You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: Such statements involve risks and uncertainty, such that actual results may differ materially.
As we transform our company, I'm pleased with our performance in the first quarter of fiscal 2021.
We had strong financial results and we made progress on our digital transformation.
Our team was able to effectively serve our customers through our broad product portfolio and diverse paths to market.
At the same time, our gross margins were in line with those in the fourth quarter even on lower sequential sales and we continue to generate a significant amount of free cash flow.
I'm pleased and grateful for the outstanding way our team has continued to manage through the pandemic.
We remain diligent about protecting the health and well-being of our associates and ensuring the continuity of our operations.
Turning to first quarter highlights.
We are committed to making the communities in which we operate better.
We published our second annual EarthLIGHT report, highlighting the company's priorities, actions and metrics for environmental, social and governance matters.
We continue to wisely deploy capital by repurchasing 2.6 million shares of the company's common stock for $255 million.
We successfully reintroduced ourselves to the debt capital markets through the issuance of a $500 million 10-year bond with a coupon of 2.15%.
Proceeds were used largely to repay our existing term loans.
We are making strong progress on the execution of our digital transformation.
So I'll provide more updates on that progress later in the call.
Finally, we have added talent to the organization.
As we build out our technology organization, we have added outstanding data science, product management and engineering talent.
As we further [Technical Issues] team, Candace Steele Flippin joined Acuity in November as our Chief Communications Officer.
Candace will work with me and our team to define and amplify our company's narrative among our stakeholders.
I'm very pleased with the quality of people who are joining our team.
I will add some additional insights to our financial performance for the first quarter of fiscal 2021.
By way of context, for the past decade, we have provided our best estimates of the impacts of volume and price mix on net sales.
Our intent when we began providing this information was to reflect the impact of the conversion of our lighting products to LED.
Today, our lighting business is fundamentally different.
For example, our product life cycles are shorter and our pace of innovation has increased.
We frequently and successfully introduced new features and benefits of products rather than just direct product substitutions.
Therefore, we believe our historical reference to price mix is no longer meaningful and is less descriptive of how we manage our business.
Going forward, we believe the change in net sales is better described by the activity in our key sales channels.
To help with this transition, I will provide the historical explanation to you this quarter so that you can bridge the gap.
In the future, our explanations for changes in net sales will be aligned with our disaggregated revenue disclosure in the 10-Q.
Should acquisitions have an impact in the future, we will provide that impact if it is meaningful.
Net sales for the three months ended November 30, 2020, of $792 million decreased 5% compared with the prior-year period, due primarily to an estimated 4% decrease in the change in product prices and mix of products sold, as well as an estimated 1% decrease in sales volume.
Both fiscal 2021 first quarter price mix and volume were adversely affected by the negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Also recall that last year's first quarter benefited from price increases put in place to offset tariffs.
Looking sequentially from the fourth quarter using the same calculations, price mix decreased 1%.
Due to the changing dynamics of our product portfolio, it is not possible to precisely quantify or differentiate the individual components on a comparable basis of volume, price and mix.
And as noted previously, we will not be quantifying this in the future.
Now, I would like to highlight the key changes in our sales channels.
I'm encouraged with the net sales of $599 million through our independent sales network in which we saw a modest decrease of 3% due to the negative impact of the pandemic.
Turning to our direct sales network, we continue to experience weakness in large industrial projects that we believe have been postponed due to the pandemic.
Sales in this channel of $76 million were down 9.5% in the quarter.
Our retail sales channel continues to be a bright spot with net sales up 3% to $55 million, driven largely by higher demand primarily for residential products.
Finally, a key impact of the pandemic has been and continues to be delayed or canceled projects by large retail customers in our corporate accounts channel.
Net sales in this channel of $24 million were down 28% as compared to the prior year.
These retrofit opportunities were delayed or canceled as these customers were limiting the activity in the stores.
In the first quarter of fiscal 2021 and 2020, we had some adjustments to the GAAP results that we find useful to add back in order for the results to be comparable.
We believe adjusting for these items and providing these non-GAAP measures provide greater comparability and enhanced visibility into our results of operations.
We think you will find this transparency very helpful in your analysis of our performance.
I would like to highlight that our current quarter's gross profit margin of 42% was consistent with our fourth quarter gross profit margin even on lower sales.
Gross profit margin was $332 million, down approximately $23 million from the year-ago period.
This decrease in gross profit was due primarily to the decline in volume and lower price on certain products, as well as the changing mix of products sold, partially offset by our aggressive cost reduction efforts and productivity improvements.
Our SD&A expenses decreased approximately $19 million compared to the year-ago period.
This decrease in SD&A expense was due primarily to decreased employee cost, including lower stock compensation, lower freight and commissions associated with decreased sales and the reduction of cost in response to lower sales.
Reported operating profit was $86 million, compared with $84 million in the year-ago period, while adjusted operating profit for the first quarter of 2021 was $104 million, compared with adjusted operating profit of $119 million in the year-ago period.
Reported operating profit margin was 10.8%, an increase of 80 basis points compared to the prior year.
Adjusted operating profit margin was 13.2%, a decrease of 110 basis points compared with the margin reported in the prior year.
The effective tax rate for the first quarter of fiscal 2021 was 24.7% compared with 22.9% in the prior-year quarter.
The increase in the effective tax rate was due primarily to the recognition in the first quarter of fiscal 2021 of unfavorable discrete items related to the deductibility of certain compensation.
We currently estimate that our blended effective income tax rate before discrete items will approximate 23% for fiscal 2021.
Our diluted earnings per share for the first quarter of fiscal 2021 was $1.57, an increase of $0.13 per share or 9%.
Our adjusted diluted earnings per share this quarter of $2.03 was $0.10 lower than the prior year.
The decrease was primarily due to lower pre-tax income and a higher effective tax rate, partially offset by lower diluted shares outstanding.
I'm pleased with our positive cash flow from operations and the improvement in our working capital days, driven by improvements in accounts receivable and inventory.
We generated $124 million of net cash provided by operating activities for the quarter ended November 30, 2020.
We invested $11 million or 1.4% of net sales in capital expenditures during the quarter.
We currently expect to invest approximately 1.5% of net sales in capital expenditures in fiscal 2021.
Additionally, during the first quarter of fiscal 2021, we repurchased 2.6 million shares for approximately $255 million or an average price of $100 per share.
We have approximately 5.1 million shares remaining under our current share repurchase board authorization.
At November 30, 2020, we had a cash and cash equivalents balance of $507 million.
We've demonstrated our ability to generate cash and use that cash to create shareholder value through investments in our business, dividends to shareholders and share repurchases during the quarter.
Our company is a unique combination of domain expertise in the industries that we serve and in the technology that will change them.
Our core lighting business is a durable performer in all markets, including the current market.
And we are executing on the transformation of this business.
We are in the process of making a better, smarter and faster to transform the service levels to our customers and the vitality of our product portfolio.
Distech and Atrius are attractive, valuable and strategically impactful technology assets that we believe we can build upon over time.
We are demonstrating consistent cash generation, and we have the opportunity to use that cash to grow our current businesses and invest in new businesses, while managing our capital structure, including share repurchases.
I'll now turn to our Q1 performance.
As Karen mentioned, net sales of $791 million were 5% below the prior year.
I'm particularly pleased with the performance in our retail sales channel, which was up 3% over last year's first quarter and in our independent sales network, which was down 3% as compared to the prior year.
As I described last quarter, our broad portfolio enables us to flex where there is opportunity, which this quarter included strength in warehouse and logistics, education and residential verticals.
Throughout the pandemic, we've seen broad disparity of performance across geographies and that continued in the first quarter.
We also manage productivity and cost relative to price to maintain our gross margin at 42%.
Throughout the pandemic, we've maintained our investment in product development.
We are introducing new lighting and controls products, as well as improving and evolving parts of our product and solutions portfolio.
We are increasing the impact of software in our product portfolio.
In the first quarter, we had a major firmware release for our nLight AIR product.
This release is called ABT, Autonomous Bridging Technology and is designed to increase the overall range of the nLight AIR system in networked environments by 300%, taking connectivity more reliable.
We've increased our focus on contractors and making their lives easier.
We launched the Compact Pro High Bay fixture by Lithonia Lighting during the quarter.
This is a new addition to our contractor select portfolio and is the most compact High Bay on the market, making it easier and quicker to install.
Contractors and distributors continue to respond favorably to our contract select portfolio.
This portfolio of products has enabled us to respond to discretionary opportunities in the independent sales network and to serve the needs of customers in the retail channel.
Sales growth in these products continue to meaningfully outpace the market.
We expanded our capabilities to provide a broad portfolio of leading germicidal UV products.
In addition to our relationships with Ushio, PURO and Violet Defense we had an agreement to purchase and resell the UV Angel Clean Air disinfection system, as well as pursue joint development of UV light disinfection products.
We now have the ability to serve multiple end use alternatives and are in the market, selling a variety of GUV products.
We are uniquely positioned to support customers with our luminaire, controls and building management portfolio.
We continue to make progress on our digital transformation that we call better, smarter, faster.
I'm pleased with the team we are creating to deliver on our platform and how we are enabling more customer-centric sales and operations.
For example, we are streamlining and enhancing our product catalog to make the process of finding, configuring and ordering products simpler and faster.
We are also increasing our ability to communicate with and update our contractors, distributors and agencies with more detailed status notifications.
We were offering them the ability to know in real time the status of the product orders.
We will continue our work to increase these service levels.
We've successfully recruited talented data scientists to leverage our data and build products powered by machine learning algorithms.
I'm excited about the progress we've made on our digital transformation to date and look forward to further enhancements for our customers.
Effectively allocating capital is an important part of how we will create value for our company.
Our priorities remain to first, grow our current businesses; second, grow our company through acquisitions; third, maintain our dividend; and fourth, create value through repurchasing shares.
In the first quarter, we repurchased 2.6 million shares of stock for $255 million.
Since we restarted our program during the fourth quarter, we have repurchased almost 8% of the company's stock.
We also successfully reintroduced ourselves to the debt capital markets during the fourth quarter.
We issued a $500 million 10-year bond at 2.15%.
We're pleased to lock in this capital for this duration at these rates.
As you can see in the first quarter, we continued to demonstrate our ability to generate cash and our ability to deploy that cash for long-term value creation.
As we look ahead, while we still see uncertainty in the end markets we serve, we are cautiously optimistic about improvement during calendar year 2021.
We are using the breadth of our product portfolio and the strength of our go-to-market teams to deliver solid top line performance.
At the same time, we are managing our costs well, while continuing to invest in our business for the future so that we will become a larger, more dynamic company.
As we look to grow, we believe that both for business performance, as well as for the understanding of our company, we should more clearly separate our lighting, lighting controls and components business and our intelligent buildings business.
To that end, later this fiscal year, we plan to reorganize our business into two units; Acuity Brands Lighting and Intelligent Buildings.
Acuity Brands Lighting will include our lighting, lighting controls and components businesses and Intelligent Buildings will include Distech and Atrius.
This new structure will better position Acuity to meet our customers' needs and strengthen our innovation through better prioritization and alignment within each unit.
We also believe this change will provide improved visibility with respect to the operational performance and underlying results of these businesses.
We are a company that delivers for our customers, our associates, our communities and our shareholders.

user
q1 adjusted earnings per share $2.03.
q1 earnings per share $1.57.
q1 sales $792 million versus refinitiv ibes estimate of $788.1 million.

assistant