic investment to support our long-term growth plans, to build our brand platform and operations, as we continue to improve the scalability of our business. We believe we are building a trusted transparent and effective direct sales health and wellness community through our integrated coach model. This leverages nearly 40 years of insights focused on how to deliver the best-in-class service and product experiences for clients who are engaged in their health and wellness journey.
Our success in creating the OPTAVIA Coach community and achieving the desired results for our clients is reflected in the growing number of active earning coaches and the average revenue each active earning coach generates. We ended the year with a record 24,100 active earning coaches, who enthusiastically support clients in achieving their health and wellness goals. Average quarterly revenue per active earning coach increased 26% to $5,756.
Our integrated coach model along with the continued development of our OPTAVIA brand platform creates a strong foundation for continued business growth. We now have 72 OPTAVIA-branded consumable products to help our coaches build personalized plans to support clients on their health and wellness journeys. Our product development and marketing teams remain focused on the development of future products to support healthy habit creation for our coaches and clients.
The improvement of these key metrics combined with a consistent focus on our mission, drove our strong fourth quarter and annual financial results. As a result, revenue and profitability exceeded our expectations both for the quarter and the year. Our strong business fundamentals helped accelerate revenue growth during 2018 from 40% in the first quarter and nearly 55% in the second quarter and more than 80% in the third quarter and 87% growth in the fourth quarter of 2018. This marks the seventh consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue growth and the eighth consecutive quarter of sequential revenue improvement.
The fourth quarter was also the largest revenue quarter in history of the company, resulting in fourth quarter diluted earnings per share of $1.30 ahead of our fourth quarter guidance of $1.15 to $1.20. Our strong financial results in 2018 and our confidence in the business enabled us to continue to fulfill our commitments to deliver attractive total shareholder returns. For the year, we paid $23.2 million in quarterly cash dividends and recently increased our dividend 56% to $0.75. We also repurchased $30 million of Medifast common stock during the year.
In 2016, our Board of Directors sent a strong message of confidence when they challenged our management team with a very aggressive long-term goal to reward shareholders. Our goal is to generate 35% annual compounded total shareholder return by the end of 2019, which we believe would require us to nearly double the size of the business to $500 million in revenue and grow the OPTAVIA Coach network to 30,000 coaches.
Shortly thereafter, we aligned all of our senior executive goals and long term incentives around the same three-year aggressive objectives. I'm pleased to report that the team achieved this long-term objective of 35% total shareholder return at the first measurable opportunity in January of 2019. Additionally, we generated over $500 million in revenues, nearly a year ahead of schedule and are trending toward an excess of 30,000 coaches by the end of 2019. We're very proud of these achievements and we feel that we are very well positioned for the next chapter in our business transformation.
Through strong revenue growth and disciplined investments, we believe Medifast remains well positioned to deliver a long-term sustainable growth and value to our shareholders as well as meaningful improvements to the lives of OPTAVIA clients across the country, as they learn new healthy habits that make their lives better. We believe we will accomplish this in partnership with our growing community of OPTAVIA coaches, who joined us in helping clients achieve optimal health and well-being. With that in mind, I would like review a few recent highlights that demonstrate our ongoing efforts to align with OPTAVIA coaches as we work together to continue to execute our strategic growth initiatives.
In the fourth quarter, we hosted our Sundance XIII Advance Leadership Retreat in Sundance Utah. It was an opportunity for nearly 300 of our OPTAVIA leaders to be trained by successful business leaders in our OPTAVIA community. It's been exciting to experience OPTAVIA coaches advancing to leader status within the coach community. These leaders are the foundation of our domestic and international expansion strategy. We recognize these leaders for their success, growth and development through our compensation program as well as through specialized leadership training. Our fourth quarter was also an important time to further prepare for the upcoming international expansion into Hong Kong and Singapore.
During the quarter, we successfully hired additional personnel in the market to support our upcoming launch and refined our final product formulations packaging content and messaging as well. Our technology teams have also been hard at work readying our new mobile applications for our launch. Our preparations are nearly final and I'm pleased to report that we will be ready to sign up our first clients and coaches and ship our first orders by June 30 of this year.
This is an exciting milestone for our growing company. I want to emphasize that our expectations for this inaugural year in these new markets is modest as our business model focuses on building a base of clients, who are successful in achieving their health goals and then developing a portion of those clients into successful OPTAVIA coaches. Over time we believe these markets will be an important part of our growth story. In the meantime, we believe we can continue to expand significantly in the United States and leverage this market to build our business in Asia. We're proud of significant progress in technology we are making to support our scalable business model in the U.S. and abroad. Just this month we successfully launched our new e-commerce platform. This new state-of-the-art cloud-based platform will improve our coach and client experience while enabling both multilingual and multi-currency capabilities further preparing us for the expansion -- for our expansion plans. We were also pleased to kick off our process earlier this month to implement a new enterprise resource planning system, a leading cloud-based ERP platform that will enable our financial supply chain functions to support our rapidly growing business for the years to come.
This important initiative is expected to be completed by year-end at an estimated SG&A cost of $5 million in 2019. These investments are important to support our continued business momentum.
We continue to partner with world-class organizations to support our growth. In mid-2018, we partnered with a global logistics company to open a new distribution center in Nevada. I'm pleased to report that this transition went very smoothly and had enabled us to subsequently expand our capabilities further to support our rapid growth.
Similarly during the fourth quarter, we transitioned our client support contact center functions to a leading global third-party contact center in Nevada to further expand our capacity and gain multilingual capabilities to support our Hong Kong and Singapore markets. This will now allow us to place more focus on supporting our rapidly growing coach community with dedicated internal coach support resources.
In addition, we are enhancing our supply chain capabilities through key initiatives in 2019 including the expansion of our Maryland manufacturing facility, raw materials warehouse and distribution center. These initiatives are already under way and will help us support our growing business.
Last quarter we introduced our very first International Leadership Advancement Trip, which will take place in March. This new qualifying event is designed to reward business leaders who exhibit specific business-building skills with exclusive training and development opportunities to further advance their business.
We have approximately 2,500 coaches and guests who qualify to attend this weeklong event. We strategically invested approximately $7 million in the third and fourth quarters of 2018 for this first ever leadership event to support ongoing growth in 2019 and beyond.
Earlier in my remarks today, I mentioned we recently met two of our three long-term objectives that we established in 2016 ahead of schedule. As a result, we are now setting our sights on our next set of long-term objectives. In January, we began sharing our long-term vision with investors to double the size of our business every three to four years while increasing our operating margin toward a three to four-year target of at least 15%.
With that in mind, we have established specific three-year goals for our management team. They are; to grow top line revenue and operating margin to $1 billion and 15%, respectively by the end of 2021; and to grow the number of active earning coaches to 50,000 by the end of 2021. Similar to our process in 2016, we are now taking the important step of aligning these expansive goals to our entire management team and the field as we all work together to achieve success.
Our 2019 guidance that Tim will share with you in a moment is reflective of our confidence in our ability to continue to grow the business to reach these long-term objectives.
As we go forward, we believe we will generate future growth by focusing on four key areas. We expect them to enable our ongoing expansion of our OPTAVIA coach community. The first area is to continue to develop and refine our integrated coach model; second, leverage technology to optimize business efficiency; third, drive product innovation in support of our mission; and fourth, expand into new demographic, segments, and geographies.
We're fortunate to operate in a very large addressable market. Over two-thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese and that number continues to rise at 5% a year. In the U.S. alone, if you think about health and wellness, it's a $194 billion market and the U.S. addressable weight loss market is a $17 billion business.
We believe our growth goals align with what we have learned over the past two years and we will focus on what has worked well and the insights that have allowed us to get to this point. We will continue to work collaboratively with our corporate and field leaders on activities that support OPTAVIA's repeatable business rhythm, focused on our long-term mission to offer the world lifelong transformation, one healthy habit at the time.
In summary we're incredibly pleased with the results we have achieved in 2018. Our entire team remains focused on delivering strong returns to our shareholders and we're excited about our future opportunities and the team we have in place to execute our growth potential.
With that, I would like to turn our call over to our CFO, Tim Robinson.
Timothy G. Robinson -- Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, Dan, and good afternoon, everyone. I'll review our financial results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2018. Then I'll provide our first quarter guidance and discuss our 2019 outlook.
As Dan commented revenue in the fourth quarter of 2018 exceeded our expectations, increasing 87% to a record $145.8 million from $78 million in the prior year period. We ended the quarter with a record 24,100 active earning coaches, compared to just 15,000 in the same period last year and 22,600 in the third quarter of 2018.
Average revenue per active earning coach for the quarter increased 26.2% to $5,756 compared to $4,562 for the fourth quarter last year. The growth and productivity resulted in part from business initiatives accelerating new coach conversion and new client acquisition rates aided by the ongoing transition to higher priced OPTAVIA products. OPTAVIA branded represented 72% of our total company consumable units sold in the fourth quarter, compared to 51% in the prior year period.
Gross profit for the fourth quarter of 2018 increased 84.5% to $109.1 million, compared to $59.1 million in the prior year period. Gross profit margin as a percentage of net revenue decreased 100 basis points with 74.8% versus 75.8% in the fourth quarter of 2017.
The decrease in gross margin percentage was driven by increased inventory reserved for a select group of products as well as higher freight costs resulting from strong year-end consumer demand.
Selling general and administrative expenses for the fourth quarter of 2018 increased $39.6 million to $89.3 million compared to $49.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2017, primarily as a result of higher OPTAVIA commission expense and consulting costs related to IT projects to support our future growth. SG&A as a percentage of sales decreased 240 basis points to 61.2% of total revenue, compared to 63.6% in the fourth quarter of 2017.
As OPTAVIA revenue becomes an even larger portion of our overall sales mix, the commission rate as a percentage of total company revenues increased 350 basis points to 40.8% of total revenues in the fourth quarter of 2018, compared to 37.3% in the fourth quarter last year.
We have been able to more than offset this increase along with strategic investments Dan mentioned earlier with the operating efficiency that we have in other SG&A areas such as labor and advertising.
Our effective tax rate was 22.4% compared to 25.4% in the fourth quarter of 2017. This decrease is primarily a result of the decrease in the federal statutory rate pursuant to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act rate of 14% offset by 2.1% due to the elimination of domestic manufacturing reduction, 5% due to a decrease in windfalls related to stock compensation and 3% due to a change in temporary differences, resulting from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
Net income in the fourth quarter of 2018 was $15.7 million or $1.30 per diluted share based on approximately 12 million shares outstanding. Fourth quarter 2017 net income was $7.3 million or $0.60 per diluted share based on approximately 12.1 million shares outstanding.
Our balance sheet remains very strong with stockholders' equity of $109.1 million and working capital of $85.2 million as of December 31, 2018. Cash, cash equivalents and investment securities as of December 31, 2018 increased $2.2 million to $101 million compared to $98.8 million at December 31, 2017. The company remains free of interest-bearing debt.
Inventory increased $19.6 million to $38.9 million as of December 31, 2018, compared to $19.3 million in the prior year period due to an intentional effort to grow inventory levels to meet current and future demand.
Our Board of Directors declared a quarterly cash dividend in the fourth quarter of $9.1 million or $0.75 per share payable on February 7th, representing a 56% increase in the prior $0.42 quarterly cash dividend. We also repurchased approximately 68,000 shares of Medifast common stock worth $10 million during the fourth quarter. There are approximately 665,000 shares of common stock available for repurchase under our existing share repurchase program. Our management team and Board of Directors remain committed to enhancing the value for our stockholders.
Now turning to our guidance. We expect first quarter revenue to be in the range of $150 million to $155 million and earnings per diluted share to be in the range of $1.50 to $1.55 per diluted share. For the full year 2019, we expect revenue in the range of $700 million to $720 million and earnings per diluted share to be in the range of $6.45 to $6.65 per diluted share.
Our fiscal year 2019 guidance assumes a 22.5% to 23.5% effective tax rate. We do not expect our international activities to be material in 2019 and we do not anticipate reporting these results separately during the year.
We expect the 2019 cadence of spending to be similar to 2018, with our annual convention spending occurring in the third quarter of the year and the cost of the 2020 leadership advancement event to be incurred in the third and fourth quarter of the year.
While our business is generally not capital intensive, as Dan mentioned, we do have plans in 2019 to invest in our growth. As a result, we expect capital expenditures in 2019 to be approximately $15 million, or 2% of revenues. We are in a fortunate position to be able to invest ahead of our future growth, to support our business needs.
Well, that concludes our operational and financial overview. We appreciate your interest in Medifast. And Dan and I are now available to take your questions. Operator?
Questions and Answers:
Operator
We will now begin the question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions) The first question comes from Frank Camma with Sidoti. Please go ahead.
Frank Camma -- Sidoti -- Analyst
Good afternoon, guys. Thanks for taking the question. So just a question on the guidance. Tim, you said you don't expect material amount of revenue this year from international, so obviously still domestic. And just doing the -- backing into the math here on the guidance, it looks like you're still forecasting pretty strong growth on the active health coach count.
So can you talk about sort of the cadence about that and how you -- what sort of conviction you have with that, given that you're not going into new markets? From my math, it looks like, the first quarter growth is somewhat muted, relative to the rest of the year, because it looks like you have to get beyond your 30,000 health coach count, by the end of the year to hit those numbers.
Timothy G. Robinson -- Chief Financial Officer
Yes. So, Frank, I think, on the international front, kind of, the rhythm of our business starts with gaining customers and those customers -- a portion of those customers become Health Coaches. So that's kind of how our business works. So the expectations early on will be accumulating customers. And then as they convert to coaches that will start to grow at a more rapid rate. So that's why our expectations are kind of modest for 2019 in the second half.
From a coach count perspective, we didn't really provide any guidance on the number of coaches. What we said was that our original goals were to reach 30,000 by the end of 2019 and we expect to be able to meet or exceed that number. So we haven't provided any specific guidance on the number of coaches for the year.
Frank Camma -- Sidoti -- Analyst
No, I understand that. But just doing the math in the productivity, you would have to -- I mean, it seems like you would have to exceed that number to get into your guidance range. And I know you're not...
Timothy G. Robinson -- Chief Financial Officer
Yes, we would agree with that.
Frank Camma -- Sidoti -- Analyst
Okay. So then that does leads me to other question on international. So you're saying that, when you launched into these international markets that the health coach will actually be based in the U.S. and actually reach the customer in Singapore and Hong Kong?
Daniel R. Chard -- Chief Executive Officer
No. What we're not saying is that we'll leverage our leadership of health coaches in the United States to reach out through their contacts into the new markets of Hong Kong and Singapore to both attract new clients and also develop those new clients into coaches. So there will be both clients and coaches based in Singapore and Hong Kong, but it all starts with our leadership in the United States.
In other words, the company doesn't play a role in going out and actually bringing in clients other than helping through the messaging and the infrastructure. I mean, it really is our coaches in the U.S. through their contacts that mechanism starts with...
Frank Camma -- Sidoti -- Analyst
And has that already begun?
Daniel R. Chard -- Chief Executive Officer
We have -- I think, as we've talked about previously we have two programs that start to create the incentive for our coaches to start communicating. But we're not actively signing up coaches in Hong Kong and Singapore. But the activity of starting to reach out and build those relationships has begun.
Frank Camma -- Sidoti -- Analyst
Okay. My only other question was sort of on the gross profit. You did explain it as increased inventory reserves and some shipping costs. Can you just sort of give us level of magnitude of how much was related to -- you're essentially writing down expired inventory? Is that what it is and -- versus the freight costs?
Timothy G. Robinson -- Chief Financial Officer
Yes. I would say three-quarter of it was probably the inventory writedown. It was a product either expired or about to expire. And then the other portion was just freight cost, kind of, year-end hurry to get products to customers in a condensed period of time.
Frank Camma -- Sidoti -- Analyst
Okay. And was that product mostly Medifast-branded products, or was it OPTAVIA-branded products or a mix?
Timothy G. Robinson -- Chief Financial Officer
It was a mix of products.
Frank Camma -- Sidoti -- Analyst
Okay, OK.
Timothy G. Robinson -- Chief Financial Officer
That was just already in the system.
Frank Camma -- Sidoti -- Analyst
Okay, great. Thanks. Okay, great. Thanks guys.
Operator
Okay. The next question comes from Linda Bolton-Weiser with D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead.
Linda Bolton-Weiser -- D.A. Davidson -- Analyst
Yes. Hi.
Daniel R. Chard -- Chief Executive Officer
Hi, Linda.
Timothy G. Robinson -- Chief Financial Officer
Hi, Linda.
Linda Bolton-Weiser -- D.A. Davidson -- Analyst
Hi. So just another question on the gross margin. I think in the past you've talked about when there's very high coach growth and recruitment going on that you have sort of a free offer when new clients are signed up. And so, a very high top line growth can result in some gross margin impacts from those free offers.
Is that something we should kind of expect going forward in 2019, being that your growth is still so high? And just what are some of the puts and takes, as we think about gross margin for the whole year of 2019? How should we think about it? Thanks.
Timothy G. Robinson -- Chief Financial Officer
Sure. Yes I think that we're very confident in our gross margin. I think what you saw in the fourth quarter was very -- two very discreet items that we don't expect to repeat themselves. So we called those out specifically.
But as you see in our gross margin, they'll continue to slightly expand and we would expect that to continue. And we don't -- to be clear, we don't expect it to go up from 76% to 80% or something like that. But some small margin improvement, we do expect that throughout the year.
When we do offer -- we have a big influx of new customers in the high-growth space, as you mentioned. The new customers do get an offer and that offer is a discount on the order. So you are right, in a high-growth period it puts pressure on the margin percentage, because a larger percentage of your shipments are going out at a discounted price, but that's a good thing. That brings in new customers who continue to purchase thereafter.
Linda Bolton-Weiser -- D.A. Davidson -- Analyst
Thanks. And just, in thinking about your high revenue per coach growth, I mean, it continues to be extremely strong, right? How should we think about that? Is some of that starting to be the hydration product that's being sold to your customers as they sign up and that's boosting productivity? Or what is exactly driving that high productivity?
Daniel R. Chard -- Chief Executive Officer
I think, as we've talked about in the past, it's not any one thing. I think it started out by -- with the launch of the OPTAVIA brand and creating a very simple narrative that resonates. So that allows our coaches to be more effective at attracting clients.
There's an improved partnership with a company in alignment with us. So a lot of the programs we put together, I think, drives the right kind of activity. And then I think the most important part of this is, we sort of build the -- all of this on some really important insights, which are that, when a coach is involved that the results of somebody's health really are far more effective. And so, I think, more and more people are recognizing that and I think there's some benefit of social media platforms being part of how that's shared and communicated.
So the program works extremely well and the coaches with the program are highly effective at helping people know what they're doing to get the results they're looking for. And, I think, the other part of this is, we're seeing more and more -- the people aren't -- the people are focused and interested on their health, not just on weight loss.
And so our program has been highly effective at hitting that sweet spot of going beyond just helping people lose weight, but really helping them achieve a healthy weight and using that as a catalyst for greater change in their lives. So that's -- the message is really resonating.
But I think it's all those things kind of in combination probably, with a few other things that are more minor, but it's all those things together. And we anticipate that that should continue on. We don't know how high to go, so certainly there's a limit to that. But so far we're seeing very positive results from those things.
Linda Bolton-Weiser -- D.A. Davidson -- Analyst
And then just in terms of potential new categories you've alluded to, could we expect to potentially hear about another new category entry in the convention time in July?
Daniel R. Chard -- Chief Executive Officer
What we anticipate and are thinking about for July is that, we'll continue to reinforce the launch of Purposeful Hydration, so that's the last healthy habit we introduced. So we'll continue to drive that. And we'll also begin focusing, creating more emphasis on the second -- the part of our -- the health program the 5 & 1 which is the Lean & Green Meal. So we have technology to help create that healthy eating habit and making that what we talk about is making healthy eating second nature. So it's those two things together that reinforce the overall program that again tie back into what coaches do as far as teaching those new healthy habits.
Linda Bolton-Weiser -- D.A. Davidson -- Analyst
Okay, thank you very much.
Daniel R. Chard -- Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Linda.
Operator
The next question comes from Doug Lane with Lane Research. Please go ahead.
Douglas Lane -- Lane Research -- Analyst
Yes. Hi. Good afternoon, everybody. Staying on the hydration product, I think the fourth quarter was the first full quarter where you actually had it for sale. Can you give us an idea just generally how it performed versus expectations?
Daniel R. Chard -- Chief Executive Officer
The expectations going in were that -- we were during a couple of things. One, introducing the next healthy habit in a product form; and then also to bring the OPTAVIA brand into a category. We have a Medifast segment that includes products that we've talked about it's Flavor Infusers, so starting to transition the same way we did with our Fuelings transition over to the new brand. So it's been effective at bringing people over to the new brand, but it hasn't been a core driver in what we've seen in terms of revenue per active earning coach. It's just part of the overall story of one healthy habit at a time.
Douglas Lane -- Lane Research -- Analyst
And there will be more news on that front this year? And getting back to the question about the convention, well, most of new product activity announcements, if you will, will be centered around convention, or will be anything between now and then?
Daniel R. Chard -- Chief Executive Officer
Yes. We have a few other launches but the other launches are really -- in most cases, they are either new flavors or flavor improvements to our current line. So the new product activity really takes place and is announced at convention. And as you pointed out and as I mentioned earlier, it will likely be focused on continued emphasis on the healthy habit of hydration as well as that Lean & Green component of our 5 & 1 Plan.
Douglas Lane -- Lane Research -- Analyst
Okay. And just lastly, are you looking to take any just outright price increases, or you're just going to manage the mix like you've been doing lately?
Timothy G. Robinson -- Chief Financial Officer
No. Doug, we always look at that. We look at our supply chain. We look at any pressures that are coming from costs and we evaluate that a few times per year. So we'll do that evaluation coming off sometime this first half and make that determination. But historically that's not been an issue for us. So I think from a price elasticity perspective, we feel confident that we have an opportunity periodically to take price.
Douglas Lane -- Lane Research -- Analyst
Okay, thanks, guys.
Operator
This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Dan Chard for any closing remarks.
Daniel R. Chard -- Chief Executive Officer
Thank you very much and thank you for all of those who were able to join us this evening. We appreciate all the participation. And Tim and I look forward to speaking with you again when we report our first quarter 2019 results. Have a great evening.
Operator
The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.
Duration: 35 minutes
Call participants:
Katie Turner -- Investor Contact
Daniel R. Chard -- Chief Executive Officer
Timothy G. Robinson -- Chief Financial Officer
Frank Camma -- Sidoti -- Analyst
Linda Bolton-Weiser -- D.A. Davidson -- Analyst
Douglas Lane -- Lane Research -- Analyst
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