Citi Trends, Inc.
Q4 2012 Earnings Call Transcript

Published: 15 Mar 2013

[Operator:]

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Citi Trends Fourth Quarter 2012 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded, Friday, March 15, 2013. I will now turn the conference over to Tripp Sullivan of Corporate Communications. Please go ahead, sir.

[Tripp Sullivan:]

Thank you. Our earnings release was sent out this morning at 6

[Bruce D. Smith:]

Thanks, Tripp. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us today. Also on the call are Ed Anderson, Chairman and CEO; and Jason Mazzola, Executive Vice President and Chief Merchandising Officer. First, I will provide you with details related to the fourth quarter and the full year results, and then Ed will discuss further the results and our business outlook, after which we will address any questions you might have. Total sales in the 14-week fourth quarter decreased 1.5% to $176 million from $178 million in last year's 13-week fourth quarter. The fourth quarter and the full year of 2012 benefited from an extra week of sales, totaling almost $9 million. Comparable store sales on a 14-versus-14-week basis declined 11.8%. By merchandise category, sales in the fourth quarter in comparable stores were as follows

[R. Edward Anderson:]

Good morning. We continue to make progress in the turnaround of Citi Trends, although the rate of progress has been slower than I expected. The financial results for the fourth quarter were much better than last year's fourth quarter. Comp store sales were down 11.8% for the full 14 weeks of the quarter, but as we reported earlier, the last 2 weeks of the quarter were dramatically impacted by the shift in tax refunds. Before the last 2 weeks, the quarter was running down about 4% in comp store sales. In the fourth quarter, gross margin improved and expenses were well controlled. While we reported a loss -- a net loss of $0.05 per share, we believe as much as $0.35 per share was lost due to the tax refund shift. This is a large improvement over last year's fourth quarter loss of $0.36 per share. The big merchandising success in the fourth quarter was the Accessories area. We have seen profitable growth across Men's, Women's and Children's Accessories, especially in footwear. In the fourth quarter, we had double-digit sales gains and gross margin rate increases in this category and expect to see continued gains from the footwear area. We had 2 sales issues as we entered 2012

[Operator:]

. [Operator Instructions] Mr. Anderson, there are no further questions at this time. I'll now turn the call back to you -- pardon me, we just got a question. We have a question from the line of Patrick McKeever with MKM Partners.

[Patrick McKeever:]

Just on the -- I think that you said through the -- through first 5 weeks of the first quarter, that total sales were down 4% from last year. Is that correct or was that same-store sales?

[R. Edward Anderson:]

That's correct. That's total. [indiscernible] Well, given that we had so few stores opened last year -- we only opened 4 stores last year on a 513-store base, comp sales for 2013 in total sales were about the same.

[Patrick McKeever:]

Okay. Right. And that incorporates, for the comp, that incorporates the shift in the weeks.

[R. Edward Anderson:]

Yes.

[Patrick McKeever:]

So it's the same 5 weeks this year versus the 5 weeks last year?

[R. Edward Anderson:]

Yes.

[Patrick McKeever:]

Okay. So I mean, the -- so the trend has certainly improved, but it's not quite where you would hope it to be. Is that a fair way of putting what you said?

[R. Edward Anderson:]

That's right. Yes, I -- absolutely. We were, as I had mentioned in my earlier comments, we were clearly expecting the beginning of the first quarter of 2013 to start off better than actually it has, given that we had the tax refunds were so late and we expected the tax refunds to impact positively the beginning of the first quarter. And so to start off with a decrease, frankly was unexpected. But particularly, in light of the fact that we had very slight single-digit sales decreases through most of the fourth quarter and actually, a slight positive in the third quarter, to drop like this is really a sharp move away from what our trends have been. And so that's really why I called out the economic environment of our customer and I called out the payroll tax increase, the gas prices, the later tax refunds. There's another piece here, which I don't normally talk about, Patrick, but I will on this call because it is important to this time of the year, and that's weather. As you know, the weather is important at the start of each season, the start of fall and winter or the start of spring. And last spring was unseasonally warm, in fact, March was the warmest March ever. This year, as we all know, it's been a very, very cool spring. And so weather is impacting our business. And we expect it -- we know the economic environment is likely impacting our business. We know the weather will change. We're not sure about the economic environment. But does that help you understand a little bit about our perspective on what's happened so far the first quarter?

[Patrick McKeever:]

Yes. No, absolutely. And how about just if you look at the distribution of tax refunds. I think they're down, at least as of the last week, they were about $20 billion lower than they were a year ago, distributions to individuals. So do you think there's still some timing issue -- there are some timing issues out there that are still impacting your -- the sales that might have been driven by tax refund spending?

[R. Edward Anderson:]

I -- there's no way for us to know for sure. My sense is because of the other significant delay in this year's versus last year's debt, there ought to be some more tax refunds out there. My sense is that we are still seeing a little bit of tax-refund driven sales here at Citi Trends. Actually, we're hopeful that there's some tax refunds out in front of us but, Patrick, we can't quantify that. I didn't read your reports that called out the fact that there's a lot of -- there's less tax refunds than last year. We're hopeful that's timing as opposed to just lower tax refunds in general.

[Patrick McKeever:]

Got it. And I think Bruce mentioned the current cash and investment positions -- position was $81 million. I was just wondering if you could elaborate on that.

[R. Edward Anderson:]

Bruce, do you want to elaborate on the cash position?

[Bruce D. Smith:]

Yes, Patrick, February and March are always very strong periods of time for us because of the tax refund business, as well as the opening of the spring season. And so it's always a heavy positive cash flow period of time. So our cash has grown from $56 million at the end of the year to roughly $81 million right now, and that's largely attributable to the seasonality of the business.

[R. Edward Anderson:]

And you said the big depth of inventory has gone down since, what you'd -- we would expect our cash to position improve, as Bruce said, at this time. [indiscernible]

[Patrick McKeever:]

Any thoughts on a share buyback?

[R. Edward Anderson:]

No, Patrick. It's early for us to be thinking about that. We're still, as we suggested here, very, very much in a turnaround mode. Our business has not yet delivered predictable results consistently, and I think until we have some predictable, consistent, positive sales results, we can't yet turn our attention to things like share buybacks and dividends.

[Operator:]

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Carter Newbold with Rutabaga Capital.

[Carter Newbold:]

Did you all talk about the store plans, either new stores or remodels, for the current year?

[R. Edward Anderson:]

Yes, Carter. The question that you missed was just an elaboration on sales activity so far, through the first quarter. And also the question about the cash balance at this point in time. As far as new store plans, we're going to continue with only a very modest new store approved program and we've opened 1 store this year. And we have budgeted for up to 5 stores but we actually had no other stores approved at this point. We did open our third store in Las Vegas about a month ago, very successfully. But we're really holding back on significant capital expenditures this year. We expect our total CapEx, Bruce, to be somewhere in the $10 million to $12 million neighborhood for the year, and we're going to use that money to remodel 225 of our existing stores, probably do 4 to 5 major expansions, maybe up to 4, 5 new stores, but spend most of our money on doing improvements to that affect all stores as opposed to investing in new stores at this point. Again, because we are still in a turnaround mode and we think it's a prudent to stay very conservative with our capital expenditures.

[Carter Newbold:]

Okay. Just a follow-up at the store level. If you look either across geography or by performance cohort, is there a group that you identify as kind of a problem store site that lends itself to a particular operating approach or the issues that you guys are facing kind of affecting you across the whole fleet?

[R. Edward Anderson:]

It's -- there are no problem pockets of stores. There's no geography or state issue across our 513 stores. And so the issues we have affect all Citi Trend stores. The better -- the more compelling our merchandise assortment, the better store sales will be in all stores. This is really not a climate or a geography issue.

[Carter Newbold:]

Okay. I have one last question just related to hitting the fashion mark. As you change the way you attempt to do that, what does that do to your sourcing approach? And if you're going away from maybe 5 or 10 really key national brand vendors and trying to develop some smaller relationships, could you just talk about how you get that product in the stores and then decide whether it's working or not? Then what that does to your sort of inventory per store?

[R. Edward Anderson:]

Sure. Carter, thanks for the question. I'm going to ask Jason Mazzola, our chief merchant to talk about how this fashion strategy versus a brand strategy, we're attempting to execute it.

[Jason T. Mazzola:]

Sure. We are embarking on a major strategic shift in the ladies' business, really from brands at great value to fashion at great value. Currently, we have a very strong team of off-price fashion-oriented merchants to make this happen and additionally, we have opened a West Coast buying office in the heart of the fashion district in Los Angeles. So currently, we have offices both on the East Coast and the West Coast that are both focused on developing that great fashion. And we are seeing signs of success, as Ed has mentioned. For the first quarter, we are driving a slight comp increase in our ladies' fashion businesses in both juniors and plus. It was not enough and is not enough right now to offset the decrease in urban brands in ladies but we are getting better at that -- this piece of business every single day. And as that West Coast office gets really up and running and is at full steam, we think we're going to see some great things happen from there.

[R. Edward Anderson:]

Did that answer your question for you, Carter?

[Carter Newbold:]

Yes, I think it does. Just one more on that same point. If things work to plan, is the gross margin profile similar, given the fashion strategy versus the brand strategy?

[R. Edward Anderson:]

That's really a good question. The answer would be, the fashion a strategy actually has the potential to deliver fairly slightly higher gross margins than the brand strategy. If you go back over time, our gross margin off of the nationally recognized brands, always ran 2 points to 3 points lower than our gross margin in our fashion area. So transitioning to fashion has the potential to be a higher-gross-margin strategy over time. Obviously right now, we're focusing on sales first, the gross margin, second. The -- over time, this strategy does have -- has the potential to be slightly more profitable.

[Operator:]

And Mr. Anderson, there are no further questions at this time. I'll turn the call back to you. Please continue with your presentation or closing remarks.

[R. Edward Anderson:]

Okay. Thank you very much, operator. We appreciate of you joining the call today, and have a good day. Thank you.

[Operator:]

Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude the conference call for today. We thank you for your participation and ask that you please disconnect your lines.