Best Buy Co., Inc. (NYSE:BBY) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Michael Lasser: Okay. My follow-up question is, quarter-to-date, you’re trending down 10%. You expect within the guidance to be flat by the end of the year. So, is the progression from down 10% to flat, is that linear, so we should be expecting steady improvements over the course of the year? And what is — what is that dependent on in terms of product introductions, execution and the competitive environment? Thank you so much.

Matt Bilunas: Thank you, Michael. As you said, our guide prudently assumes that inflation persists and the consumers are — be continue to make trade-offs around their spend. And so, at a high end, the comps progressively improved throughout the year. And like I said, we will exit the year more on the flat to slightly possibly growing as the pressures in the CE industry kind of abate as we progress through the year. So maybe not perfectly linear, but we do expect that at the high end, the sales performance would progressively improve. At the low end of the guide, we’re clearly modeling a more sustained pressure on the CE industry as customers feel the longer effects of the macro pressures of inflation that continue to shift some spend to the activities in travel.

So that’s kind of the two ends of our expectations for next year. But again, at the high end, we do expect our sales and the industry itself to improve as the year progresses, which is consistent actually with what — some external benchmarking you would look at between NPD and CTA, which would also expect some level of improvement.

Michael Lasser: Thank you, very much. Good luck.

Operator: Next caller, please, state your name and company name before asking your question. Please go ahead.

Karen Short: It’s Karen Short from Credit Suisse. So, I have two questions. I guess the first question is just, obviously, the midpoint of your sales guide is $1 billion above calendar ’19, but EBIT margins are 100 basis points below. So again, calendar ’19, but promos seem to be likely consistent in ’20 — calendar ’23 relative to 2019. So, can you just elaborate on that a little bit? And then with respect to the members that you called out, $100 million is clearly a very strong number in terms of members for My Best Buyer, Totaltech. Can you just give a little color on what percent of sales those members represent? And then maybe some color on how you could better leverage that program?

Matt Bilunas: Sure. I’ll start and then Corie can jump in too. I think the comparison you’re talking about is this year compared to FY ’20 — or calendar 2019, if you think about our business from the biggest change from this past year to 2019 is within gross margin in the two very big factors that have lower gross margin since that time are; one, supply chain costs that are much higher. Part of that is the online mix that has grown, and the other part of that would be supply chain inflation that hopefully, we would see abate over time. The second biggest impact to gross margin has been our rollout of the membership offering, which, during the quarters last year, when we weren’t fully lapped, it was almost 100 basis points of pressure compared on a year-over-year basis.

So those are the biggest impacts compared to that 2019 period, which was gross margin. SG&A was — rate was rather similar to 2019. And so, what you do have there is you have savings compared to store labor being down. And then you have offsetting that a bit is the investments we’ve been making in technology and depreciation coming through from higher capital.