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Earnings Analysis: 
Urban Outfitters Fourth Quarter Earnings Call
Author: Rozalina Destanova
123jump.com
Last Update: 5:24 AM EDT March 10 2008


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Net sales at the Philadelphia-based retailer rose about 29% to $465.4 million, while comparable-store sales grew by 11%. Direct sales increased by 39% to $72.9 million, driven by a circulation increase of just 19%. The company’s operating expense leveraged 101 basis points to 22.3%, principally due to the leveraging of direct store controllable and other corporate expense. Urban Outfitters plans to open 45 to 49 new stores during fiscal 2009.

 
Glen T. Senk: In terms of Leifsdottir, it will be a narrow distribution, 60 doors in the first year and a branded approach. You will see shop build-outs, numerous specific marketing paraphernalia, anything from the hangars to the fixtures, hang tags, and I debated whether or not to include who it would sit next to in a place like Bergdorf Goodman or Bloomingdale’s but I chose to do that because it will help you visualize what the line is going to look like. If you think of it sitting next to DVF or See by Chloe or Marc by Marc Jacobs, it will feel like that.

Marni Shapiro (The Retail Tracker): What about the number of SKUs you will launch with that line?

Glen T. Senk: We showed 70 styles for the first delivery and I imagine the average store like Bloomingdale’s will y open the first delivery with about 30 to 35 styles and continue to build on that. Bloomingdale’s, for example, the shop will open at about 500 square feet. I am not entirely positive but that is what I believe we are talking about.

Holly Guthrie (Janney Montgomery Scott): You have had success with the catalog at Urban, oftentimes leading the store. I have seen some displays which look similar as the catalog. When will it be rolled out and what else you look forward to?

Tedford G. Marlow: We have good information on the direct side of our business in regard to our customer database. We do not enjoy the same thing in regard to retail and we are putting some actions in place to develop a customer program on the retail side for getting information and building a database and realizing more opportunity in regard to cross channel marketing. When we drop the catalog, the catalog goes to customers that we know as direct customers; that is, they have shopped with us through direct or we are prospecting with them off of other direct lists. We drop no catalogs to drive retail business in proximity zip code wise to retail stores because we do not have good database information. This is work that we feel can be beneficial for the business that we are just getting underway on. The last couple of days we have been involved in about eight of conversation on the subject, so that is a key piece of the puzzle. That being said, the other area of opportunity over the last year is getting a consistency and a cohesive message in regard to the creative that we are developing for catalog, website, and in-store, is work that we have been underway on and that we like how that has been progressing and what it has done for the productivity of the business.

Roxanne Meyer (Oppenheimer): At Anthropologie the loyalty program is still relatively new. How long do you think it will take before you are able to extract some of that valuable customer data and where can you then translate into a nice sales lift?

Glen T. Senk: When we spoke about the CRM strategy at Anthropologie initially, we said it would be a two to two-and-a-half year rollout and we are on track for that. It has three phases. The first phase was to use a third-party service provider to help us collect the data and analyze the data. By the third quarter of this year, we will decide how to proceed more permanently, whether or not to use a third-party service provider or to buy a program and do it in-house. As we have a relatively limited functionality at this point with that third-party service provider. As we work with that group and/or bring it in-house, I expect we will have more functionality. Having said that, we do have some ability to slice and dice the data now on the 200,000 people who signed up and we are beginning to do that, survey those customers, test different assumptions and so on. That is what I meant when I said we were refining the program.

Roxanne Meyer (Oppenheimer): How much room the shoes are going to be consuming within the stores and what it is going to be replacing in terms of space?

Glen T. Senk: In the 23 stores that have shoes, the average store will, in selling square footage, have about 200 to 250 square feet devoted to the project, and then back of house will be 600 to 700 square feet.

Roxanne Meyer (Oppenheimer): Is there anything specific that is going to be coming out of the store in order to make room for the shoes?

Glen T. Senk: No, the 23 stores that it is launching in are stores that are larger than the average of 7,000 selling square feet, so the stores that can accommodate it. We are not sure we will be able to carry shoes in all 108 Anthropologies ever. That is something that we will figure out based on what we learn in the first six months or so.

Samantha Panella (Raymond James): What trends are you currently seeing in women’s apparel and are skirts becoming a more important category?

Glen T. Senk: I can not tell you that. There is a lot of trend in all three businesses - all three brands and across the company, so there is a lot of good data to get our teeth into right now.

Roxanne Meyer (Oppenheimer): Could you speak about pricing and price point in various tiers?

Glen T. Senk: Unlike other retailers, we have never had a narrow band of price points. If at Urban Outfitters, the average price point of a blouse is $48, they may have renewal blouses that are $18 and they may have something by Charlotte Ronson that is $248. Prices may change over time based on demand. If we are early in a fashion cycle and we have things that our competition does not have, then typically there is less price or more price elasticity. As we get later in the cycle, then we have more price pressure. In general, we are not seeing any price pressure in our business. We did not see any price pressure in the fourth quarter, as evidenced by our average unit retail and average transaction. I do not think there is any kind of pattern in our business that would indicate that what is selling as being particularly price motivated right now. When Anthropologie in the fall of 2006 got too high, it happened primarily in the accessory area and it was not a strategy. It was a mistake, so it was not a failed strategy. It was just an outright mistake. Over time, our average prices have increased low single digits on a consistent basis year-in, year-out, and I do not see anything happening in our business that would suggest it will change.

Michelle Tan (UBS): How the stores that you have in Europe are going and any update on the growth opportunity that you have there?

Tedford G. Marlow: The European business had a reasonably productive year. They were up against strong business in the previous year and they produced in the back-half in the single-digit comp range, up against strong high double-digits the year before. We will be opening five additional stores in the market this year. We are opening Belfast tomorrow and as well this year, we will be taking the business into Germany with an opening in Hamburg. The productivity of the business is on a four-wall basis, our more mature stores, we are getting return on sales out of those stores that are in excess of company average and I would say the one experience that we have had going all the way back to our second store in the market, which was in Dublin, we have a tendency to open with a strong opening and then people getting to know us, we go through some lag time, and then business kicks in and starts to be productive. What we have seen here over the last couple of years has been true to that. Taking the business on to the continent in Copenhagen followed that same model - opening strong, softening, and then getting strong again. At the present time, we like how the business is treating us overall. Both sales as well as we have taken the bottom line profitability of the business up, approaching double-digits.

Dana Telsey (Telsey Advisory Group): Can you talk about the direct opportunity - what you see in terms of the business, how it coordinates with the stores, and what you are seeing in terms of the cost structure, particularly on the catalog side - the paper costs, paper, printing and postage costs?

Glen T. Senk: The direct part of our business over the last five years is the fastest growing part of our business and we are excited by the opportunities that lay ahead. We think that there is a real paradigm shift in the way people are shopping the direct-to-consumer business. They are using the web more and more. They are using the web to do research prior to going into a brick-and-mortar store. They are using the web to find out - to shop with their friends. They are posting what they like and what they do not like on Facebook and we have had many strategy sessions internally and we always joke that we are in the Model T stage right now in terms of direct-to-consumer and website, and none of us are even smart enough to imagine what it is going to look like in 10 years. We all believe that it is going to continue to increasingly penetrate the total sales volume, and we are focused. We spent a lot of time speaking to the youngsters in the company because they are much more in touch with the technology than many of us sitting around this table are, and we look for inspiration at people like Google and eBay and all of the leaders in that field. In terms of the catalog, it is true that some of the fixed catalog expenses, such as paper and postage, are going up but the web is working much harder than it used to in terms of driving our business, so we are able to have fantastic sales increases with either less circulation or in some cases decreasing circulation. It has not been a challenge to us. In fact, we think that long-term, the profitability on the direct business will be far higher than the profitability on our bricks-and-mortar business.

Dana Telsey (Telsey Advisory Group): Store construction costs have been an area of focus for you. Is there more opportunity on that and if so, how?

Glen T. Senk: There is still opportunity for improvement but at a lower rate. I would be happy with a couple of percentage points reduction, particularly with cost of goods going up in the construction area.
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