AutoZone (NYSE:AZO) recently reported its third quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call.
Commercial Program
Alan Rifkin – Barclays Capital: A couple of questions if I may. First, on the c...
AutoZone (NYSE:AZO) recently reported its third quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call.
Commercial Program
Alan Rifkin – Barclays Capital: A couple of questions if I may. First, on the commercial program, can you maybe give a little bit of color on what the productivity levels are for the programs that are under three years old, since it’s such a significant portion compared to the more mature programs? Then, I have a follow-up.
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William C. Rhodes, III – Chairman, President and CEO: Yeah Alan, I don’t want to get into too many specifics on it, but clearly they’re much less mature and they come out significantly below the existing programs. The other thing that I think is important and I’m not sure everybody understands, is as those programs open many times, probably most of the time, the also cannibalize the existing programs. So, some of the growth in the productivity of the commercial programs right now is muted, because we do have those 900 stores that over the last three years have done some cannibalization of the existing programs. At the end of the day, we’re not meeting our aspiration, but the underlying performance of the new programs and the existing programs when you take everything into account, we’re generally pleased with it.
Alan Rifkin – Barclays Capital: So, for the select group of markets Bill, like the west, where you said was better, and let’s say the southeast where weather really was not an impact, those markets collectively performed on your plan?
William C. Rhodes, III – Chairman, President and CEO: I think, for the first two-thirds of this quarter, I would say they were generally aligned with where our expectations were. In the last third of the quarter, frankly the Northeast and Midwest is where we really saw very strong performance as they rebounded in a significant way…
Alan Rifkin – Barclays Capital: Then just lastly real quick the 82 expanded hubs, I mean any sort of color as to how much more productive these hubs are and do you ultimately plan to expand every single one of the 154?
William C. Rhodes, III – Chairman, President and CEO: Our objective is to expand all the 154. Obviously we made great progress so far in getting 82 open in less than three years, 82 expanded or relocated in less than three years. As we get farther down the cycle, because these are real estate deals, we have done the easy ones, now we have more complicated ones ahead. So the pace will likely slow. As for how they are performing, this is the first time that we have ever deployed capital really for our hub stores. If you think originally all we did was take existing space that was there and leverage it to put the product assortments. So the easiest way for me to show you that they are meeting our expectations is we continue to make real estate acquisitions and build buildings because they’re exceeding our expectations – meeting or exceeding our expectations, so we are pretty pleased with them.
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Weather Impacts
Simeon Gutman – Credit Suisse: It’s Simeon Gutman for Gary. Two questions, first Bill Rhodes, you talked a lot about the regionality and so I think that kind of helps explain some of I guess cyclical versus secular arguments. Is there anything else you can point to be at age of vehicles or other factoids that they kind of point to that this I guess a year ago’s downturn was more cyclical?
William C. Rhodes, III – Chairman, President and CEO: Yeah, I think we’re going to stick with what we said for the last year. This isn’t a new story. I think the last three calls we talked about the fact that we thoug