Best Buy Co., Inc. (NYSE:BBY) Q3 2024 Earnings Call Transcript November 21, 2023 8:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Mollie O'Brien - VP, IR

Corie Barry - CEO

Matt Bilunas - CFO

Conference Call Participants

Simeon Gutman - Morgan Stanley

Chris Horvers - JPMorgan

Peter Keith - Piper Sandler

Mike Baker - D.A. Davidson

Steven Zaccone - Citi

Jonathan Matuszewski - Jefferies

Steven Forbes - Guggenheim

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Best Buy's Third Quarter Fiscal 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this call is being recorded for playback and will be available for -- by approximately 1:00 P.M Eastern Time today. [Operator Instructions] I will now turn the conference call over to Mollie O'Brien, Vice-President of Investor Relations.

Mollie O'Brien

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Joining me on the call today are Corie Barry, our CEO, and Matt Bilunas, our CFO. During the call today, we will be discussing both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures, a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures and an explanation of why these financial measures are useful can be found in this morning's earnings release, which is available on our website, investors.bestbuy.com.

Some of the statements we will make today are considered forward-looking within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements may address the financial condition, business initiatives, growth plans, investments and expected performance of the company and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from such forward-looking statements. Please refer to the company's current earnings release and our most recent 10-K and subsequent 10-Qs for more information on these risks and uncertainties. The company undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances that may arise after the date of this call.

I will now turn the call over to Corie.

Corie Barry

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. For the third quarter, we are reporting better-than-expected profitability on slightly softer-than-expected revenue. Specifically, we are reporting a comparable sales decline of 6.9%, which is slightly below our outlook for the quarter as consumer demand softened through the quarter. At the same time, we expanded our Q3 gross profit rate 90 basis points from last year due to profitability improvements in our membership program and better product margins. We also lowered our SG&A expense compared to last year as we tightly controlled expenses and adjusted our labor expense rate with sales fluctuations.