National Vision Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:EYE) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Reade Fahs: And Mike, I’ll just add one other thing to your question about our costs. We talked about in our last call that we have got a 3-year extension of our current lens contract with EssilorLuxottica, which sort of locks in pricing for several years. And so that’s — lenses are a key part about what we buy, then that’s one of the costs that we can — is very predictable.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Dylan Carden of William Blair. Our next question comes from the line of Michael Lasser of UBS.

Michael Lasser: Now that you’ve had some time to reflect and analyze what’s happened this year? Why is it different than what has happened during prior downturn? National Vision has got a long history of being able to generate very attractive same-store sales growth throughout the course of the cycle. And now, obviously, this year has been much tougher, much tougher than the other publicly traded reporters. Perhaps there is some element to it that the low-income consumers under pressure — low income consumers has been under pressure in the past, maybe there’s some element of it with the capacity constraints, but capacity constraints that’s ebbed and flowed for National Visions in the past. So why is it different? And how does that influence how you think about the performance of the business and the ability to maintain positive comps in the face of a weakening economic environment?

Reade Fahs: I will — Michael, thanks for that. Nice to hear your voice. So a few things. The past — the ’08 ’09 experience was a recession, this is a recession coupled with steep inflation, that is a little bit different. The other piece is just this disruptive purchase cycle from the crazy up and down of the pandemic era where we shut our stores and this or that. There was purchase cycle disruption there. But the newer piece has been since the pandemic, the market for optometrists has gotten a lot tighter, and so there’s the OD capacity piece. Frankly, when I think of this as the most big picture level, I think that all of the challenges related to pandemic era pieces the capacity, the purchase cycle disruption, even the inflation, it’s all bundled in with impacts relating to the pandemic.

Michael Lasser: And my follow-up question is, if the overall demand environment remains sluggish in the next year, the market for optometrists remain tight, such that it would put upward pressure on wages and in turn your cost structure, should the market be prepared for down margins next year in that scenario? And are there actions that you can take to preserve your profitability in the event that, that is the outcome for the business?

Patrick Moore: Well, we are going to stop short of providing specific guidance for 2023 today, Michael, as you would guess. I go back to the answer that I gave earlier. There has been some many twists and turns for margins across the pandemic. This year, the biggest twist was frankly just the degree of revenue that has — that we did not get than we expected to at the beginning of the year. We remain in a posture that says we believe there will be demand recovery, and we are going to be very well positioned to take that demand recovery. We have not yet taken slashed cost. We have been very smart with costs that we felt like we could pull back on. It wouldn’t damage our go-forward growth prospects, and we continue to evaluate that posture. I think we’re in the right place on this. I think time is going to prove it out. So again, I can’t give you specific guidance, but I do think that there’s an opportunity here for us to see some more cover.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Brian of Jefferies. Our final question comes from the line of Molly Baum of Bank of America.