LEVI - LEVI STRAUSS & CO

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  1. stock1234

    stock1234 2017 Stockaholics Contest Winner

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    Levi Strauss & Co. engages in the design, marketing, and sale of apparel products. The company offers jeans, casual and dress pants, tops, shorts, skirts, jackets, footwear, and related accessories. It operates through the following geographical segments: Americas, Europe, and Asia. The company was founded by Levi Strauss in 1853 and is headquartered in San Francisco, CA.
     
    #1 stock1234, Mar 21, 2019
    Last edited: Mar 25, 2019
  2. stock1234

    stock1234 2017 Stockaholics Contest Winner

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    Levi’s Stock Popped 33% on Its IPO. ‘We Make Real Money,’ the CFO Says.

    Levi Strauss & Co. stock (ticker: LEVI) began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday morning at $22.22 a share, and rose to about $22.60 by the afternoon. The denim-apparel maker priced its initial public offering at $17 a share on Wednesday after initially seeking a valuation between $14 and $16 a share. The current price, up 33%, gives Levi’s a market value of about $8.8 billion.

    Barron’s caught up with Levi Strauss & Co. CFO Harmit Singh on Thursday afternoon after he helped ring the bell at the NYSE, which suspended its dress code forbidding wearing jeans on the trading floor for the day.

    Barron’s: Levi’s is a 166-year-old company and it’s been public once before. Why is now the right time to go public again?

    Harmit Singh: Our business results have been very strong and we’re really confident about the future. Our management team has been around for a long time, so the team that got us here is the same team that will continue to take us to the next level. And the markets are in a good spot.

    How quickly can Levi’s grow and what are the opportunities to do so going forward?

    We’re a mid-single-digit revenue growth company. As a company today we’re very different than we were six years ago when I joined the company. Back then sales were skewed to the U.S., skewed to wholesale, and skewed to men’s bottoms. That led to one conclusion: low single digit growth.

    Today, the company is growing fastest in international, which is the majority of our business—54% of our total revenue. Second, our direct-to-consumer business, which is our e-commerce and our stores, is a third of our revenue and has growing around 14% annually the last couple of years. Next, we relaunched our women’s business line in 2015 when everybody was calling the death of denim because of athleisure taking off. That business has been on a tear and has grown for 14 quarters straight, eight of them in double-digits.

    And last but not least, our tops business has doubled in the past six years. Today it represents about a fifth of our business, and we’re just getting started. Today we sell about four bottoms for every top, six years ago it was seven for every top.

    Any way you look at it, there are a lot of organic growth opportunities as we build more of a lifestyle orientation to our brand.

    Does today’s 32% stock bounce at the open mean you left money on the table?

    We are a company that has been around for over 160 years and we think about growing this company for the long term. A movement up or down on a daily basis doesn’t concern me, our board, or our shareholders.

    How will you deploy today’s IPO proceeds and future cash flows from the business?

    Our first priority in terms of spending cash will be to grow this business organically. Part of that is going to come in the form of more new stores. Last year, from our base of 800 stores, we opened about 70 net new stores. This year we’ve said we plan to open about 100 stores. We’re also going to remodel more stores and continue to spend on e-commerce technologies.

    What about returning capital to shareholders over time?

    We are a dividend-paying company. Unlike a lot of other companies that are going public we make real money and pay dividends. Our thinking is to continue that as the company performance improves and then start with a modest share buyback to offset dilution.

    Your IPO filing mentioned M&A opportunities. What could those be?

    There are both organic and inorganic acquisitions. Organic acquisitions could be buying back franchises. We’ve done that very successfully in markets like the U.K. or China recently. The second is taking back distributors. When the company was not doing as well as now and the brands were not as strong, we had given some markets out to distributors. Then, taking back some product licenses. For example in the U.S., our men’s product for wholesale is still licensed. Our women’s product was licensed a few years ago and we’ve taken it back.

    For inorganic acquisitions, think about categories like footwear and outerwear where we’re under-penetrated. You know, a good set of boots and casual sneakers goes very well with men’s or women’s denim. I’m wearing an Air Jordan sneaker which is Levi’s red tag branded.

    There’s nothing in the short term though. It’s not that we’re taking the IPO money and we’re going to do a large deal. These are more long-term deals that we think could leverage our scale and infrastructure and then grow our returns on an accretive basis.

    Could you speak to investors who might hesitate to buy stock in a company with a dual-class share structure that doesn’t give them meaningful voting rights?

    The good news is you can see the demand for our IPO is very strong. So there’s no dearth of great investors who want to participate.

    The family that owns the majority of the stock are really committed to staying on with this company for the longer term, but were open to getting new public investors who are also really long-term oriented. From a governance perspective, our management team is completely professional starting from the CEO Chip Bergh downwards. Our board is an independent board other than the CEO who is on the board. Every other member is independent and we have two family members on the board.

    How does your life change now that you’re the CFO of a publicly traded company instead of a private one?

    Not a lot, in fact. Even though it’s been private, we’ve been running this company like it’s a public company for many years because we’ve had public debt, and Chip and I both come from public company backgrounds. A lot of the executive team have worked in public companies. We’ve had governance processes like a public company. So from my perspective, it’s very similar.

    But the one difference with some public companies—I’m not going to name them—is that we’re going to run this company for the long term. So we’re only going to do annual guidance, not quarterly guidance. If there are quarterly blips it’s because we’re running this company for the long term.

    https://www.marketwatch.com/articles/levis-stock-ipo-cfo-interview-51553194237?mod=mw_quote_news
     
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  3. Pokey

    Pokey New Member

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    Does levi have a chart please.
     
  4. stock1234

    stock1234 2017 Stockaholics Contest Winner

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    Chart not available on FINVIZ just yet, I will put the chart up at the first post when it is available
     
  5. A55

    A55 Well-Known Member

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  6. A55

    A55 Well-Known Member

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