Citi Trends, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTRN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Chuck Grom: Okay. And then one last quick one for me. This is, Heather, on the balance sheet, right? I think they’re close to $13, I think, in cash per share, more than 50% of the market cap of the stock right now. I guess – I don’t think you guys bought back in your stock in 4Q. But I guess just talk about how you’re thinking about cash priorities when you – at what point would you look to put that cash to use? And, I guess, sort of a follow on there, you continue to have great success with the CTx remodels, but the rollout continues to be pretty small in terms of the total store base. So, I guess, how do we think about cash deployment and then accelerating those CTx remodels?

Heather Plutino: Hi, Chuck, I’ll take that one. Just to clarify, you are correct. We did not repurchase any shares in the fourth quarter. Really happy with our cash balance right now given the uncertain environment that we’re living in and that we expect to continue for at least the first half of 2023. It allows us to weather the environment while also giving us what I call dry gun powder, right, to take advantage of inventory opportunities in key categories. So, it’s giving us a lot of optionality. All of that being said, capital allocation is an important topic for us, and we continue to monitor opportunities in partnership with our board. We don’t have plans to deploy cash meaningfully, at least through the first half, given the trough that we’ve been describing.

But as we think about how we deploy our cash, and I feel like we’ve probably talked about this before, first and foremost, it’s to fund the operations. Second, we invest in inventory opportunities, and then we talk CapEx, right? So, system upgrades and to your point, CTx remodels and new stores. And then, finally, and not off the table is the return to shareholders via share repurchase. So, active conversation, but as you can imagine, given the uncertain environment that we’re operating in, gives us a lot of comfort to have a very strong and stable balance sheet.

Chuck Grom: Okay, great. Thanks very much.

Operator: Thank you. Our last question is from the line of John Lawrence with Benchmark. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

John Lawrence: Good morning. David, would you – could you take just a moment and – when you look at the cash spent and you talk about some of the new areas of inventory purchases, the kids area, and we’ve talked about the men’s area, is there any way to drill down into ’22 and see, we spent X million dollars on that additional inventory when we sort of went on the offensive – on the offense? And what was the gross margin for that particular product? Was – can you dissect that at all just to show the strength of that new inventory?

David Makuen: Hey, John. Thanks for that question. It might be tough to dissect all of that in a quick answer, but I hear where you’re going. And I can tell you that the test that we did last year and/or partial rollouts, I’ll use the Q line as an example, we started scaling that big time in late ’21 into 2022. That inventory is largely turning into sales. It’s a nice turning business. So, when we look at sort of the ROI on that inventory investments, it’s generally pretty strong across all of our categories. We go into them. Planning, inventory and margin at very good levels. And then, we, obviously, manage the turn as the product starts to get adopted and accepted by our customer base. So, I can tell you that for the most part, all of our “incremental activities,” whether it was Q line expanding into our multicultural men’s assortment efforts or the missy size range, which is new to our store, ever in our chains history, all of that had really good planning associated with it where it was both sales- and margin-accretive to the P&L.