Columbia Sportswear Company (NASDAQ:COLM) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

So if you adjust for that timing difference, coupled with, Laurent, you also mentioned the shipments that we made in the latter part of last year for Russia, which were orders we took pre-invasion, those equated about $45 million. So if you adjust for each of those two items, the rate of growth that we’d be seeing in our wholesale business would be in the mid-single-digit percent range. But from an overall standpoint, when you look at the full year, which I think is much more indicative of the trends we’re seeing across the business, at least for the wholesale side, we’re up a low single-digit percent on the year.

Laurent Vasilescu: Very, very helpful. And then I wanted to follow up on margins. I think in your 10-K, you noted that inbound freight was 180 basis point impact to FY ’22 gross margins. Just curious to know how much — it looks, from your CFO slide deck today, that you recaptured about 200 basis points in this quarter. Just curious to know how much freight is going to be a benefit for your full year gross margin. And then clicking down to the SG&A, last 10-Q, you had about $18.8 million of logistics cost in your SG&A. Just curious to know how much that was impact for 2Q in dollar terms and how much do you think it could impact for the full year.

Jim Swanson: Yes. As it relates first to the gross margin and the inbound freight headwind that we had last year of 180 basis points, we continue to anticipate greater than 200 basis points of favorable gross margin impact this year as those imbalance freight costs have come down materially for us. And then as it pertains to SG&A, we’ve continued to see — you’ll see in the same CFO commentary document, among the higher rates of growth, that SG&A continues to be operations. And that encompasses our warehousing, distribution, fulfillment cost. That’s still a meaningful part of what’s driving SG&A up in the quarter. We’d anticipate those costs continuing through the balance of this year. And then, of course, we do believe those to be transitory.

As we get our inventories back down to more normalized levels going into next year, that should become more of a headwind. In terms of quantifying that, Laurent, it’s going to be — in or around the $30 million range would be a ballpark estimate of the impact in that area of our business.

Operator: Thank you. And the next question is coming from Mitch Kummetz from Seaport Research. Mitch, your line is live.

Mitchel Kummetz: Jim, if I heard you correctly, it sounds like the biggest part of the change in the sales guide is replenishment, your thoughts around replenishment in the back half. I mean how do you guys come up with that? Are you just looking at kind of trends over the last month or two and extrapolating that? I’m just trying to get a sense as to how conservative you might be without an assumption.

Tim Boyle: Yes. The replenishment business for us is very helpful, and we are in the process of automating that process today. I just left a meeting where we talked about the increased accuracy around the replenishment business. So it’s going to be important for us in the future, and it’s something that we’re getting much better at. But it is impactful this year, especially when you consider the potential impact of the PFAS product change. So it’s going to be the Board part of our business, and we’re getting much better at it all the time.

Jim Swanson: Yes. I think just further to that, Mitch, it’s based on the statistical forecast and looking back at what we’ve seen in trends over the last several weeks. And I would say that’s the case in terms of our wholesale replenishment business. That’s also the case in terms of how we’re thinking about D2C growth in the back half of the year. And so our outlook would contemplate D2C growth rates being similar to what our experience has been when you look at the first half of the year.