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Perry Ellis International Inc. (PERY) |
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CEOCFO Current
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This is a printer friendly page! Since
1993, Perry Ellis International Inc. has experienced tremendous growth and is well
capitalized to continue growing through additional acquisitions to expand their product
base Perry Ellis International Inc. is a leading designer,
distributor and licensor of a broad line of high quality men’s and women’s
sportswear, including casual and dress casual shirts, golf sportswear, sweaters, dress
casual pants and shorts, jeans wear, active wear and swimwear to all levels of retail
distribution. Through its "family of brands" marketing strategy, Perry
Ellis develops and enhances a distinct brand, styling and pricing strategy for each
product category within each distribution channel and target consumer. The Company also
produces goods sold under the private label program of its various retail customers. In
all, Perry Ellis markets its brands to a wide range of segments, targeting consumers in
specific age, income and ethnic groups. “I have been with Perry
Ellis for two-and-a-half years having joined the company in May of 2001.”
Offers Mr. Timothy Page, CFO of Perry Ellis International. “At the time, the company had about fifty million dollars in
revenues. Since then we have done a number of acquisitions and today our run rate in terms
of revenue is in the hundreds of millions and our market cap is around 300 million
dollars. What first attracted me was that Perry Ellis is a great brand name, so it was a
good opportunity to work with one of the leading brand names in apparel. The company is in
Miami, which is an attractive place to live and third, the company had an interest in
trying to grow and become a major player in the industry. I believe my expertise is in
doing acquisitions and mergers, and managing not only the process of doing deals but
managing the process of integrating and assimilating companies after they have been
acquired.” Discussing Perry Ellis success in the Hispanic markets, Mr. Page tells us, “The Hispanic market
has been a huge growing market for us. We have been one of the innovators in men’s
apparel in terms of designing and distributing products targeted at the Hispanic market.
We have brands called Cubavera® and the Havanera Co.®, which have been very successful
in terms of sell-throughs and acceptance by consumers. We are looked at in the
apparel industry as one of the companies that has an expertise in design and
target-marketing Hispanic consumers.” “We have begun to have brands that appeal
to women.” Says Mr. Page, sharing some thoughts
on a possible growth area for Perry Ellis, “We acquired the
Jantzen® swimwear business from VF Corp. about eighteen months ago and with that we
picked up licenses to produce Tommy Hilfiger® and NIKE® swimwear, which are primarily
women’s wear. So that gives us some access to the women’s market and gets us out
of just being a men’s wear company. It gives us the opportunity to expand the Jantzen
brand in resort wear and women’s sportswear. We just acquired a company called
Redsand®, which is a surf brand and we are hoping we can expand that to juniors and we
have another company called Original Penguin®, which is a retro young men’s line and
there seems to be a good demand for a junior line there. There are opportunities to
acquire brands in juniors or missies or various areas.” Addressing investors Mr. Page, states, “The company has a
great growth system ever since it went public in 1993. We were a 30 million dollar company
in 1993 with 30 employees and now we have an annual run rate in the hundreds of millions
with about fifteen hundred employees, and I do not see anything that is going to slow down
the growth of the company in the foreseeable future. We are thoroughly well capitalized
and we have opportunities to acquire businesses. We have a long-term strategy for growth
and probably what people do not realize is that the company does have plans to address the
liquidity issues in terms of the number of shares out there that are available to trade.
That would seem the biggest drag on attracting investors; there just are not many shares
in the public flow. As we have said in a number of conference calls and other venues, the
company is aware of this issue and we are ready to address it.” |
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