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Market Update : 
Circuit City Stores Third Quarter Earnings Call
Author: Albena Toncheva
123jump.com
Last Update: 4:51 AM EST January 01 2008


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The specialty retailer of consumer electronics reported revenue of $2.96 billion, down 3.1% from prior year, on 5.8% decline in comparable store sales. Circuit City believes that it is on track to take out $150 million this year versus its run rate, which annualizes the $200 million in fiscal 2009. The company completed 21 domestic superstore openings in the quarter and it is on track to open 61 to 63 incremental and relocated domestic superstores this year.

 
Bruce H. Besanko: There is additional opportunities in the company to continue to reduce our expense structure. The areas such as indirect spend continue to be areas of improvement for us and we are going to continue to dig deep to be sure that our expense structure is commensurate with our sales and margin performance.

George D. Clark: We have RPOS already in over 160 of our stores. RPOS is whole house system. It controls inventory inside the store. It’s a point-of-sale transaction system for our stores. It’s replacing a legacy system that’s been in the company for over a decade. We worked on mastery and refinement of RPOS this fall and we plan on scaling it in the first two quarters of next year to the rest of the company.

Matthew Fassler (Goldman Sachs): Could you address the TV margins, which were down for you and for the industry?

Bruce H. Besanko: One of the things that was a contributor to our TV margin was we over-indexed in some of the smaller and medium LCD products and we saw margin erosion in most of the categories but we over-indexed in opening price point merchandise also when we ran the ads. We saw an awful lot of opening price point merchandise.

Matthew Fassler (Goldman Sachs): You have a real estate optimization opportunity. It looks like the financial performance, at least in the short run, has deteriorated faster than could be attributed to the real estate per se. Is this the moment in time to focus on new real estate the way you are?

Philip J. Schoonover: The company has roughly 400 stores that we’d call legacy real estate. The store was designed when we were in the appliance business and it was superstore retailing. We have 34,000 square foot stores with 18,000 square feet of selling space. It’s a major structural issue for the company and we have to get after that. We also have to spend some time saying what’s the new job of a new customer experience in the stores? We’ve spent the last 24 months in Boston and Florida testing our way to a new retail format. We have committed to the 20,000 square foot box, which by the way has about 17,000 square feet of selling in a 20,000 square foot box and materially the same size show room. It’s also a very different employee value proposition. It’s better for our customers and better for our associates. We need to get after this structural issue and with the current trends, we need to do that carefully and cautiously and more prudently than ever.

Dan Binder (Jefferies & Company): Can you comment on the traffic versus ticket, whether or not they were significantly different from each other?

Philip J. Schoonover: Our traffic was down slightly, as anticipated. The entertainment and software business in general is deteriorating, particularly in music and movies. Games was improving, so we are seeing some bump but it’s not helping the overall traffic. We focused on close rate. We did see improvement in our average ticket driven by the mix of hardware versus entertainment software but also driven specifically by notebook PCs, TVs, imaging and MP3, so we have seen improvement in the average ticket throughout the quarter.

Gary Balter (Credit Suisse): The pricing on TVs tends to be a few hundred dollars on the big screens lower than Best Buy or others. Is that hurting you? Is it really driving additional traffic?

John Kelley: We’re strategically looking at exactly what our pricing is in comparison to the competition. We have a lot of initiatives and the ad effectiveness and just overall pricing initiatives to make sure that we’re competitive and give a great value proposition to the customer but also that we also are making money at the same time.
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