Tag Archives: SVU

Supervalu FY 3Q17 Earnings Call Notes

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SUPERVALU’s (SVU) CEO Mark Gross on Q3 2017 Results

Challenges

” we, not unlike others in the food industry, continue to be challenged by an environment that includes competitive openings, deflation and lower levels of SNAP benefits.”

Lots of competition

“What I would lean into in terms of these retail banners is we have an unprecedented amount of new competition among our five banners. We are between two-thirds and 70% of all of our stores have been competitively impacted, which has a significant impact on our IDs. We obviously look at our IDs in a number of ways. One of which is how our stores are competing when they are not being competitively impacted and I can tell you that they are significantly better from a trend perspective”…

“Yes. So, we have historically had in the Minneapolis and Twin Cities market, we have had a host of competitors, some of whom we actually supply, but I think the new – there is a number of new entrants into the Twin Cities. One is a smaller hard discount retailer, but they are opening stores here and then we have another larger competitor from the Midwest that’s recently opened stores and in fact, they opened I think it’s about 5 stores this past calendar year. They are expecting to open more in this current calendar year and probably beyond that and they are very good competitors. So, that would be an example of some competitors coming into the Twin Cities markets. There are additional competitors going into Farm Fresh, hard discount competitors have begun opening stores there. And then there is the usual suspects across all of the banners, in some cases, there is the national competitors like Safeway and Kroger and so on that continue to open stores.”

E-commerce skew higher private label

“It’s a lot of things. I mean, it’s just a little color. They are bigger, they are more frequent and they also skew higher on our private label assortment that it really goes to the loyalty of that shopper. So, it’s a piece that we need to continue to examine and work with.”

Bruce Besanko

Bigger baskets for e-commerce customers

“Yes, our experience so far with these e-commerce – our e-commerce customers is that they have – they buy more, they have bigger baskets and they shop more often. So, it’s a nice story here and we need to – we are working to roll this thing out rapidly. I think our intent is to have an e-commerce solution in each of our five banners by the end of this year and then the continued investment into our new fiscal year.

Miscellaneous Earnings Call Notes 10.21.16

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Hasbro’s (HAS) CEO Brian Goldner on Q3 2016 Results

Strong POS trends

“So you’re right, Drew. We are in fact seeing really strong POS trends entering the fourth quarter, particularly in the US. We saw a little bit of softness in POS in the late summer, July, August period. And then in September given the shift in Star Wars as well as the impact from Jurassic, that impacted our US POS. Internationally, we’re seeing very strong POS, up double digits, in Europe, up in Latin America, up year to date in Asia-Pacific. And then in the quarter in Asia Pacific, particularly in Australia, recently we’ve seen some retail issues with a retailer where there was just less inventory taken, and a little bit less of a sell-through and therefore impacted that HAPM number, the Asia-Pacific number because of Australia. So overall we feel very good about the POS trends year to date, and the POS trends going into fourth quarter, with a little bit of a note in the third quarter due to some of those timing shifts and some of the brands that have come down significantly versus year ago.”

Kansas City Southern’s (KSU) CEO Patrick Ottensmeyer on Q3 2016

Brian Hancock

Mexican customers very aware of peso changes

Chris, this is Brian. I would tell you that for the customers in Mexico, as they look at the peso, that impacts them significantly. And many of them have asked us price in peso and we have done over the last 18 months. There is still a significant portion of our businesses that is priced in dollars because it’s more of a global basis. But we watch that as they do as well. And we’ve tried to do everything we can to make sure that each other understand where the peso is, how it’s impacting the business.”

UnitedHealth Group’s (UNH) CEO Stephen Hemsley on Q3 2016 Results

Medicaid has been ACA’s biggest success

“Medicaid has been a very significant success of the ACA and wherever that has played out, those markets have actually been more stable and better performing. And Medicare continues to be a core program of the country and that funding for both Medicare and Medicaid is something that we have been advocating consistency and stability of it. Kind of those themes are what we have stayed with. I think commenting beyond that, particularly as new administrations take hold and so forth, our posture is to be very constructive about making the marketplace work most effectively and serving the most number of individuals and making that system simpler and more usable for everybody. So I think beyond commenting on that level, I don’t think we are going to get into what’s going to happen going forward on either a state basis or federal.”

Regions Financial’s (RF) CEO Grayson Hall on Q3 2016 Results

Large customers accessing capital markets to pay down bank debt

“Regarding business lending, average loans are down modestly on a year-over-year basis. We continue to experience muted customer demand and heavy competition in the business segment, particularly in the middle market commercial and small business sectors. We are also seeing some large corporate customers’ accessing the capital markets and are using these proceeds to pay down bank debt”

Barbara Godin

Mortgage delinquencies getting back to all time lows

“Yes firstly they’re all within our risk appetite so we’re very comfortable with what’s happening in the consumer book. What we see is real estate continues to improve in particularly we see home equity was down significantly this quarter. Mortgage is really back to with all-time low tracking along the bottom. Some of the other portfolios that we see indirect is pretty stable.”

Burberry FY 2Q17 Carol Fairweather – Chief Financial Officer

Did see a slight improvement in US but still challenging

“In terms of the U.S., in terms of our plans to turnaround, clearly the U.S. market does remain very challenging. It’s an 80% domestic market for us and both domestic and tourist remain down. That said, we did see, and I said just now, we did see a slightly improvement in Q2, but we are still down low single digit.”

Did see improvement in China

“Okay, so in terms of Chinese trends, Luca, what we are seeing is we just seeing an improvement in our second quarter, both at home and when they were travelling. So China, as I said was up mid-single digit or up double digit excluding the rationalization or evolution of the portfolio. ”

Morgan Stanley’s (MS) CEO James Gorman on Q3 2016 Results

I don’t think I’ve ever seen transaction levels lower than this. It has to change

“I think as having watched this business over two or three decades, I don’t think I’ve seen transaction levels lower than this. And just supposed against that that the business had record revenues is a testament to the managed money side of it, the banking side of it, the deposit side of it, things that frankly 15 years ago really didn’t exist to a highly dependent transaction activity. And the world has changed, investors have changed but we’re sitting on $2.1 trillion of assets. And their behavior has changed whether the transaction stuff picks up; I don’t know post the election, post the Fed moving it remains to be seen. My guess is over time it does, I feel just intuitively, it feels like a low but can it go low, I guess it could go low but probably there is a bias to moving up rather than moving down of the next couple of years that said more and more money is going to fee based accounts.”

SUPERVALU’s (SVU) CEO Mark Gross on Q2 2017 Results

Eric Claus

22 states lowered SNAP benefits

“In addition to deflation, Save-A-Lot has been adversely impacted by the reduction of SNAP benefits in 22 states in which we operate, the factor that is compounded by the fact that our level of SNAP sales is meaningfully higher than other retailers. These states have either lowered the amounts paid to individuals or barred them completely from receiving benefits, a fact that has negatively impacted customer accounts and basket size among our customers using SNAP. ”

M&T Banks’ (MTB) on Q3 2016 Results

You’re certainly starting to hear more people worry about concentration limits in CRE

“Well, I think you’re certainly hearing more people worry about the concentration limits. And I think that’s certainly a concern. I read through some of the other comments from other calls and I recognize that’s a concern. We obviously pay attention to that as well. And when we look at where we stand today, we feel pretty good about the headroom that we have there. But I guess the important thing for us is that we try to do business, particularly in the commercial real estate space, with customers with whom we have a long history of doing business. The equity that’s in the deals is still very strong and as strong as it was pre- the last recession or stronger than that.”

Commercial bankers feeling good about the demand that’s out there

“I guess from speaking with our commercial bankers across the region before coming on the call, they are feeling good about the demand that’s out there. You know, as I mentioned before, our pipeline is very, very strong. It’s in line with what we’ve seen in prior quarters. I think there is a little bit of a pause and I expect there will be a pause this quarter, as we go through the election cycle and people digest what that means and with the change in administration.”

Tupperware Brands’ (TUP) CEO E.V. Goings on Q3 2016 Results

Tupperware’s global sales force is 3.1m people

“We are holding our sales force size at 3.1 million. There is really no change from the second quarter.”

Danaher’s (DHR) CEO Tom Joyce on Q3 2016 Results

We have not seen another leg down in industrials

“Yes. Well, first of all, I think we have seen – while not the beginnings of growth on the industrial side, I think we haven’t seen – we have not seen another leg down. In other words, we have seen some stability. ”

Supervalue FY 3Q16 Earnings Call Notes

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Sam Duncan

Trying to figure out how do we make deflation work for us

“Nothing out of the ordinary is changing, meaning the deflation and that’s what the issue is, but what Eric and his team is now working on is how do we make deflation work for us, and we had to go out there and be aggressive and look for deals and work with vendors to get the items that we need. Whether it be private label or national brand, we don’t care, we just got to drive business.”

We’re 10% behind where we were last year just on deflation

“If you look at where we were at approximately a year ago and where we are today, it’s a 10% swing on inflation and deflation. So that means when you open up the door, you’re 10% behind before you start, so you got to figure out ways to fight through that. We don’t know when we are going to start seeing some inflation and we keep thinking we are going to see it, but it hasn’t happened so far and we’ve thought that way for about six months now, but hopefully we will see some in the future. ”

I wish we had some inflation

“Trust me, I wish we had some inflation, because I would like to go out on a bear note, but inflation, deflation is out of my control and we’ve done a great thing in this company on how we improved the balance sheet and everything, so we’ve got the basics in place and we can just work through this issue.”

Customer count is not dramatically different

“Customer count is not all dramatically in any way, this is a deflation issue. When you’ve got pork and beef products down 20%, it’s a significant swing. Again, if we just had deflation – inflation at where it was a year ago, we would be running positive comps on Save-A-Lot, so it’s pretty simple to explain.”

My hope is the deflation stops

“My hope is and I don’t know what’s going to trigger it that or the deflation stops, hopefully it will settle down. I don’t know if it’s because of the oil prices and all of that. I have no idea of what’s causing it, but there is nothing more significant in that that’s affecting our business.”

Bruce Besanko

Have swung from historic inflation to historic deflation

“Last year’s historic level of inflation for certain proteins was driven by domestic supply issues combined with strong demand for exports. This year in-store contrast, domestic supplies have seen the largest year-over-year increase in the last 65 years while global demand has softened, which has led to the historic levels of deflation. We haven’t experienced these kinds of swings in the past 40 years.’

Most important task our teams are managing is this very significant deflation

“we continue to be impacted in both the corporate stores and through our license business with the significant deflation. The deflation grew in the third quarter relative to what we saw in the second quarter, which was higher than what we saw in the first quarter. So the most important task that our teams are managing is this very significant deflation”