Skechers U.S.A., Inc. (NYSE:SKX) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Gaby Carbone: Good afternoon and congrats on the strong results. So just bigger picture, would you help us think about the long-term pathway for margins? Seems like you’ll get back to 2019 EBIT margin this year. But beyond that, where do you see the biggest opportunities to expand margins within the business?

John Vandemore: First of all, thanks, Gaby. It’s the continued growth trajectory of our international and our direct-to-consumer businesses. As we’ve said for a long time, that really is the longer term algorithm for growing both the gross margin and the operating margin. Obviously, there are opportunities within operating expenses to create a little bit of a tailwind leverage, but that’s always going to be countinents [ph] for us against what it takes to invest for the brand to grow to 10 billion and then numbers beyond that. So I’d say, again, the first emphasis is continued growth in those two key avenues for us with some potential upside opportunity to leverage operating expenses longer term.

Gaby Carbone: Got it. That’s helpful. And just a quick follow up. In your press release, you mentioned that you’re developing new categories that are going to be introduced later this year. Just wondering if you could elaborate on that?

David Weinberg: Probably not. We try to be careful not to get too far ahead or give too much notice where we’re planning something certainly something big to get everybody an idea of where to look and where to find it. I think we’re all secure in some launches. You’ll see them I believe shortly and you’ll know them as they happen. But we’re not in a position yet nor are we ready to go forward and announce them and get everybody ready from a competitive point of view.

Gaby Carbone: Yes, understood. Thank you so much.

John Vandemore: Thanks, Gaby.

Operator: Next question comes from John Kernan with Cowen and Company. Please go ahead.

John Kernan: Excellent. Thanks for taking my question. So congrats on the great quarter. You beat the high end of the sales guidance by about $100 million, which is great. It’s obviously a function of how much momentum you have in the business. The flow through was quite high to the operating profit line too. Can you just talk to what surprised you the most, John, financially in the quarter? Obviously, there was some sales upside. It seems like gross margin also was an area of upside to your expectations. And just have a follow up for the full year guide as well.

John Vandemore: Well, I don’t know that I would characterize this as a surprise per se. But let me contextualize it within the prior guidance. The continued extraordinary strength we’re seeing in the direct-to-consumer business certainly outdistanced our prior guidance. It’s hard to put into guidance a growth rate nearly 30%. Now that being said, we had seen strong trends. We feel like we have the product for it. So we were optimistic that it would continue, and it did, which was great, but I don’t know that wisdom would have been putting that fully into the guidance. So that definitely outdistanced our guidance. I would say China came back, did really well this quarter, even in kind of a mixed quarter from a consumer behavior perspective, but growing nearly 20% was a great result for us in China.

And then the domestic wholesale, I know it’s — again, we don’t want to log ourselves for a 25% decline, but that is better than we thought. We saw, again, sell-through driven activity and other activity in some accounts that are a little bit healthier than others from an inventory perspective leads to some accelerated take on the product. And that was great, because our hope is that that really starts to indicate a change with the balance of our customers that being in stock in full in sizes with the new product is the best way to go forward, which is what we’re doing in our own retail. So those were all positive surprises. Of course, you never get just good news. So there were some — a little bit of challenges here there that we dealt with that we’re not going to talk about because they weren’t material.