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Gap Inc Earnings Call, Fourth Quarter 2008
Author: 123jump.com Staff
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Last Update: 5:00 AM ET March 06 2009

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The clothing retailer reported sales of $4.1 billion, compared with $4.7 billion in 2007 as comparable store sales decreased 14%, compared with a decrease of 3% last year. The firm''s ability to drive healthy margins and achieve cost savings helped it deliver earnings growth of 16%.


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Television is the kickoff of a multi-dimensional program and campaign and integrated communication over the next number of months to speak to Old Navy''s target customer and to get people inside of those stores.

All of the brands are starting to, be very brand appropriate, which is critical to all of us, critical to the brand presidents, while still being much more proactive in how we convince customers to cross the lease line and these are the brands that they should be walking into.

Michelle Clark (Morgan Stanley): Could you give us inventory positions by division?

Sabrina Simmons: Our principle in buying inventory for all our divisions is the same, so we anchor our inventory buys on current traffic.

That is one of the most important inputs to our inventory buys. And we report traffic to you every month, so it is no surprise that to varying levels we have been experiencing negative traffic.

So, all divisions are going to be buying their inventories tightly, it is just a matter of degree how far down.

Michelle Clark (Morgan Stanley): Can you update us on localization initiatives in your stores and how much more opportunity there is there to drive an improvement in the merchandise margin rate?

Glenn Murphy: Localization is also on our list of eight or 10 priorities we have for this year.

We invested heavily on a new inventory system which was pioneered by Old Navy and is now being used fully by them in all their categories and will be taken up by Banana Republic, Gap and our outlet business throughout 2009.

One of the benefits of this strategic inventory management system we put into place is our ability to really do some work we have never done before.

Today we assort by size of store, we actually want to assort based on what consumer expectations and demand is going to be, and this new system will allow us to be much more localized, to look at the assortment in a much more different way.

Whether that is on women''s or men''s or kids or baby or temperature related or average household income, and it will allow us to do that work.

There has been quite a bit of focus and I think that comes with us as a business culturally thinking of customers first. With the heightened level of focus on customers we are going to assort our stores.

In Banana Republic, we can not do 450 different assortments; that would be chaos for us. But we can certainly break it down in a much deeper way and a much more fragmented way than we do today, which could be three or four different assortments.

So that work is under way. Banana Republic, Gap, Old Navy, and outlet will enjoy the benefit of that throughout the year. But we are big believers that we should have been doing this a long time ago.

Our customers have certainly demanded it. We now have the technology that we made the investment to allow us to do it very easily, and it is going to be something we are going to get some benefit in the future.

Jeff Black (Barclays Capital): Do you think this spring is the kind of product that justifies the kind of spending you are going to do for marketing?

Glenn Murphy: In Old Navy, we have a good enough comfort level to justify the marketing that we are putting in place.

This is the end result of the product we are going to have in terms of its brand appropriateness, its styling, its fashionability, its final value position. They are going to continue to work that product over.

But it has made a fairly significant leap forward, and the March product you are going to see is going to be coming into our stores a little bit this week and fully next week.
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