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Earnings Calls: 
Circuit City Stores Earnings Call, First Quarter 2009
Author: Godwin Gwetu
123jump.com
Last Update: 10:15 AM EDT July 04 2008

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The leading specialty retailer of consumer electronics and related services posted softer net sales of $2.30 billion from $2.49 billion in Q1 of 2008 with consolidated comparable store sales down 13%. The fiscal 2009 Q1 net loss from continuing operations totaled $164.8 million versus $54.8 million in Q1 of fiscal 2008. Whilst management believes that the company has adequate liquidity to fund turnaround, future dividend payments have been suspended in preference for capital conservation.


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Dan Binder (Jefferies & Company): In the 50 stores that you did the incentive test, can you provide detail around the improvement in comp-store sales, margin rate, average employee increase in wages, close rates etc?

John T. Harlow: What we saw was significant enough over control groups that we believe that it would create enough margin impact to allow us to sustain not only the sales opportunity and the sales traction that we’ve seen year-to-date but allow us to create up-side in the back-half of the year. The movement was in a 50-store test versus control. It had to be quite significant for us to move in a 90-day timeframe to roll it to scale.

Philip J. Schoonover: You’re familiar with the company’s efforts in road shop. This is a very similar program to the program we’ve had in effect for a number of years in road shop. We had the analog of team-based incentives in the company and then we had the coupling of poor performance last fall. This compensation program as well as the training and other activities has improved the home theater performance enough that we felt that this was a good direction for the company to go.

John T. Harlow: The team-based component of it is creating a level of collaboration and it’s turned out to be very much customer-friendly as well as sales and financially friendly. That’s why we’ve moved forward with it.

Dan Binder (Jefferies & Company): Can we get an update on the POS systems?

John T. Harlow: We’ve chosen to move at a deliberate pace on this to make sure that we minimize the disruption at the store level. We’ve continued to make sure that not only the POS but the back of the house work that’s done on the POS system is on-course. To date, our plan is to continue to implement it in new stores and to continue to refine it in a group of stores. We are at about 200 stores today and then we will add a group more in the third quarter and the plan will be in the first half of next year to complete the chain once we are satisfied that the integration and infrastructure work are where we need them to be for scale.
As it relates to MST, we continue to be optimistic. Where we’ve gone so far with MST is we are actually in the later stages of implementation. We are about 80% of the way through and the work on the benefits from assortment and margin that we anticipated getting are taking hold at this point and the replenishment modules and core systems will be put in place over the next six to 12 months.

Dan Binder (Jefferies & Company): What were the comp store sales by month for this quarter?

Bruce H. Besanko: In the first half of the quarter we saw comps that were similar to what we saw in the fourth quarter. In the back half of April and moving in through May, there was a substantial change. We attribute that change in part to the traction that we are getting from our initiatives and the rebate checks. As a result of that, the comps in May were better than the earlier trend.
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