RH (NYSE:RH) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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So it will be clear to people something coming that they have never seen a building wrap in a way that’s never been done. So everything is moving along. And Milan is an extraordinary project in dug out the site in the ground, they built the infrastructure for what’s going to be an incredible chunking Garden restaurants and €“ so a lot of exciting things. We’re moving along and make a lot of investments and I think we’re going to be relatively easy to find in Europe. I don’t know how many people actually know about it yet, but they’ll know we’re coming. They know something coming that they haven’t seen before. So yes, so there is €“ and that’s the great thing about the buildings we build, right, is there is people watching by them all the time, driving by them all the time.

So there is inherent curiosity that gets filled depth. And sure, a lot of people are going to go to our website and say, what’s that and see what we’re doing and see who we are. And so the brand is going to be benefited by not just topping up in a mall store where you throw a little barricade up along 300 other little storefronts and say, whoever’s coming in 2 or 3 months, I mean our buildings are under development for 2 to 3 years. So people get to anticipate our entry into a market for a while. So I think that’s one of our advantages, quite frankly.

Steven Zaccone: Great. Then the second question I had was, I did want to shift to margins. And I was curious for how to think about the path beyond this year. It’s helpful to think about the business where you are today versus 2019, but we always used to think about a 20% margin floor for the business. So as we look to €˜24, would you expect the mid-teens to high-teens operating margin level to be the right level for the business as maybe you return to growth, but it’s potentially offset by continuing investments for global.

Gary Friedman: Yes. I think you’ve got to think about a 20% margin floor, not in the worst housing market €“ worst luxury housing market I’ve ever seen. It’s been one of the worst housing markets anybody has seen, right? So I think in the third quarter, with luxury housing is not a fourth quarter, luxury, if you think about where luxury housing has been, it was down 18% in the first quarter of €˜22, down 28% in the second quarter of €˜22, down 38% in the third quarter of €˜22 and recently reported a couple of weeks ago down 45% in the fourth quarter of €˜22, which means because you’re talking about months and they are kind of going down, it probably means that the last month of the fourth quarter was down close to 50%.

It’s not 50%, then you’ve got a refi market that’s down 70%, 80%, some number like that. And housing values, the refinancing market is another way to drive businesses like ours, when people are refinancing, taking money out, investing money into their home, refurnishing their home, things like that. When you’re looking at kind of record inflation, record rising interest rates, a record kind of falloff in the housing market like this. Like is there €“ I don’t think I was thinking that we had a COVID giveback and this kind of market environment with the banking prices and other things all happening at once. So for our customer, they are smart and savvy investors. There is one that the leasing housing market went up more than regular housing market is about a 10-point swing between the two between the non-luxury homes I think a 10 point swing all year, even more than that in the earlier quarters.

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