Foot Locker, Inc. (NYSE:FL) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Mary Dillon : Sure. Well, I am really excited about the possibility of unleashing more capability around demand creation, using our loyalty program to even greater effect or customer data and data analytics, improving some of the experience in the omnichannel world that we’re in. So we’re in the early stages, I’d say, of determining what the investment levels might need to be. Now the good news is we’re already on aggressive cost reduction plan, right, as Andrew talked about in his in his work. So that’s good. That will give us some sources of investment. And it’s pretty clear that whatever we do is going to be manageable from a cash flow perspective. And really from an OpEx perspective, anything we choose to spend on would be sales drivers with clear ROIs attached to them. So more to come, I understand you’re probably trying to build out the modeling, but I think we will come to conclusion soon, but we think we have it well at hand.

Operator: The next question comes from Jay Sole of UBS.

Jay Sole : Andrew, I think you mentioned that the YEEZY impact would be about $50 million in Q4. I think there’s been some talk by data that they would rebrand the product and maybe start delivering again. Can you just talk about that strategy and how it impacts at Locker, especially as we look into Q1, Q2, Q3 of next year, do you expect to continue to have a negative impact from the removal of YEEZY? Or will there be some way to sort of offset that with the rebranding?

Andrew Page : Yes. I mean as we talked — as you noted, there’s about a $50 million expected impact in Q4, which we have built into our guidance, and we’re comfortable with our guidance, excluding YEEZY. As it relates to going forward, we have — we’re not planning to — we don’t have that planned in the fourth quarter, and that’s — we have — we’re comfortable with our decision. We’re comfortable with where adidas landed on that, and we feel we’re moving forward. We’ve moved on past that.

Frank Bracken : Yes, I think it’s probably a better question, honestly for the adidas team to be perfectly candid. But what I can tell you is we’ve got a full assortment of adidas products, everything from Boost to nomads to classic basketball and there’s a great partnership that they launched with Jerry Lorenzo in Fear of God this holiday. So we’ll lean into and partner and continue to collaborate, tell great stories and plenty of other franchises across the adidas brand.

Jay Sole : Got it. And maybe if I can ask one more. Andrew, where do you see inventory at the end of 4Q? Do you see it being back in line with the sales trend? Or will maybe need one more quarter.

Andrew Page : Yes. I mean an inventory at the end of Q4 is still going to be up. It’s going to be up in the similar range as we talked about and you saw in the mid-30%, low 30% for Q3. So we expect inventory to still be up.

Operator: The next question comes from Matthew Boss of JPMorgan.

Matthew Boss : So Mary, while clearly early days, how do you view Foot Locker as a destination for the consumer today maybe high level, what do you see as low-hanging fruit to expand the customer file or drive incremental customer traffic? And then just for Andrew, as we think about bottom line profitability, your guide for this year calls for just over 7% operating margin. Could you help bridge the gap maybe to roughly 9% pre pandemic? Or are there any structural hurdles that you see preventing multiyear opportunity to meet or potentially exceed that level pre-pandemic?