Best Buy Co., Inc. (NYSE:BBY) Q2 2025 Earnings Call Transcript August 29, 2024 8:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Mollie O'Brien - VP of IR
Corie Barry - CEO
Matt Bilunas - CFO

Conference Call Participants

Scot Ciccarelli - Truist Securities
Michael Lasser - UBS
Mike Baker - D.A. Davidson
Greg Melich - Evercore ISI
Steve Zaccone - Citi
Steven Forbes - Guggenheim
Simeon Gutman - Morgan Stanley
Christopher Horvers - JPMorgan

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to Best Buy's Second Quarter Fiscal 2025 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 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 non-GAAP 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. Today, we are reporting better-than-expected results for the second quarter. Our comparable sales performance sequentially improved to a decline of 2.3% compared to our guidance of down 3% and last quarter's decline of 6.1%. At the same time, we delivered a non-GAAP operating income rate of 4.1%, which was higher than our guide of 3.5%, due to lower-than-expected SG&A expense. On a year-over-year basis, our non-GAAP OI rate expanded 30 basis points, largely due to gross profit rate expansion in our membership and services offers. From a category perspective, we drove comparable sales growth in tablets, computing and services. This growth was more than offset by declines in appliances, home theater and gaming.