Burlington Stores (BURL) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending April 29, 2023

May 25, 2023 8:30 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Burlington Stores, Inc. First Quarter 2023 Earnings Webcast. I would now like to turn the call over to David Glick, Group SVP, Investor Relations and Treasurer. Please go ahead.

David Glick

Thank you, operator and good morning everyone. We appreciate everyone’s participation in today’s conference call to discuss Burlington’s fiscal 2023 first quarter operating results. Our presenters today are Michael O’Sullivan, our Chief Executive Officer and Kristin Wolfe, our EVP and Chief Financial Officer.

Before I turn the call over to Michael, I would like to inform listeners that this call may not be transcribed, recorded or broadcast without our expressed permission. A replay of the call will be available until June 1, 2023. We take no responsibility for inaccuracies that may appear in transcripts of this call by third-parties. Our remarks and the Q&A that follows are copyrighted today by Burlington Stores.

Remarks made on this call concerning future expectations, events, strategies, objectives, trends or projected financial results are subject to certain risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those that are projected in such forward-looking statements. Such risks and uncertainties include those that are described in the company’s 10-K for fiscal 2022 and in other filings with the SEC, all of which are expressly incorporated herein by reference. Please note that the financial results and expectations we discuss today are on a continuing operations basis. Reconciliations of the non-GAAP measures we discuss today to GAAP measures are included in today’s press release.

Now here is Michael.

Michael O’Sullivan

Thank you, David. Good morning, everyone and thank you for joining us. I would like to cover three topics this morning. Firstly, I will discuss our first quarter results. Secondly, I will talk about our guidance for the second quarter. And finally, I will comment on the full year outlook. After that, I will hand over to Kristin to walk through the financial details of our first quarter results and our 2023 guidance. Then, we will be happy to respond to your questions.

Okay. Let’s talk about our Q1 results. Comp store sales for the first quarter increased 4% versus our guidance of 5% to 7%. On a geometric stack basis, this represents 3% comp store sales growth versus 2019. As I will explain in a moment, we believe that this weaker-than-planned comp growth was driven by two external factors. We started the quarter very strongly. In fact, until mid-March, our comp growth was running up double-digits. As we have described on the last couple of calls, we have had a very strong focus on delivering great value in our assortment, expanding opening price points and offering great brands of well values. This strategy has driven the improvement in the sales trend that we have seen since early Q4 and this strong momentum continued well into the first quarter. Our merchants and operators have done a nice job executing this value strategy.