Caleres, Inc. (NYSE:CAL) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

And while I’m not an economist, we are basically adopting the consensus in terms of the future interest rate increases that we’re expecting for the year. And so we are continuing to in the near term use free cash flow after the dividends and after the investing in the business to pay down debt. And so, we expect that to continue to work down. Again, we still do have that authorization from our board on share repurchases. And so we’ll continue to just stay very close to the market dynamics. And if there are opportunistic times when we think it makes sense to buy back shares, we’ll certainly do that as well. But I would say for now, focus is on continuing to manage our inventories tightly and improving turns and continuing to bring down our debt level, just given the increased interest expense as well as just making sure that we’ve got a lot of resiliency and flexibility in our model given the economic uncertainty.

Dana Telsey: Got it. And then just on the plans for Easter that you had mentioned, Jay. Anything that we should be focused on, whether it’s brands, categories? How you’re thinking of pricing this year compared to last year? Thank you.

Jay Schmidt: Yes. I think our pricing kind of remains consistent as really I would say our back half of 2022. We certainly are very excited about the strength of our lead brands coming out of our portfolio. We expect them to continue to trend through 2022. Sam Edelman, Vionic, Allen Edmonds and Naturalizer really gaining strength with the consumer and then very excited of Famous as we get going in there and really with all the excitement around the stores and then also new seasonal products that we’ll be delivering as their spring opens up. So I would say very excited, but no real changes on really retail pricing as we see it right now.

Dana Telsey: Thank you.

Jack Calandra: Thanks, Dana.

Operator: Our next question is from Mitch Kummetz with Seaport Research. Please proceed with your question.

Mitch Kummetz: Yes, thank you. I’ve got a few quick follow ups. Jack, I may have missed it, but did you say where you expect either free cash flow or cash flow from operations to land for the year?

Jack Calandra: Yes, Mitch, we’re not guiding to that specific metric, but to be helpful, what I would say is, given the — on the operating cash flow, given the planned continued improvement in inventories, I would expect to see a step up in our operating cash flow in 2023. We are investing a little bit more on CapEx as I mentioned, that’s really returning CapEx to what I consider prepandemic levels. If you look at our CapEx history over the past couple of years in 20 20 and 2021, we spent less than 1% or less in CapEx, we were under spending versus depreciation. And so, we’re bringing that back to a more normalized levels, both as a percentage of sales and relative to our depreciation. So a little bit more of a headwind from a free cash perspective with that increased CapEx investment.

Mitch Kummetz: Got it. And then you mentioned the sales impact from the 53rd week. Is there an earnings impact?

Jack Calandra: Yes. So for the company, it’s only about $0.02 of EPS. It’s $22 million of sales $18 million of that we estimate is on Famous, but a relatively small earnings impact, but about $0.02.

Mitch Kummetz: Yes. And then lastly, on the capital allocation, obviously, we’re in a rising interest rate environment, but I am curious like how much do you consider when you’re thinking about your interest expense versus your share count and the opportunity to kind of take those down. How much do you consider kind of which is more accretive to earnings? Does that get sort of factored into your thoughts around potential opportunistic buyback?