Academy Sports And Outdoors (ASO) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Academy Sports And Outdoors (ASO 0.65%)
Q3 2023 Earnings Call
Nov 30, 2023, 10:00 a.m. ET

Contents:

• Prepared Remarks
• Questions and Answers
• Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Academy Sports and Outdoors third quarter fiscal 2023 results conference call. At this time, this call is being recorded, and all participants are on a listen-only mode. Following the prepared remarks, there will be a brief question-and-answer session. Questions will be limited to analysts and investors.

We ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. [Operator instructions] I would now admire to turn the call over to your host, Matt Hodges, vice president of investor relations for Academy Sports and Outdoors. Matt, please go ahead.

Matt Hodges — Vice President, Investor Relations

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining the Academy Sports and Outdoors third quarter 2023 financial results call. Participating on the call are Steve Lawrence, chief executive officer; Carl Ford, chief financial officer. As a reminder, statements in today’s earnings release and the comments made by management during this call may be considered forward-looking statements.

These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could bring about our actual results to differ materially from our expectations and projections. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the factors identified in the earnings release and in our SEC filings. The company undertakes no obligation to revise any forward-looking statements. Today’s remarks also refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures.

Reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures are included in today’s earnings release, which is available at investors.academy.com. I will now turn the call over to Steve Lawrence for his remarks. Steve?

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Matt. Good morning, and thank you for joining us on our third quarter earnings call. As you saw from the results we announced earlier this morning, we had a challenging quarter with sales coming in at $1.4 billion, which was down 6.4% in total and translated into a negative 8% comp. Based on his sales, adjusted earnings per share for the third quarter was $1.38.

Certainly, the key themes we saw emerge in the first half of the year carried through into Q3. The customer is clearly under pressure, is being careful about when they infer to shop and how they want to spend their money. We’ve also seen a continuation of the trend with customers coming in during the key shopping moments in the calendar and then retreating during the lulls. Another key theme continues to be customers looking to enlarge their buying power by focusing on the value offerings and our assortment, which is our private brand merchandise, the promotions that we run, or in clearance events that take place at the end of each season.

Similar to prior quarters this year, we also continue to see customers gravitate toward new and innovative brands and items in our stores and online. Breaking the quarter down by month, August sales were down mid single digits. As we discussed on our Q2 call, we saw good momentum early in the month driven by our back-to-school business. Once we got past Labor Day and into September, we saw a slowdown in sales that lasted the entire month, resulting in a low double-digit negative comp.

We credit the softness in September to the lack of a natural shopping event on the calendar, coupled with much warmer than average temperatures, which suppressed early sales on fall seasonal categories. This trend carried forward into early October, but we did see an uptick in sales later in the month that we believe was driven by a combination of some cooler temperatures, coupled with increased sales in our outdoor business. The end result was that we saw a sales improvement versus the September trend with October coming in at a negative mid single-digit comp. Looking at the results by division, our best-performing business for Q3, sports and rec, which ran a 2.7% decrease.

Declines in fitness and bikes were partially offset by continued strength in outdoor cooking and furniture, as well as for team sports business. Our outdoor division ran down 6.9% for the quarter, but, as I mentioned earlier, we saw this business pick up toward the end of October as we approached hunting season started to lap softer comps from last year. Our apparel and footwear business has started out strong during back-to-school then tapered off as we moved into September. Apparel ran a 6.9% decrease for the quarter, was slightly better than footwear, which was down 8.2%.

We believe the primary driver of the soft business is caused by the above-average temperatures we experienced September and early October, which tamped down demand for fall seasonal items. Moving to gross margin, order came in at 34.5%, which was a 50 basis-point erosion versus prior year. This was primarily driven by our merchandise margin coming in 49 basis points below last year. We believe that the warmer temperatures we experienced in the quarter resulted in softer sales versus last year and the high margin fall seasonal products.

Customers, instead, gravitated toward the lower margin summer clearance, which makes our margin down. Promotional activity for the quarter was in line with our expectations. And our gross margin rate through three quarters sits at 34.7%, which is above our annual guidance and continues to remain roughly 500 basis points above our pre-pandemic levels. Now, I’d admire to give you a couple of updates on our progress against some of our long-range scheme initiatives starting with new stores.

During the third quarter, we opened five new stores with locations in Virginia, Indiana, Missouri, and Texas. During November, we opened up our final seven stores for the year, bringing our total to 14 for 2023. The November openings represent the largest number of new stores that we’ve ever opened in a single month. It’s five on a single weekend.

This is a huge accomplishment for a company, and I want to take a moment to recognize all of our team members that helped make this possible. As we open new locations, we continue to gain insights into what factors ensure a successful launch of a new store are getting better with each grand opening. While the sample size is still small, as we scrutinize and learn more from our new store openings, what is becoming clearer is that stores open in legacy markets where we have a high brand awareness as a group are on track to confront or exceed your own sales targets. What has also started to become apparent is that stores open in newer markets outside our current footprint need additional time and investment to build brand awareness and, therefore, will likely take longer to ramp to sales maturity.

After we get through this year, we’ll have more data on the sales ramp-up in 2022, as well as additional data on traffic, ticket, and conversion from both the ’22 and the 2023 stores, and will be used to refine our expectations for future store openings. As we look forward, we’re excited about the pipeline that we’ve identified. We’ll give guidance around a number of new stores that we scheme to open in 2024 during our next earnings call. Another one of our growth initiatives is to speed up the growth of our dot-com business.

While this channel has faced a similar challenges that our brick-and- mortar customers feeling this year, we’ve made some meaningful advancements in the third quarter that we believe will help drive growth in the future. During last quarter’s earnings call, we announced our new partnership with Fanatics. While in its early days, they’ve dramatically expanded our offering in NCAA with this partnership, offering over two times the number of styles for customers we started the quarter with just in time for the holiday gift-giving season. We’ll continue to leverage their extensive catalog and add more SKUs as we start each league’s new season.

Over time, our online offerings are significantly larger, allowing us to greatly enlarge our reach, helps service a much wider fan base. In addition to SKU growth, we’ve also been working hard on expanded functionality, such as adding Sezzle, a new pay-in-four option that supports additional categories such as hunting. As we head into the holidays, we believe with this expanded assortment and additional capabilities that we’re well positioned to capture the surge in demand from all the key online shopping events, including Cyber Week and Green Monday. A third initiative that I’d admire to update you on is our new customer data platform.

During our last call, we discussed adding this new tool to our toolbox at the end of Q2. The team has spent the last quarter fine-tuning our customer segmentation work, along with developing playbooks to help drive greater traffic and increased spend from our various customer segments. We have two main focuses in our CDP work, improving customer identification and increasing engagement. Both of which will help us build a deeper connection with our customers and drive incremental sales revenue.

Well, we just began to leverage some of our new capabilities for this tool, our initial marketing tests yielded promising results. First task was to grow our addressable customer file in order to help enlarge the reach of our various marketing channels. During Q3, we monitored a reactivation campaign that helped us boost the number of customers reaching with our emails by 25%. Another example of how we’re leveraging our customer data platform, the small tests that we ran with a focus on increasing both frequency of shop and spend, the subset of our best customers.

We sent targeted offers to this group, manage to drive an incremental trip at a higher basket size. What’s exciting about this use case was that we saw continued growth with this group after the initial discount we offered had lapsed. While we don’t expect all the tests we’re running to have a huge impact on Q4 results, we do believe that we will be able to start scaling these learnings and we will start moving needle in 2024 and beyond. The final initiative I’ll touch on is the work we’re doing around improving our supply chain.

The team has been working hard on getting ready to install and roll out our new warehouse management system, planning to go live with our Georgia DC in the spring of next year. This implementation is a key enabler of many of the supply chain efficiencies that we’re anticipating and the long-range scheme as we continue to open new stores. Now, I’d admire to turn it over to Carl Ford, our CFO, to walk you through a deeper dive of our Q3 financial performance, along with an update for 2023 guidance. Carl?

Carl Ford — Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Steve. Good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining the call. Let me walk you through the details of our third quarter results.

Net sales were $1.4 billion, a 6.4% reject compared to the third quarter of 2022 with comparable sales of negative 8%. The reject in sales was driven by an 8.1% reject in transactions, partially offset by a slight boost in ticket size. Consistent with overall sales performance, we experienced pressure in our e-commerce channel. E-commerce sales represented 9.4% of total merchandise sales compared to 9.5% in the prior-year quarter.

As Steve mentioned, our gross margin rate for the third quarter was 34.5% compared to 35% last year. The margin reject was due to a 49 basis-point reject in merchandise margins driven by an boost in planned promotions and a higher mix of clearance sales. Higher overhead costs, lower vendor allowances, and a slight boost in shrink were offset with freight savings. As a company, we continue to function at substantially higher gross margin rates than pre-pandemic, demonstrating that the operational changes made to the business over the past few years are structural.

During the quarter, SG&A expenses were $345.9 million or 24.7% of net sales, an boost of 170 basis points compared to the third quarter of 2022. As consumer demand remains challenging, we are focused on optimizing profitability through expense control and investing in our future. We reduced our variable operating expenses versus last year, while more than 100% of the boost in SG&A was driven by the investments we are making in areas that uphold our long-term growth initiatives, such as new stores, omnichannel, supply chain, and customer data. Net income for the quarter was $100 million or 7.2% of net sales, resulting in GAAP diluted earnings per share of $1.31.

Adjusted diluted earnings per share were $1.38. Our balance sheet remains strong with $275 million in cash and no outstanding borrowings on our $1 billion credit facility at the end of the quarter. Our inventory balance was $1.49 billion, which was flat compared to last year in both dollars and units. On a per-store basis, units declined 4%.

Heading into the remainder of the holiday season, we believe that our current assortment and level of inventory is appropriate to uphold the business. During the third quarter, Academy generated $57.5 million in net cash from operating activities. This is a 13% boost compared to last year. We continue to execute our capital allocation strategy by self-funding our growth initiatives and returning cash to shareholders.

During the quarter, we repurchased approximately 864,000 shares or $44 million and paid out 6.7 million in dividends. As of the end of the quarter, we had approximately 100 million available on the current share repurchase authorization. On November 29th, 2023, the board approved a dividend of $0.09 per share payable on January 10th, 2024, to stockholders of record as of December 13th, 2023. Demonstrating the commitment to our capital allocation strategy, the board also approved a new three-year 600 million share repurchase authorization.

Together with our remaining 100 million, the company now has 700 million of share repurchase authorization available for the next three years. Year to date, the company has spent 152 million on capital expenditures. For the full year, we expect to spend between 175 million and 225 million. Shifting now to guidance, based on our year-to-date results and current expectations for the fourth quarter, we are narrowing our fiscal 2023 net sales guidance from the previous range of 6.17 billion to 6.36 billion, to 6.10 billion to 6.17 billion.

This translates to a revised comparable sales range of negative 7.5% to negative 6.5%. Our full year gross margin rate is expected to finish between 34% to 34.2%. GAAP income before taxes is now expected to range from 670 million to 680 million and GAAP net income between 520 million and 530 million. GAAP diluted earnings per share are now expected to be $6.70 per share to $6.85 per share.

And adjusted diluted earnings per share are expected to range from $7.05 per share to $7.20 per share. We now expect to create 300 million to 350 million of adjusted free cash flow in fiscal 2023. The earnings per share estimates are calculated on a share count of 77.3 million diluted weighted average shares outstanding for the full year and do not include any potential Q4 repurchase activity. As far as providing guidance beyond fiscal 2023, we scheme to give fiscal 2024 guidance in March on our year-end call.

I will now turn the call back over to Steve for some closing remarks. Steve?

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

As you can tell from our commentary today, the third quarter was challenging for us. That being said, we’ve seen the customer come out and shop during the key moments on the calendar, and there is no bigger moment than the upcoming holiday season. The team has been preparing for Q4 all year. We’re off to a solid start in November.

As we expected, we saw traffic patterns return to a more normalized pre-pandemic pattern with less pull-forward of demand during the early part of the month. We put together a strong set of promotions for Thanksgiving week, and we saw a strong reaction from the customer yielding one of our biggest Black Friday events ever. While we still have a lot of business ahead of us, success for our Thanksgiving promotion helped create some momentum as we head into December. Looking forward into the remainder of holiday, we have a strong promotional cadence commanded by an aggressive marketing spend, which should help us deliver outstanding value to our customers.

Our inventory is in the best position we’ve been in over the past three years with a focus on the key giftable categories, along with new brands and innovative items customers have been voting for all year. I’ve been in all three of our DCs and a lot of our stores over the past quarter. And I can tell you, that teams are already excited for customers this Christmas. With that, we’ll now open it up for questions.

Questions & Answers:

Operator

[Operator instructions] Our first question comes from Brian Nagel with Oppenheimer. Please proceed with your question.

Brian Nagel — Oppenheimer and Company — Analyst

Hi. Good morning.

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

Good morning

Carl Ford — Chief Financial Officer

Good morning.

Brian Nagel — Oppenheimer and Company — Analyst

My first question, you know, looking at the results here and over the last few quarters, we talked about the kind of the top-line weakness. And recognizing you haven’t given guidance for ’24, and you scheme to do so early next year. But I guess the question I have is, is we think about this comp trajectory and kind of the moving pieces, what are the puts and takes, as you look at the business, to get back to positive comps for the company?

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, I’ll start, and Carl may jump in. But, you know, what we thought about this year, and I think we shared this on our last call, coming off the pandemic, having two back-to-back, you know, double-digit comp years, we anticipated ’22 is going to be kind of a year of reset. Thought we’d get back to growth this year. Clearly, the thing that is challenged this year is the customer’s under pressure.

So, we feel admire we don’t have a challenge strategy, we’ve got to challenge customer. So, the things that we’ve been focusing on as we proceed forward, you know, it was managing through the short term, making sure we’re delivering against the things the customer is looking for. The customer is voting for value, so we’re delivering value a couple of different ways. First, our everyday value proposition.

Second, the promotions that we run during key time periods during the year. And third, the clearance events that we run at the end of each season. And then, on the other end of the spectrum, we’re seeing customers gravitate toward newness. So, we’re also focused on delivering a steady diet of new brands and new ideas.

That being said, you know, another drag in our comp has been our outdoor business, which, through the first couple of quarters, was down double digits. We’ve seen that business start to get better as we started lapping softer comps. And so, I think as we proceed into next year, and you’re right, we’re not ready to give guidance for next year, I think the focus on value newness, leaning into our initiatives longer term in terms of opening new stores, the growth we’re thinking at — we have in dot-com, and getting more predicted out of existing base of stores, we think all of those things are the key ingredients to returning back to positive comms. That being said, when the customer’s health turns around a little bit, that we can’t ascertain.

What we can focus on are the things that are within our control, and that’s what we’re focused on.

Carl Ford — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, Brian, the only thing I would add there, you know, to the initiatives that Steve walked through, there’s a big comms sales waterfall embedded within them. He mentioned new stores and omnichannel. I would also say the customer data platform. You know, we got it up and running in July.

We’re running a lot of tests associated with it. They’re positive out of the gate. I think as we ramp our maturity working with the tool and getting more customer data, I think that’s a tailwind for a long time.

Brian Nagel — Oppenheimer and Company — Analyst

No, that’s very helpful. The second question, and again, I know we’re dealing with a very fluid demand backdrop in a relatively short amount of time, but, you know, as you look at your business, particularly relative to all the internal initiatives you’ve done with merchandising, are you capturing — do you think you’re generally capturing share across the board? Or are there parts where you potentially could be losing share here?

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, you know, listen, we look at market share first on a broad basis, and we look at it over a longer horizon than just a month or a quarter. We look at it on a yearly basis. We know we’re picking up a little bit of share. When we look at it on a longer-term basis, we’re very happy with that.

If you look at our sales versus 2019, you know, we’re still up about 25%. So, broadly, we believe we picked up a lot of share over the past four years and we’re holding on to that share. Beneath the surface, there’s always puts and takes here and there, but we believe we’ve picked up share and are holding on to it.

Brian Nagel — Oppenheimer and Company — Analyst

All right, guys, I appreciate all the color. Thank you.

Carl Ford — Chief Financial Officer

Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Michael Lasser with UBS. Please proceed with your question.

Michael Lasser — UBS — Analyst

Good morning. Thank you so much for taking my question. With your gross margin down 44 basis points, how are you looking at the need to continue to make these types of discounting and other promotional investments in order to drive the top line?

Carl Ford — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, from a gross margin standpoint, you referenced the 44 basis points. I would harken back to some of the structural improvements that we’ve made. We’re up about 500 basis points to FY ’19. I think about the early initiatives that we talked to you about around power merchandising and the things that we’ve done there, I have a lot of lasting power, and I just want to run through some of them.

We exited a bunch of categories that weren’t really synonymous with sports and outdoors, toys, luggage, electronics. We implemented season codes, systemically driven clearance lifecycle management. We really optimized buy and overall inventory management with a pretty upgraded open-to-buy process. We made allocation replenishment, system enhancements, and those are learning.

They continue to get better and better. Pricing system updates with reg price optimization, I really feel admire we’ve done a good job there. And then, to your last point, just managing promotions, but managing them from a position of inventory strength. And so, the 50 basis-point reject was really driven by planned promotions and our customer gravity — gravitating toward that value side of our offering.

It was included in our guidance. We are going to continue, admire we’re an everyday value provider. So, you’re going to see value every day. We’re really only going to encourage key shopping moments, and we’ve embedded that within the guidance.

And so, I do want to reiterate, our fourth quarter gross margin last year in the fourth quarter was 32.8%. The high and the low range that we put out there in this guidance, on the low, it’s a little bit worse than that; on the high, it’s a little bit higher than that. We’re planning on promotionality, and we’ve got some tailwinds with the supply chain costs.

Michael Lasser — UBS — Analyst

My follow-up question is, as you look to next year, how much more room is there to reduce SG&A without impacting the customer experience? And how are you thinking about that in the fourth quarter? Thank you.

Carl Ford — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, I won’t get into next year’s guidance, but I will say, from an expense standpoint, you know, this third quarter SG&A was up about $3 million to last year. That was — more than that was our strategic investments around new stores, omnichannel, customer data, supply chain. We’re flexing our variable costs really well, and we kind of keep a gauge on that by looking at our customer satisfaction scores. And we continue to be really proud of those.

So, if you think about the long-range scheme that we put out there, we had about 200 basis points of deleverage in SG&A along the span of this. Now, that was offset by gross margin improvements, largely driven by supply chain. The guidance applies about 200 basis points of SG&A deleverage this year. The fixed cost deleverage associated with the sales is the issue right now.

We remain committed to those strategic investments and we’re flexing in a healthy way in our variable. And our customers are telling us they’re still happy with our performance.

Michael Lasser — UBS — Analyst

OK, have a good holiday. Thank you so much.

Carl Ford — Chief Financial Officer

Thank you.

Operator

Our next question is from Will Gaertner with Wells Fargo. Please proceed with your question.

Will Gaertner — Wells Fargo Securities — Analyst

Hey guys, thanks for taking my question. Just wanted to touch on, first, the lower free cash flow assumption. It looks admire you cut it by 100 million, reduced capex by 25 million, reduced CBT by 38 million. Can you elaborate on that reduction?

Carl Ford — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, absolutely. From a free cash flow standpoint, your 100 million at the low is correct. The bulk of that is the reduction in the overall net sales on the low end. There are some timing things that come into play associated with year-end, and that made up the balance of it.

Will, I do just want to reinforce, if you look at our Q3 cash flow from operations, we’re up 13% to last year on down 6-4 sales. Year to date, on sales down 6, cash flow from operations is down 2.6%. We really feel good about our cash flow as a rate to sales. On the investing side, on what we’re committed to, it’s new stores, it’s omnichannel, it’s customer data, and it’s supply chain.

We think, done well, we will have no regrets investing into those four initiatives. So, inventory management stays really good. You cannot manage your cash flow without that. We’re really proud of our merchants in the open-to-buy process.

But the leading causes for the reject are really sales, top line in nature, and just the mere timing stuff.

Will Gaertner — Wells Fargo Securities — Analyst

That’s great. And just one more for me, I know you hit on this a little bit, but this customer data platform, what benefits are you beginning to see? What benefits are you expecting to see? And how does this — I know you talked about it benefiting comps, but will this also benefit merch margins? And if so, how?

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, I’ll take that one. So, you know, how we’ve likened this before is in the past, we had pretty blunt instruments to grasp what was going on with our customer file. We had data in a bunch of different places. You know, we couldn’t always tell, same customer shopping is online and in store, so we installed our new customer data platform in the second quarter.

And now, what we have is a holistic view of our customer. We’ve started doing some preliminary work around segmentation. And so, now, what we can actually see is we’re looking at it on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis, this movement, you know, even within segments. So, in some cases we can see certain cohorts within a certain segment maybe spending a little bit less per trip, or we can see other cohorts maybe shopping less frequently.

And so, what we started testing is different triggers to get them to react differently. So, what I talked about on the call was we had one evaluate with some of our best customers who maybe their spend was down a little bit year to date to try to incent them to up spend. In another case, we had some customers who were shopping a little less frequently, and the goal was to get them to make one extra trip. And in both those cases, you know, there are small use cases at first because they’re tests, but we saw an uplift in sales.

And we saw the behavior that we triggered with the promotion continue after the promotion. So, longer term, what we would see is this can be a much more robust tool for us to use across all of our different customer segments. From a margin perspective, I think what it’s going to do is it’s going to make us a lot more precise and targeted with our markdowns versus having broad-based promotions. I think you’re going to see, you know, a continued pullback on that and more focused targeted promotions that are individualized to the customer.

I’m not sure there’s a huge margin uplift from it, but we do think there’s an offset by pulling back on companywide promotions to fund those targets.

Will Gaertner — Wells Fargo Securities — Analyst

Got it. Thank you. Good luck during the holiday, guys.

Carl Ford — Chief Financial Officer

Thank you.

Operator

Our next question is from Robby Ohmes with Bank of America. Please proceed with your question.

Unknown speaker — Bank of America Merrill Lynch — Analyst

Hi, this is [Inaudible] on for Robby Ohmes. Thanks for taking our questions. Just first, can you talk about how Black Friday looked compared to your expectations? You said one of your strongest ever. Are there any categories to call out that performed well for Black Friday? And are you expecting holiday to be concentrated around the big buying events admire Black Friday, Cyber Monday? Thanks.

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, so I’m not going to get too granular in terms of category performance. What I will tell you, and I said this in prepared remarks, is what this year feels admire is kind of a return to kind of pre-pandemic shopping patterns. You know, we saw the customer, as we came in October and early November, moderate spending and expect for the discounts. And then, as I said on the call, the event was one of our best events we’ve ever run.

So, that can give you a sense of how good it was. You know, that being said, there’s still a lot of time before Christmas. And so we’re excited about the momentum that came out of that event, and that we’ve seen continue into the early part of this week. But it’s way too early to make the call, we’ve still got about three weeks before Christmas.

And as you know, this year there’s one extra day between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and that gives us one extra weekend. And so, we do expect at some point there to be a little bit of a lull that creeps in after we get past this week, and we expect that last week to be really strong. So, yes, we think that the behavior we’ve seen happen all year of the customer aggregating their shopping around these key moments will continue. Fortunately, we got the biggest moment of the year ahead of us, and I think we’ve really prepared ourselves for this.

Our inventory is in the best shape it’s been in all year. We’ve really been thoughtful about how we’ve constructed our promotional cadence and our marketing cadence. And I think we’re really well-prepped to have a great holiday season and to take advantage of the customer who’s willing to be out there and shop.

Unknown speaker — Bank of America Merrill Lynch — Analyst

Thank you, that’s helpful. And I just also wanted to ask a question on the hunt business. What were the trends you saw in 3Q? Are you seeing any stock-up or surge behavior? And do you expect the hunt and ammo momentum to continue through 4Q?

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, I mean, we talked a little bit about this in the prepared remarks. Definitely, that business has been one of our more challenged businesses. Through the first half of the year, it was down in the mid teens. We certainly — it was kind of — it performed down in the mid to high single digits in Q3, which would imply it got better than the first-half trend.

And if you track it through the quarter, it definitely got better toward the end of the quarter, both in the major categories of firearms and ammo. It feels admire, you know, we’re starting to lap some softer comps. If you recollect, we talked a lot about different surge activities that happened last year and certainly through the pandemic, it feels admire we’re lapping a lot of those as the business is starting to get more normalized. And our belief and hope is that business will start to stabilize from this point forward.

Carl Ford — Chief Financial Officer

One thing I’d add there is it was a little bit warmer than average. And so, that hunter that likes to get outside and mess with his lease prep activities and get ready for deer season didn’t see that amplification. And now that it’s gotten a little cooler here, we’re starting to see that turn on a little more.

Unknown speaker — Bank of America Merrill Lynch — Analyst

Great. Thank you. Best of luck this holiday season.

Carl Ford — Chief Financial Officer

Thank you.

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Anthony Chukumba with Loop Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.

Anthony Chukumba — Loop Capital Markets — Analyst

Good morning. Thank you so much for taking my questions. We just wanted to get an update on some of the product newness. I know you guys have been excited about some of the new products that have come in recently and have been expanded, admire, you know, the OOFOS recovery sandals and Bogg Bags and Birkenstocks and Shadow Systems.

So, I just wanted to see if you had any update there. Thanks.

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

Well, you’ve listed a couple of them.

Anthony Chukumba — Loop Capital Markets — Analyst

Yeah, I have to do it.

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

Thank you. You know, certainly what we’ve seen this year, and we talked a little bit about it, that the customer is gravitating toward newness. So, the categories you talked about are all categories that we were well positioned in for this holiday. We’ve seen them continue into holiday.

Other areas, we talked about our outdoor grilling business being really strong. There’s certainly a trend being fueled there by Blackstone and that flat grilling. That continues to be a great category for us. We talked in our last call about the addition of L.L.Bean.

So, we are really excited about that and the addition to that to our assortments for this holiday. And when you think about it, that product is really strong and kind of full, heavier weight products. The weather is getting right for that right now, just in time. So, we are excited about that.

But yeah, generally across the board, newness is working for us. You call out several of the brands, and there are other brands out there that are also working.

Anthony Chukumba — Loop Capital Markets — Analyst

Got it. And just one quick follow-up on newness, any update in terms of potentially getting on or HOKA for the footwear business?

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

At this point, you know, it is not in our plans in the next year. We continue to talk to them and work with them on getting access to those brands. But at this point, it’s not, you know, on our roadmap. That being said, we’ve got a lineup for the best brands in footwear.

You know, we got a premier position with Nike, who’s our biggest brand across the total company, as well as in footwear; strong businesses with, you know, brand admire Adidas and Under Armour, new brands admire Birkenstock that you mentioned. HEYDUDE doing really well four us, Crocs doing really well for us, you know, Books doing really well for us. So, you know, our goal and what we’re focused on is winning with the brand that we have and be very successful in those.

Anthony Chukumba — Loop Capital Markets — Analyst

Got t. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Chris Horvers with JPMorgan. Please proceed with your question.

Chris Horvers — JPMorgan Chase and Company — Analyst

Thanks. Good morning, guys. So, my question is on the strength that you saw at the end of October and quarter today, I guess how much of that do you think was helped by the Rangers-Astros World Series? Is that something that we need to contemplate as we look to the back half of 2024? And, you know, as you think about the guidance for the fourth quarter, can you share anything about what’s going on quarter to date? It seems admire you’re bracketing about a down 6. You know, are you trending in line with that? Are you expecting, you know, that extra day and that late surge to get you to that level? You know, anything there would be really helpful.

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, I’ll answer the second part first. You know, the performance we’ve seen quarter to date is embedded in the guidance that we gave. And I’ll refer you back to the commentary I gave you around November and Black Friday, and you can make inferences from that. In terms of the Astros versus Rangers, believe it or not, it actually was more of a negative to us than a positive to us.

If you look at our store count and what the Astros mean as a percentage of our business and license relative to the Rangers, the Rangers’ business is smaller. So, lapping the Astros World Series last year with the Rangers was actually a negative to our sales trend earlier in the month.

Chris Horvers — JPMorgan Chase and Company — Analyst

Got it. And as you think about, you know, the hunt businesses has really been such an indicator of the overall trend in the business. You think about the start of rifle season for deer in November 1st in Texas. Obviously, a big event.

Carl, you talked about, you know, some shift of the weather. As you peel back, you know, what you saw over, let’s say, the past two months, you know, how confident are you that business is actually bottoming? Because it’s, you know, sort of easy to focus on admire, hey, here’s what just happened when it got cold and the season started and blame the weather earlier. admire, I guess what’s your degree of confidence and how is it different from the last time you spoke to us in August?

Carl Ford — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, I think what I would tell you is this business is a cyclical business it always has been. And it is sometimes driven by external events and impacted you know by those maybe more so some of the other business. What we shared with you in the last call, which, you know, we also believe we’re seeing right now, is what gives us confidence that it’s starting to kind of level out a little bit is that the volume is becoming fairly predictable on a weekly basis. You know, if you go back, there were huge spikes in the last year driven by external events.

And as we got through this year, ammo on a weekly basis has settled into a pretty normal cadence, the firearms business has settled into a pretty normal cadence. So, really, the negative costs we’re experiencing wasn’t as much about the fluctuation in this year’s business as it was in the fluctuation in last year’s business. As we get into Q4 and beyond, that starts to level out quite a bit. And that’s what gives us confidence that it’s stabilized.

And that being said, it’s going to have ups and downs, right? I mean, it’s admire any business that’s driven by some external factors, but the kind of the noise in the last year is starting to die down a little bit.

Chris Horvers — JPMorgan Chase and Company — Analyst

Got it. Have a great holiday and Christmas season. Thanks.

Carl Ford — Chief Financial Officer

Thank you.

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

Thank you.

Operator

Our next question is from Oliver Wintermantel with Evercore ISI. Please proceed with your question.

Oliver Wintermantel — Evercore ISI — Analyst

Yeah, thanks and good morning. I had a question. You mentioned new markets and legacy markets in your prepared remarks. Could you maybe a little bit enlarge on what you learned there about the cadence of when you open into stores until maturity and then maybe add a little bit on four-wall EBITDA? Thank you.

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, I’ll tackle the first part, and I’ll let Carl tackle the second. You know, so we’re now two years in our new store openings. We opened up nine stores last year, 14 this year. I would tell you last year, a lot of the stores were weighted more heavily to new markets, and we tested a lot of different ideas.

You know, we’re testing, how do we do in a more urban dense population versus a more suburban population. We were testing some different new markets. This year, we applied a lot of those learnings to the, you know, that we had from last year to this year’s new stores. Things — when you look at the two years advantages that we’re seeing, and we call this out on the call, the stores that are within kind of our core geography or footprint where we’ve had existing stores for a while get off to a much faster start.

And they’re beating or surpassing the plans that we put out there. On the flip side, as we go into a newer market, maybe in the northern Midwest, in Indiana or maybe even Illinois, starting out a little bit slower, but when we go back and we look at historical ramps — and, you know, one of the things that’s also a little tricky is some of the new stores open from 15 and prior have some effect of the pandemic in them, right, in the later years. So, we’re trying to go back and look at ramps before that to see what that curve looks admire. You’re seeing those probably have a slower ramp.

And so, we wanted to call that out just to give you guys some color around that. And certainly, as we get into 2024 and give guidance, we’ll give you hopefully a better idea of how we’re seeing these new stores ramp and give you a little better guidance around that.

Carl Ford — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, and I’ll take the EBITDA. You know, I think similar to what Steve talked about, within our markets where there’s high brand awareness, EBITDA rates are higher, even in year one, versus in other markets where the brand awareness isn’t as high. We’ve had to invest a little bit more from a marketing perspective for that local customer to get to know us. The things that we talked about, positive EBITDA as a cohort in year one, we saw that.

Still committed to a ROIC hurdle of 20%, learned a lot coming out with FY ’22. I’ll just reiterate some of the commentary that we talked about. Tested a lot of new things, went into two new states, did our first retrofits as a company. We had done build the suits, you know, historically for as long — even before Steve and I were here.

You know, tried some new things, learned a lot, feel admire the FY ’23s are benefiting from those learnings, and we’ll update you more in March.

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, to Carl’s point, one of the things I left out at the end is we’re actually seeing the ’23 vintage get off to a faster start than ’22 because we applied those learnings. So, what was really interesting is some of these newer markets actually over Black Friday were some of our best markets. So, that gives us a lot of confidence that people are trying the brand who maybe hadn’t tried it before and that it’s starting to break through a little bit.

Oliver Wintermantel — Evercore ISI — Analyst

Thanks for all the color. I just had one follow-up. There was a previous question about the reduction in capex to 175 to 225. It looks admire the cadence of store openings in the fourth quarter stays the same.

Is that capex reduction? Are you signaling something about next year’s store openings cadence?

Carl Ford — Chief Financial Officer

Oh, no, not at all. This has more to do with when we revised our guidance, any discretionary expense we pulled out, any discretionary capital we pulled out, we’ve been efficient. I’m going to reiterate, our commitment to those four kind of initiatives that we talked about, from a new stores, omnichannel, customer data, supply chain standpoint, there’s been — none of that capex pull-down has anything to do with that. It’s just, you know, we’re getting closer toward the end of the year.

I’m willing to refine kind of our guidance range, just admire we did on the top line in EPS. It’s just coming in at a little bit lower.

Oliver Wintermantel — Evercore ISI — Analyst

Perfect. Thanks for the clarification. Thank you.

Carl Ford — Chief Financial Officer

Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Daniel Imbro with Stephens. Please proceed with your question.

Joe Enderlin — Stephens Inc. — Analyst

Hey, guys, this is Joe Enderlin on for Daniel. Thanks for taking the question. Just kind of piggybacking on the last question there, could you give any additional color on what early learnings you’re taking from the 2022 vintage to the 2023 one that you think are driving the most improvement within those stores?

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, I would say there’s several, you know, Carl hit on one. You know, we went in with a marketing scheme in terms of how we’re looking at the new stores that were both in heritage and new markets. And, you know, there’s probably more distortion that we need to make. We probably can spend a little bit less in the heritage markets, a little bit more in the new markets to drive a little more brand awareness.

You know, the last two vintages have been more back-half loaded. We’re seeing stronger performance in stores that open up in spring. So, we think moving more to the first half of the year is the right thing to do. So, you’re going to see a start slowly moving to have a better balance across the years, Having a better balance between new markets and existing markets, having a better, you know, improved localization strategy.

We — you know, I think we’ve done a lot of work over the past four or five years in terms of being smarter with our localization strategy. But even as we’re opening up some of these new markets, we’re having even more learning. You know, we opened a store in Florida, and we gave it our best assortment of saltwater fishing. And we thought we were giving it, you know, an A-plus assortment.

And then, as we were down in the market looking at it, found that we probably need to do even more than we’re doing. So, now we’ve built an A-plus-plus assortment, and then we’re going to use that to apply to all the Florida stores that we open on the Gulf Coast going forward. So, it’s an iterative process. We’re taking the learnings from each one and applying to the next.

It’s broad-based across merchandising, across marketing, across operations, across how we inventory the store. I can just tell you that each one is getting better and better, and that’s our expectation as we proceed forward.

Joe Enderlin — Stephens Inc. — Analyst

Got it. That’s helpful. Thank you. Just as a follow-up, warmer fall weather seemed to influence sales across the industry.

Does this influence how you look at the sales opportunity in 4Q at all? Do you think that initial deferral of cold weather items in 3Q could be made up in 4Q to any extent? Thank you.

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, you know, that’s the big question is, you know, if it gets cold, how long it stays cold, etc. I think one of the things that we’re happy about is that our inventories are under control, right? And candidly, it feels admire the industry is in a better place today than maybe it was a year ago at this time. And so, you know, we saw promotions lift a little bit over Black Friday but still seem well within control and lower than where they were, you know, pre-pandemic. We’ve got obviously increased promotions built into our forecast moving forward.

But I don’t think we’re counting on a big return of business that was missed. But I also don’t think we have an overhang of inventory that we’re going to have to address or deal with either.

Carl Ford — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, the only thing I would add there is that supply chain normalization, it might not be between Q3 and Q4, but it might be intra-quarter, where parents might have been buying a holiday gift and they bought it early, you know, because they were worried about it being there. I think the consumer’s confident that, you know, at least looking at our inventory position, we’re going to be in stock more frequently. And so I think some of that stuff that may have occurred in the third quarter in yesteryear, a parent or someone will have more confidence buying that closer in.

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

I think when you look at our business, you know, candidly, Q3 is usually a wild card, right? I mean, in our geography, it can be warm. Occasionally get a cold snap in October. It helps out a little bit. Generally, our geography gets colder in Q4, and it’s been fairly consistent year over year, and that’s where we sell the bulk of our seasonal product.

And so I think, we’re going to see that same pattern hold true this year.

Joe Enderlin — Stephens Inc. — Analyst

Got it. That’s super helpful. Thank you, guys.

Carl Ford — Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Joe.

Operator

Our next question comes from Simeon Gutman with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.

Jackie Sussman — Morgan Stanley — Analyst

Hey guys, this is Jackie Sussman on for Simeon. Thank you so much for taking our question. Just on the 34.5% gross margin for the quarter, I think you mentioned in your prepared remarks shrink. How are you handling shrink relative to prior quarters? How has it evolved throughout the quarter? Are things getting sequentially better? And anything to call out in terms of key forward data on that would be really helpful.

Thanks.

Carl Ford — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, Jackie, that’s a good question. Shrink was a big topic of discussion in the second quarter. We still see it as an issue. Our shrink rate was up 12 basis points to last year in the third quarter.

And when I talked about some of the muting of the tailwinds from freight, shrink is in play. Look, I don’t think, we do year round, we talked a little bit about this at the last quarter, we do year round physical inventory. So, we started to see shrink. in the third quarter of last year.

We were up 36 basis points and shrank in the third quarter of last year, so this is 12 on top of that. It’s better than the second quarter and way better than the first quarter trajectory, but I do think it’s because we got an earlier read on this and began to react to it. Maybe just a little bit quicker, I’ll walk through some of the things that we’re doing without getting into kind of much detail associated with what we’re doing. We’ve made investments in the team.

We’ve made investments in internal analytics to help us see patterns both internally and externally quicker. We’ve done a number of technology solution tests and subsequent rollouts really begin beginning in the third quarter of last year that aids on the prevention side, as well as on the detection side. We’ve got really strong partnerships with local law enforcement. So, on the detection side, the things that we can do to aid them, admire they don’t admire seeing this happen.

And the tools that we can help them with, they appreciate. You know, we’ve seen sort of from a federal standpoint over COVID, you know, there wasn’t as much federal participation in kind of admire these local organized crime rings that we were seeing. I feel really good about what we’re doing. We’ve led a couple of those discussions here, and we talked about one of the ORC bus that we saw in the Houston area that was a long running thing earlier.

And lastly, we don’t want to lock up all of our product. We don’t want our customer to have a negative experience, but we evaluate and we learn a lot. So, we’ve done some evaluate and learns with some baseball equipment that made a lot of sense. And we put the customer call button right next to where we might use a peg lock for an expensive glove, the A2000 specifically.

And some of the bats, that business is turning on so well associated with those premium baseball bats. We want to make sure that that inventory is there for the customer when they come in. That big mix of things is what we’re doing, but it’s a retailwide problem. It’s a nationwide problem, and our shrink rate was up 12 basis points this quarter.

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, I’ll just highlight one point that I think was embedded in what Carl said. You know, probably one of the best things that we can do to help combat this, because he’s right, it is a problem that everybody’s facing, is to staff our stores and make sure we’ve got people there who are helping out the customers, who are around. And that’s something we’ve been committed to, and I think that’s been a help as we’ve been navigating some of these strength trends that people have been fighting against.

Jackie Sussman — Morgan Stanley — Analyst

Got it, super helpful. And speaking of staffing stores, as you start the holiday season, are you seeing just any pressure on wages or labor hours? How are we thinking about that in terms of potential SG&A spend in the quarter relative to your pre-COVID trends? Thanks so much.

Carl Ford — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, I mean, certainly, if you look at our hourly wages versus pre-COVID, pre-pandemic, I mean they’re up for everybody. We feel admire we’ve done a really good job of keeping pace, if not maybe doing a little better in terms of the increases. We’re not having any trouble getting help, candidly. We’ve got a really good energized team of people that are out there.

We feel admire we’re appropriately staffed. But yeah, definitely wages are up versus where they were pre-pandemic.

Jackie Sussman — Morgan Stanley — Analyst

Great, thanks so much.

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

Thank you.

Carl Ford — Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Jackie.

Operator

Our next question is from Seth Basham with Wedbush Securities. Please proceed with your question.

Nathan Friedman — Wedbush Securities — Analyst

Hi, there. This is Nathan Friedman on for Seth. Thank you so much for taking my questions. I think you mentioned that your average ticket was trending higher year of year in this quarter.

And I know that you mentioned being more promotional and having some higher clearance, but just curious what kind of trends you’re seeing. Is there admire any evidence of trade down within your categories? Any color here would be appreciated.

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

I’ll start with a trade-down question. You know, we haven’t seen — that’s one of the things we talked a little bit about in the last quarter’s call was last quarter we thought we saw a little bit of trade down from our lower-end consumer into maybe, you know, lower-end retailer in terms of trip consolidation. We haven’t seen that this quarter. Conversely, we also haven’t seen any trade-down, we think, from other retailers into us.

So, I don’t think we’re losing customers. I don’t think we’re necessarily gaining any trade-down. That being said, one of the things that I think is helping us with that is we’ve done a really good job over the past four or five years in regards to building out our better, best center of our assortment. So, what that really allows the customer to do is to trade-down within our store.

So, building out the higher end bats and gloves that Carl was just talking about, if a customer doesn’t want to spend $300 or $400 for emerging that. We have other options for them to trade to versus having to go to another retailer. So, we think that’s helping us on that front. In terms of, you know, AUR average ticket, our biggest challenge was more traffic.

The average ticket was basically flattish, up slightly for the quarter. You know, we continue to see AUR growth year over year and over a multi-year period. You know, we expect that that’s going to continue. It’s not huge.

It’s low single digits. We think that will continue into Q4. And the promotional activity that we think is going to impact that we have baked into our guidance.

Nathan Friedman — Wedbush Securities — Analyst

And my second question is, you mentioned some things associated with supply chain and vendor allowances that offset 12 basis points of shrink this quarter. I guess that would suggest that your supply chain tailwind benefits may be slowing down as you start to lap these tougher comparisons. One, is that true? And second, how are you thinking about the puts and takes here in fourth quarter with supply chain and your tougher — sort of tougher merchandise margin comparisons as well? Thanks very much.

Carl Ford — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. It’s a good question, Nathan. So first and second quarter freight benefit was on around about 90 basis points each quarter, and we’ll have more detail in our 10-Q. But in the third quarter, it’s about an 80 basis-point tailwind for us, so a little bit of lessening there.

You know, we talked about — we didn’t really start to see that benefit from a freight standpoint until the first quarter of this year. So, we’re expecting tailwinds within the forecast that we — or the guidance that we put out there. We’re expecting tailwinds from a freight standpoint in the fourth quarter. But I think what you’re starting to see just beginning in the third quarter with that 10 basis-point kind of drop-off, going from 90s in first and second quarter to 80 basis points in the third quarter, it’s a tailwind.

But it’s beginning to lessen. But we really didn’t start to see the full weight of freight savings until first quarter of this year.

Nathan Friedman — Wedbush Securities — Analyst

Appreciate the time, and happy holidays.

Carl Ford — Chief Financial Officer

Thank you.

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

Thank you.

Operator

We have time for one more question. Our next question comes from Cristina Fernandez with Telsey Group. Please proceed with your question.

Cristina Fernandez — Telsey Group — Analyst

Good morning, and thank you for taking my question. I wanted to see if you can explain on the sales guidance, you kept the comp range within the prior range but lowered the total sales outlook. So, is that performance of new stores, the timing or the 53rd week? Can you explain why that’s lower?

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

It was primarily a reflection of what we’re seeing happening with the new store openings. We’ve had some — we’ve lost some sales where they slid out a week or two here or there. So that certainly impacts a little bit. Also, what we discussed on the call in terms of the performance of kind of the legacy heritage markets, new stores versus kind of the newer markets, so that’s the combination of those two things which drove that delta.

Carl Ford — Chief Financial Officer

But, Cristina, I will — I saw some of the early print that came out associated with comparing our fourth quarter of this year to the fourth quarter of last year. I know all of you are aware of that. This is a 53rd week fourth quarter. There are 14 weeks of sales in it.

That has always been in our guidance. But I saw some early reads, as I just looked at quickly, associated with admire the amplification to last year’s fourth quarter. I do want to remind you there’s a 53rd week.

Cristina Fernandez — Telsey Group — Analyst

Yes. And then, the second question I had, with the sales coming a little bit lower, how are you thinking about inventory for the year? And related to that, with the consumer shifting more to value, does it make you change the buys you have, leaning more toward that lower-price and lower-ticket assortments, focusing more on clearance activity? Any color there on inventory and buy would be helpful. Thanks.

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. I would say, one of kind of the strengths that we’ve shown, I think, over the past four years is strong inventory management discipline. I think that’s continued through the past quarter. Inventories are flat on a total basis, down about 4% on a store-per-store basis from a unit perspective.

So, we feel admire the inventory is in a good position on a [Inaudible] basis. But we also feel admire the content beneath the surface is much better than where it was a year ago in stocks, or the highest had been since the pandemic started. So, we don’t expect any sort of overhang of inventory coming out of the holiday. In terms of how we’re structuring our buys, yeah, the customer is gravitating toward value.

We see that expressed several different ways. You know, e talk a little bit about sometimes the private label mix. Private label business was a little better than some of our national brand business, which we infer as a flight to value there. So, certainly, that’s a growth initiative.

We’ve talked about how over time. We want to grow that business from around 20% or 21% of the business to 25%. You’ll see us continue to lean into that and grow that business. You’ll see us continue to lean into our everyday value proposition and really highlight those and feature those in marketing.

And you’ll see us use promotions around the key must-win shopping moments on the calendar to make sure that we’re driving traffic into our store and winning that driveway decision. And then, at the end of the seasons, clearance is another way to deliver value. So, all those things are parts of our playbook. We’re definitely leaning into them at the appropriate time to deliver value to the customer.

We think our position as a value leader in the space, you know, gives us a really good position to be in as the customer is under pressure.

Cristina Fernandez — Telsey Group — Analyst

Thank you, and good luck with the rest of the holiday season.

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

Thank you. OK. So, that was our last question. I just want to say from a recap perspective, you know, our approach over the remainder of the year is going to take the appropriate actions to steer the short-term softness in customer demand, you know, with really a focus on delivering new and innovative products, offering compelling value in order to help our customers stretch their holiday budgets, while also thoughtfully managing expense and inventories.

On a longer-term basis, we believe we’ve got a unique concept that resonates with active young families. We believe our model is scalable and transportable, and we’re going to continue to make investments in our future growth so we can enable more people to have fun out there by shopping Academy. In closing, I want to thank all 22,000 of our Academy associates for all the hard work and effort they put in and will still put in this holiday. You know, our employees are kind of a key ingredient of our secret sauce, and I know that every one of our team members is going to give it their best during Q4 and in the future.

So, thanks for joining us today, and have a great holiday, everybody.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this call has now concluded. Thank you for your participation. [Operator signoff]

Duration: 0 minutes

Call participants:

Matt Hodges — Vice President, Investor Relations

Steve Lawrence — Chief Executive Officer

Carl Ford — Chief Financial Officer

Brian Nagel — Oppenheimer and Company — Analyst

Michael Lasser — UBS — Analyst

Will Gaertner — Wells Fargo Securities — Analyst

Unknown speaker — Bank of America Merrill Lynch — Analyst

Anthony Chukumba — Loop Capital Markets — Analyst

Chris Horvers — JPMorgan Chase and Company — Analyst

Oliver Wintermantel — Evercore ISI — Analyst

Joe Enderlin — Stephens Inc. — Analyst

Jackie Sussman — Morgan Stanley — Analyst

Nathan Friedman — Wedbush Securities — Analyst

Cristina Fernandez — Telsey Group — Analyst

More ASO analysis

All earnings call transcripts