Carlos Alberini: Well, so just as you know, we have just refinanced our convertible, just we were able to do that under very favorable terms, and we are very happy with the fact that we were able to also kind of like defer some of those maturities into the future. So today, we have a great capital structure, and we are in a very good position. Last year, the team also refinanced and redid a couple of our facilities, credit facilities. So just our capacity is pretty significant, and we feel that we’re in a very good place. That’s why every time that we can squeeze and generate more free cash flow, we are very happy about that. So — and I think that as a company and as our Board has been tremendously pro shareholder returns, and they have done a lot to really increase those returns, increase the dividend very recently.
We were very active with share repurchases during the last few years. We are talking about 40% of the shares outstanding that were repurchased since I’ve been back. So you can imagine, we feel that we are super active with that. We want to make sure that we keep our powder dry just, we want to first as a top priority to be able to service our business. And with investments, this year, our CapEx is going to be lower than last year, and we are being very prudent in the way we are spending our money, but we want to make sure that we have plenty of capacity just when we have opportunities to invest to grow the business and do more. Of course, we are going to continue to look at opportunities to return value to our shareholders at all times. And I can promise you that.
And when we consider that is a good opportunity for us to be more active, we will do so. But we feel that we have been managing and balancing all those priorities in a very effective way. And I take a lot of pride on that because I’m very proud of how the Board approaches this topic and how pro all shareholders the Board is.
Eric Beder: Okay. I think what should we be thinking about in terms of opportunities to add more stores in other countries? Or how should we be thinking about that in terms of regions and where you would like to add those stores where it makes sense?
Carlos Alberini: Yes. Well, so we always look at the potential of the different markets, whether we are there or not and the opportunities for the Guess? brand primarily to really develop those markets, any one of those markets. And we have — in many cases, we work with partners. Just they are several examples of that where we have territories where our partners run the business, we have either a license or franchise type of business model with them. And we still see a lot of opportunity in all over the world, especially considering how large and expensive our categories are, I mean, just the — it could be that we are strong in one category in one particular market, but we see opportunities to bring and develop many of the other categories that we are in business with.
So, we have plenty of opportunity for growth here. If you look at the size of the Guess? brand today, it is about $5.5 billion. This is a fewer measuring based on what the ultimate consumer pays for our Guess? product, $5.5 billion. We think that this number could be a lot bigger than that. I’m talking about — when you look at some of the global brands, some of them are in the $8 billion, $9 billion size, and this is with less product categories than we have with less of a lifestyle type of offering as we have. So a lot of opportunity. But going back to the countries, I mean, they are markets like India, where we see a tremendous opportunity, and the brand is doing well. We are working with a partner there that has been opening stores. The stores are very profitable across the board.
They have been opening stores pretty aggressively, and we think that we will close this year with more than 20 stores there. And that is very exciting for us because it’s a huge market. And the brand is — we have the fortune that the brand is well known across the world, just I don’t think that you can go to any market where Guess? is not well known as a brand. So that gives us a big opportunity. Of course, we have been investing in China, that’s a huge market. Unfortunately, this has been a very challenging goal for us, but we are not giving up. We are very committed to that market. We see a big opportunity there. And we are looking into just changing the business model and we think that we are into something that could be very, very productive, looking at that market in the future.
And then within Europe, there are a lot of markets where we have a good presence and very profitable businesses, but where there is a lot more opportunity to grow and penetrate some other businesses. There are so many countries, so many cultures and again, we think that the Guess? brand is very relevant and something that people desire. So, we want to put that make the brand and the product available to all those potential customers.
Operator: Thank you. And this ends the Q&A session. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I will pass it back to Carlos Alberini for final comments.
Carlos Alberini: Yes. Thank you. Well, just — we are very pleased with our performance this year, and we are very excited about our future. We have a clear strategy and a very good plan for the second half and our teams are executing very well. We’re very proud of that. We are positioned well to grow our business and deliver strong value for our shareholders. Thank you to everyone that joined us today. We really appreciate that, and we look forward to speaking with you very soon. Thank you.
Operator: Thank you, everyone, for joining. You may now disconnect.
