Key Takeaways
• On the Up: BAMKO’s (asi/131431) Q3 2024 sales rose 11% year over year to $92.55 million, outpacing industry average growth.
• Earnings Rise: BAMKO’s EBITDA for Q3 increased 54%, reflecting higher gross margins.
• On Track for Annual Growth: The Counselor Top 40 distributor’s top-line sales are up to $260.9 million through the year’s first nine months.
Counselor Top 40 distributor BAMKO (asi/131431) increased sales 11% year over year to nearly $92.55 million in the third quarter of 2024, outpacing the average promo distributor Q3 revenue gain by more than two-and-a-half times over.
The Los Angeles-headquartered firm, part of publicly traded Superior Group of Companies (SGC), said in an SEC filing that sales for the first nine months of 2024 are also up compared to the same stretch the previous year, rising 6.5% to $260.9 million.
“We’ve benefited from generating increased volume with some existing customers and by adding new customers,” BAMKO President Jake Himelstein, a member of Counselor’s Power 50 list of promo’s most influential people, told ASI Media. “We’re taking market share, which is helping to offset some legacy customers coming in with smaller orders. We believe this will further fuel our growth once the economic environment improves.”
According to the SEC filing, BAMKO’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) leapt 54% in 2024’s Q3 compared to the prior year’s third quarter, reaching $10.73 million. For the first nine months of the year, EBITDA jumped 27.7% on an annual basis to $27.4 million.
“Our EBITDA was up thanks to higher gross margins and leveraging our expenses on higher sales,” Himelstein said.
After years of strong growth, BAMKO’s North American promotional products sales dropped nearly 12% year over year in 2023 to $342.7 million as headwinds in key markets the firm serves, like technology, inhibited client merch spend. BAMKO ranked eighth on Counselor’s most recent list of the top 40 largest distributors by revenue in promo.
In the third quarter of 2024, promotional products distributors collectively increased sales, on average, by 4.2%, according to the Distributor Quarterly Sales Survey from ASI Research. The industry’s extra-large distributors – those generating above $5 million in annual revenue, of which BAMKO is one – grew sales on an annual basis average of 3.1% in the quarter.
Meanwhile, BAMKO’s parent company SGC also saw growth in the third quarter. The Florida-based firm, which additionally operates a contact center business and healthcare apparel segment, said full-company sales increased 10% to $149.7 million compared to third quarter 2023 sales of $136.1 million.
In Q3 2024, SGC’s pretax income rose to $6.6 million, doubling the prior year’s tally. After-tax net income increased to $5.4 million, or $0.33 per diluted share, compared to $3.1 million or $0.19 per diluted share for the third quarter of 2023.
For the first nine months of 2024, SGC’s full-company sales reached $420.27 million, up 6.1% from the comparable 2023 period. After-tax net income for the nine months was higher on an annual basis too, coming in at about $9.9 million, or $0.60 earnings per diluted share; in 2023, the respective numbers were $5.2 million in net income and $0.32 earnings per diluted share.
SGC’s board of directors declared a quarterly dividend of $0.14 per share. The firm predicts top-line and bottom-line rises for the whole of 2024, saying sales companywide will be in the $563 million to $570 million range, versus 2023 sales of $543 million, and that earnings per diluted share will be between $0.73 to $0.79, versus $0.54 in 2023.
