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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.

 
Jeff Black (Lehman Brothers): On the Urban side, there was a style component as well as an SKU component to the merchandise fix. Is there still room to go on the SKU part of that and if so, will there be implications on the margin for the first and possibly into the second quarter?

Glen T. Senk: Let me tell you how we can grow style count by 20% and keep SKU count flat. You offer less color choices or print choices within a style and what we said back in May was we felt that there was too much monotony in the assortment, that there was not enough variety, that we were not hitting enough customers, and a lot of the changes that Jim and Liz and their respective teams made addressed that. I have not worked with Ted and Jim to understand where we can go from today over the next six to nine months. My guess would be that we want to keep the SKU count relatively flat and still increase the style count by another 5% or so. While the style and SKU count impact the margin, I do not think there is a direct correlation. What I was talking about before in terms of improving the flow, we are comfortable with where the Urban inventory is right now. Improving the flow, improving the way we take markdowns so that we take them earlier, deeper, faster, turn the product faster so that we convert the bulk of the floor to regular priced selling, those are the things that positively impact and maintain margin and we are making good progress there.

Randy Konik (Bear Stearns): What you think are the top three initiatives we should be focused on in monitoring the business in 2008?

Glen T. Senk: The number one priority for me is people because without people, I can not get any of this done. When I look at how I spend my time and the people that I work with and what I do on a day-to-day basis, people is my number one priority. The second priority is growth. We have, since the day I joined this company publicly said that we want to grow sales at 20% or more and profit faster than sales. So I as the CEO am responsible for delivering that objective. The next thing is the quality of growth, so my last group of initiatives is productivity, profit, expense control, sustainability, consistency, and so on. That is where I get to the profit faster than the sales growth.

Randy Konik (Bear Stearns): Can you talk about the role of Freeman Zausner, as he has come back out of retirement and/or any plans to hire a chief operating officer?

Glen T. Senk: Freeman is an unbelievable asset to this organization, an unbelievable partner to Dick and to me. There is not a day that goes by where I do not speak to Freeman 10 or 15 times, we are basically in offices next to each other and he is involved in many parts of the business. He supervises David Ziel directly and partnered with Dave in Dave’s tremendous accomplishment. He supervises Calvin Hollinger directly and partnered with Calvin over the last several years, to the point where I think we just have a best-in-class technology system. He hired and partners with Bill Cody in Talent, and just a remarkable turnaround in that organization. He supervises Matt Ganess. He does strategy for us and Matt works really directly with Dick and with me and with Freeman. Freeman touches a lot of parts of the business. Freeman has the energy of a 15-year old. He runs circles around most of us and I expect and hope that he will continue to be as involved in the business for years to come, as he is today. With regard to a COO, that is something that we are considering. We have started to speak to some potential candidates and we do believe that we need a COO in the not-too-distant future.

Dutch Fox (Friedman, Billings, Ramsey): What is your square footage by division?

John E. Kyees: The square footage at the end of the quarter for Urban was 1,184,147; for Anthropologie, it was 806,744; and Free People was 23,636.

Dutch Fox (Friedman, Billings, Ramsey): Where you think CapEx is going to come in this year?

John E. Kyees: CapEx for this coming year should be around $120 million.

Marc Bettinger (Stanford Group): Are you seeing anything to indicate any increase in competition for any of the brands?

Glen T. Senk: We define ourselves as a purveyor of experiences and I think that to a certain extent, that insulates us from other competitors. What it does not do is insulate us against less obvious competitors, so when we think about our competition, we think about everything from the travel industry to the entertainment industry. I do think that people today define themselves more by the experiences that they have and less by the possessions that they have, so it broadens the competitive field. When we speak to our customers for all three of our brands that they are hard-pressed to identify direct competitors and I think that again was kind of a brilliant strategy early on in our development and it served us well. Having said that, I believe that people have a limited amount of money to spend each month and if they are not spending it with us, they are spending it elsewhere and it is our job to understand where they are spending it. I think that the idea for example to get into the garden center business was brilliant because I think that people are spending an increasing amount of their disposable income in their gardens. People are spending more money on odd forms or exotic forms of travel. The restaurant industry has grown faster than the retail industry over the last several years, so we have to watch out what is going on there.

Janet Kloppenburg (JJK Research): What is Space 15 Twenty-one?

Tedford G. Marlow: The idea behind Space 15 Twenty is experiential in that we have had this kind of as a working idea in our group tied to culture, commerce, and community. We are seeing it as a space that we would be part of the business, along with other businesses, not necessarily national businesses that you commonly would think of but a smaller format, compatible businesses that would marry and with the lifestyle that we serve in our business and that our customer would be looking for. We are open to what those businesses would be. This is to some degree like Dover Street market in London being a multi-level, under one roof. It is meant to address the business side of what we do, the culture that our customer lives in and what they are looking to do in their social time other than simply shop. And as well, be a place in the community for people to gather and simply enjoy themselves, whether they shop or not. The backside of the project is an active farmer’s market on weekends and it is an ideal location for us to try the idea.

Janet Kloppenburg (JJK Research): Is it by the farmer’s market in Hollywood?

Tedford G. Marlow: No, it is not. There is a farmer’s market off of Sunset that takes place on the backside of this location. There are also other retailers within that neighborhood that are compatible to what our customers are looking for lifestyle wise.

Janet Kloppenburg (JJK Research): Do you look for this to be expandable over time into other cities?

Tedford G. Marlow: We would like to think that. We are playing with some other ideas as well. We are trying some smaller formats. We just opened in St. Denis, which is in Montreal, a smaller format store that is women’s apparel, accessories, gifts. The idea is that we can support that with the infrastructure of our larger store in Montreal, so we are trying different ideas in regard to format. It is all driven by the idea of growth - different things that we can do to grow the productivity and the experience of the brand.
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