Qurate Retail, Inc. (NASDAQ:QRTEA) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Carla Casella: Okay. That’s great. And then, just the — I was surprised to hear comments about demurrage costs in 4Q. I felt like that was something that that we’d be lapping. Can you just talk about what the demurrage was in 4Q versus 3Q versus last year and what — when will that sunset or do or could we see more of that in the first half of 2023?

Jim Hathaway: Great. Thank you. This is Jim Hathaway, Carla, this is great question is, we saw a significant amount of attention demurrage in the first half of the year, driven by three things. One is the marketplace increases on trailer storage. Second was post a tragedy Rocky Mount, we needed additional storage. That was the thousandths trailers that we spoke to. And then the third thing was we did have some detention and demurrage in CBI that I was referring to as we were standing up the Phoenix location. Right now, we can say with the inventory actions that David spoke to, is we’re back down to a normal trailer level and a fairly normal level in our FCs. And so the detention and demurrage, I was speaking about that we may see to some degree in 2023 is just as we stand up the Phoenix location in CBI, which we anticipate to be done by the second quarter.

Carla Casella: Okay. Great. And then can you talk about, you mentioned your inventory’s much cleaner. This will be my last question. The impact on 2023, does that give you ability to lean in on any specific categories or others where you’re kind of holding back on leaning in on either because of the environment or just what’s going on in the channel?

David Rawlinson: Yes. I would say what it allows us to do is to be more varied in our mix as much as anything as and to be more properly allocated in our mix. We are part of the Project Athens work is a set of programming work to better optimize our programming. We couldn’t get to that optimization in the fourth quarter because we had to devote so much of our resources to getting through the inventory. It also allows us to do some pushes on things like we have Selma Blair, we think there’s a big opportunity in adaptive, and so we’re going to be working with her to bring some new items in and tell some new stories to our customers. And there are a number of other initiatives like that that we weren’t able — that we think are going to be very attractive to our customers, but we were not able to get to given the inventory backlog.

So we do think we will be able to bring back some demand because of being able to more squarely meet the moment for our customers. I think the other places you’ll see us lean into, now that we have a cleaner inventory position; we’re going to be leaning into jewelry. We think there’s a pretty big opportunity there. We’re going to be leaning into wellness. We’re going to be looking to continue to grow fashion, especially private label brand penetration. The last thing I will say is I think you’ll also see us be able to work on average sale price as we go through the year without the margin pressure of having to do as much clearance and promotion.

Operator: Thank you. The next question is coming from Robert Routh of FBN Securities. Please go ahead.

Robert Routh: Yes. Good morning and thanks for taking my questions. Just two quick ones. First, the campus that you have in Pennsylvania is obviously quite large and I’m sure, do you own all that land? And if so, is there any estimates to the value of that land? Because I would think it’s worth a small fortune and not reflecting your stock price.

Ben Oren: Thanks for that. It’s Ben Oren again. The campus in West Chester, Pennsylvania, was part of sale and leaseback transactions in 2022.

Robert Routh: Okay. Great. And the second question would be for Greg if he’s still there is, a few years ago, I think you filed an 8-K, you tried to buy Dr. Malone’s controlling B shares at 14, and the company exercised their right of first refusal on that. And now taking a look at where both the A and B shares are, I’m just curious if you still would have an interest in getting that block of stock if it was ever possible, or getting control of the entity and kind of how you view that transaction that years ago in hindsight how you’re viewing the company.

Greg Maffei: I’m still here. The — those transactions were a while ago, and the net effect of that was to retire those shares that they’re really not available to be purchased at this point, obviously that price is substantially above the current market price, which probably in hindsight was better. I didn’t get to buy them at 14.

Robert Routh: Okay. Great. I guess, and one last one if I may, is given the personalities you have the distribution and your reputation in terms of people feel secure buying things online from QVC and HSN more than some other platforms, is there any opportunity to partner with any larger entity a Macy’s or a bigger entity that doesn’t do quite as well online as you folks do given what you have in the infrastructure you have built because it would seem that there’d be a lot of opportunities to do that, to enhance your operating results moving forward, or is that something you’re not interested in exploring?

David Rawlinson: Yes. Hi, this is David. I would say we’re interested in exploring a lot of all opportunities at this point. I think you’re right, there are — there is substantial interest from other retailers who are looking how to figure out, especially video commerce where they don’t have any real expertise. But I think everybody thinks video mediated selling in the future will become a bigger part of commerce than it is today. And so we have explored various ways of partnership, various modes of partnership with some other players in the space. I think the first place you’ll see that show up, it’s probably in our streaming apps where we have some more flexibility to bring some different type of value propositions and retailer brands in relationship to light for our customers. But it’s something we’re actively thinking about and actively having conversations about.

Operator: Thank you. The next question is coming from Hale Holden of Barclays. Please go ahead.

Hale Holden: Good morning. Thank you. The $500 million that’s at the QRI level for debt service is that predominantly to satisfy the preferred coupon or because it doesn’t look like you have a ton of maturities coming up in the next couple of years there?

David Rawlinson: That’s right, Hale. It’ll service the dividend payments for the preferred and any overhead at the QRI level.

Hale Holden: Got it. And then, for kind of how your core customers thinking about the world, QVC has a lot of self-gifting and you’ve been sort of unable to refill the customer real funnel, I guess with new customers over the last 12 months as you kind of roll down the pandemic bulge. I was just wondering if you could kind of give us a state of play of how you think your customer’s feeling about the world and how their spending was looking to get a sense of how we get to that flattish revenue number for the year.