AKRON, Ohio – Myers Industries has announced results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2015.
The company reported net sales of $156.3 million, including strong performance from Scepter, offset by continued challenges in agricultural end markets. Gross profit margin increased to 29.3 percent, driven by operations excellence initiatives, pricing actions and incremental contributions from Scepter.
Income per diluted share from continuing operations as adjusted was 13 cents in the first quarter of 2015 versus 15 cents in the first quarter of 2014.
President and CEO John Orr commented, “For the first quarter of 2015, our Scepter business delivered strong sales and operating performance. Scepter continues to demonstrate its long-term value to our Material Handling Segment. As we discussed in our fourth quarter earnings call, we continued to experience reduced sales of our agricultural and food processing products during the first quarter of 2015. Lower crop prices and falling farm incomes continue to depress demand for our agricultural storage containers while sales of our food processing products were impacted due to a suspension of orders by a major customer. We have taken and continue to implement a number of actions to offset these near-term impacts, including labor and overhead reductions and accelerated product introductions in the manufacturing, automotive and distribution end markets. We should begin to see the benefits of these new product introductions in the second half of this year. While first quarter earnings were down compared to the first quarter of last year, I want to reiterate that the business fundamentals of our restructured company remain sound and our prospects for ongoing earnings growth continue.”
2015 Second Quarter and Full Year Outlook
The company anticipates that although second quarter sales and earnings may continue to be impacted by softness in some of its Material Handling end-markets, income from continuing operations as adjusted should show improvement versus the first quarter of 2015 as a result of continued strong operating performance at Scepter and the actions the company is taking around cost reductions, new product introductions and cross-selling initiatives. The company continues to anticipate that full year 2015 sales and adjusted earnings per share from continuing operations will exceed 2014’s results.
