Kura Sushi USA, Inc. (NASDAQ:KRUS) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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George Kelly: Okay. That’s great. And then I think a question for me. If I look historically at your restaurant level margin, just the seasonality of that line, there’s been a really nice step-up between 3Q and 4Q historically. And you just reported such a strong number. I’m just curious if there’s anything I should be aware of that would make it hard for you to achieve that kind of step up again this year?

Jeff Uttz: Well, I think the biggest thing, George, when you look at last year from Q3 to Q4, Jimmy already touched on this was we got such a big jump in labor. For last year because of the initiatives that we put in place. It was the first quarter where everything was fully in place last year between Q3 and Q4. So we got a lot of benefit between those two quarters. In addition, we took an incentive compensation adjustment last year in Q4 both of which we’re not going to have those benefits in this year. So if you look specifically last year, be very careful that to assume that kind of a jump from Q3 to Q4 in terms of the labor line. What you’ve seen historically in the other lines, I think it’s probably pretty consistent with where I would keep your eye on.

George Kelly: Okay. That’s helpful. Great. And then last question for me. I don’t believe you’ve talked about this recently, but I remember as part of the IPO process, there was a TAM study that you guys did just about the number of units that you thought was a realistic goal? And then there was discussion about maybe updating that. Is that something you’re still working on?

Jeff Uttz: It’s certainly not — we don’t have a new one. It’s the sort of it. We’re still very — we’ve got about 50 units against that initial white space estimate of 300. And so we’re not necessarily in a rush to update it. One of the trickier things that we’ve seen when exploring this is that I think for us, in our estimation, the biggest opportunity since we’ve gone public is really — and it’s unfortunate, but it’s the mass closures of Japanese restaurants. And white space studies tend to focus more on demographics as opposed to competitive factors. And so we’re — that’s the tricky part is figuring out how to bake in just how meaningfully the landscape has changed because the demographics haven’t changed that much, but the competitive landscape has changed completely and so that’s where we are.

And we do know a true that when we did the TAM study at the IPO that the parameters that we used are very conservative. And we do know that we make very good money at sales levels that are below. what we used in the last whitespace study. So when we redo that, if we just lower some of the parameters, I think everybody on this call and we all know and we’ve even set at conferences that we believe that number is going to be much higher than 300 and we will, at some point, update that study as most companies do about five years or so from their IPO, which for us would be next summer. But fortunately, for us, it seems like analysts provide their own white space numbers for us. And so we haven’t had to give a new one.

George Kelly: Thank you. I’ll keep guessing.

Jeff Uttz: Thanks, George.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Jeremy Halan with Craig Hallum Capital Group. Please proceed with your question.

Jack Cole: Thanks, guys. This is Jack Cole on for Jeremy. Congrats on the great quarter. So you mentioned that wages are still up year-over-year. Could you just clarify the magnitude of wage pressure in Q3? Is that still up high-single digits? And then just how do we think about wage pressure heading into FY ’24?

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