Quaker Fabrics recovers in Q3

FALL RIVER, MA — Bulking up its margins and holding sales relatively steady, decorative fabric producer Quaker Fabric Corp. switched gears and moved into a recovery mode, driving third-quarter profits up by 45.9 percent, to $2.2 million from $1.5 million last year.

With exports still weakening, despite growth in the core domestic business, sales were flat in the period, slipping by 0.3 percent, to $80.8 million from $81.0 million last year. Even though sales were virtually flat, they marked a substantial improvement over the previous quarter, growing by 9.3 percent over the April-June period.

Driving the strong bottom-line growth, average gross margin widened strongly, by 230 basis points, or 2.3 percentage points, offsetting higher costs. Expenses rose by 180 basis points, when measured as a percentage of sales, to 16.8 percent from 15.3 percent a year ago.

In another prop to the bottom line, Quaker pared its interest expense by 19.1 percent, to $968,000 from $1.2 million, generating a cash savings of $228,000.

Larry Liebenow, president and ceo, said results "reflect improvements in our margins and at the bottom line in comparison to both the first half of this year and the same period of last year." Fueling the gains, said Liebenow, were "improvements we have made to our manufacturing efficiencies and cost structure."

Liebenow added, "Our order rate strengthened during the quarter, allowing us to recover somewhat from the very slow first half we experienced — with our backlog position at the end of the quarter at $30.2 million, up about 5 percent in comparison to last year's third quarter and 23 percent in comparison to the second quarter of this year."