Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. This is Sportsman's Warehouse First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Ms. Rachel Schacter of ICR..

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. With me on the call is John Schaefer, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Kevan Talbot, Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, I would like to remind you of the company's Safe Harbor language.

The statements we make today will contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which includes statements regarding our expectations about our future results of operations, demand for our products and growth of our industry.

Actual future results may differ materially from those suggested in such statements due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those described in the company's most recent 10-K filed with the SEC on March 24, 2016. We will also discuss non-GAAP financial measures during today's call.

Definitions of such non-GAAP measures as well as reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are provided as supplemental financial information in our press release, included as Exhibit 99.1 to the Form 8-K we furnished to the SEC today, which is also available on the Investor Relations section of our website at investors.sportsmanswarehouse.com.

Now, I'd like to turn the call over to John Schaefer, President and Chief Executive Officer of Sportsman's Warehouse..

Thank you, Rachel. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I will begin by reviewing the highlights of our first quarter performance and then discuss our progress on our strategic initiatives and thoughts on the remainder of the fiscal year.

Kevan will then go over our financial results in more detail and review our outlook, after which we will open up the call to your questions. We're pleased with our first quarter results which came in within our guidance.

While the overall retail environment was difficult and we faced some of the same headwinds affecting the retail industry generally, we do believe the unique characteristics of our business model and our execution of that model allowed us to navigate these headwinds in the first quarter.

Similar to the previous several quarters, we met each of our financial performance objectives and performed within our guidance. Our continued focus on maintaining and, where possible, enhancing gross margin has allowed us to meet our ROIC objectives and earnings guidance.

While we are not immune to the traffic declines facing retail, there were a number of initiatives put in place in previous quarters as well as our positioning as a strong hard goods retailer that have allowed us to successfully weather this headwind in the first quarter.

We continue to grow the company while also meeting our twin objective of a 20% ROIC on new stores and creating free cash flow to pay down debt. We opened three stores in the first fiscal quarter of 2016 and are on pace with our plan to open 11 stores in fiscal year 2016. Net sales for the quarter increased 9% to $151.6 million.

Same store sales decreased 2.2% versus the prior year period. Breaking down this number tells an interesting story and confirms our position as a go-to source for our customers. In Q1 and continuing into Q2 of fiscal year 2016, we have two factors impacting same store sales that should show improvement in the back half of the year.

The first is the effect of competition, which we have talked about many times. Competition impacted same store sales in the quarter by 170 basis points. This included two new competitive openings in the first quarter of this year, impacting three of our stores versus no new competitive openings in the first quarter of last year.

As a reminder, when one of our larger competitors opens a store in our market, the impact of this new competition lasts approximately 18 months.

However, the biggest impact is in the first five months as we believe the retail theater environment of the competitor’s store results in significant curiosity and increased customer traffic for the competitor in the impacted market. The second item is the impact of the economy on our oil and gas-dependent stores.

This impact was 90 basis points in the first quarter. Excluding the impact of these two factors, our same store sales would have been up 70 basis points for the quarter over the prior year’s first quarter. We believe these two factors will subside as we move into the second half of the year.

On the competitive opening side, we expect this impact to increase in the second quarter based on an additional competitive opening.

However, given the already announced competitive opening dates and our relatively consistent historical experience with the associated impact beginning in Q3 through Q4, we believe we should see this impact decrease substantially.

On the oil side, as we anniversary the big declines in oil prices in late Q2, we should see the impact of this dynamic on our same store sales comparisons diminish as well.

Continuing to look more closely at our store sales performance for the quarter, firearm sales were up 18% versus the first quarter of last year and versus the NICS data for our states being up 14.8%.

Keep in mind, as we pointed out in our Q4 earnings release, that we saw what we believed was a $5 million pull forward of firearms and ammunition sales into Q4 last year and out of Q1 this year.

Also, as you may recall, in Q1 of last year, we had the green tip ammo scare resulting in a run on ammunition in the first quarter of last year, which we have now anniversaried. These factors reiterate that on an ongoing basis firearm sales are returning to historical trends and are moving with the overall growth in the industry.

Ammunition sales on a same store basis declined 4.4% over the prior year as a result of the pull forward and the green tip ammo scare last year.

And while on an overall basis it still appears customers are continuing to reduce their stockpiles of ammunition, it appears that the three to four month lag in ammunition growth following firearms growth that we discussed previously is still relevant.

As a result, we are very pleased with the overall growth in firearms and ammunition even after considering timing differences and we believe we are the best positioned brand in our niche to continue to capture market share in the category.

Our store growth performance in the firearm and ammunition categories and ancillary businesses as well as the growth in our non-hunting categories all point to continued share gains and traction in markets of all sizes as either complimentary alternatives to major competitors and larger markets or at the expense of mom and pops and the direct channel in smaller markets.

From a composition standpoint, conversion and average order size continued to increase.

Once again, as we move through the quarter, it became clear that our customers were focusing their dollars on the use categories within hunting, camping and fishing versus the ancillary categories within hunting, camping and fishing and the clothing, footwear and electronics categories.

As we stated last quarter, we see this trend continuing through the first half of 2016 as customers gauge the potential impact of both the overall economic environment as well as the continuing presidential election process.

Now on to profitability, gross profit increased 12.3% versus last year, with gross margin as a percentage of sales increasing 100 basis points over the same period.

Once again, we delivered on our sales goals and held individual product gross margin across most of our categories and across both our branded and private label businesses, which reflects our planning, buying and pricing discipline as well as our gradually increasing private label penetration.

Adjusted operating income for the quarter was $2.5 million, a 100% improvement over the prior year as we continue our dual objective of both investing in our future [indiscernible] we are operating as efficiently as possible on a day to day basis.

Adjusted earnings per share were $0.00, at the high end of our guidance and an improvement over the adjusted loss per share of $0.03 in the prior year period.

We believe our results continue to demonstrate that our customer base enjoys shopping in our stores based on our unique environment as well as our convenience as a neighborhood store in larger markets or our big box appeal in smaller communities where we provide a greater assortment than the mom and pop competition.

We also believe that we have an advantage versus online-only options by providing outdoor enthusiasts with the touch and feel of product they may not have been physically exposed to before.

Our pricing is similar to and in many cases better than the prices that can be found online and as we've noted before many key product lines are not available or very difficult to purchase via the direct channel. Looking ahead, we remain focused on our strategic growth initiatives and key priorities.

Let me discuss a few, including progress made in the first quarter. Number one, we remain focused on the significant store growth opportunity we see in existing and new markets that we expect will support an expected unit growth rate of greater than 10% annually for the next few years.

With the opening of stores in Slidell, Louisiana; South Jordan, Utah; and Rohnert Park, California in the first quarter, we are on track to open 11 stores previously announced in 2016.

Our operating discipline and prudent use of cash have continued to allow us to self-fund our store growth, while also reducing our leverage and we expect to continue our pace of new store openings into fiscal year 2017 and beyond.

Number two, we have seen consistent performance out of our 45,000 square foot boxes and executed a successful fixturing strategy grounded in analytics around SKU productivity and customer preferences, among other things, that has enabled our success in smaller 30,000 square foot boxes as well.

As I discussed in previous quarters, our 15,000 to 17,000 square foot stores in Klamath Falls, Oregon and Heber City, Utah are performing as we expected and that has given us the confidence to continue to pursue this unique strategy going forward, including opening three additional locations of this size in 2016 in Rock Springs, Wyoming; Gillette, Wyoming; and Prescott, Arizona.

Number three, we continue to focus on maximizing the potential of our loyalty program, which continues to post strong gains. We now have over 900,000 members, an increase of approximately 70% over the prior year and the transactions from our loyalty members continued to increase, representing almost 44% of our net sales in the first quarter.

Number four, while still a very small part of the revenue of our business, we continue to invest in e-commerce with the focus on increasing our digital presence to build our brand awareness and drive customer interaction.

Traffic on our website increased 31.5% in the first quarter versus the prior year period as we continue to improve all aspects of our site.

As we have noted before, driving traffic to our site is a key component in our e-commerce strategy as we know customers use our site for product knowledge and availability as much as they do for pricing information.

So in summary, we are pleased that we delivered Q1 results within our range of expectations despite some headwinds and are encouraged by the progress we continue to make against all of our strategic growth priorities as well as the consistent performance of the vast majority of our store locations in a choppy environment.

As we look toward the remainder of 2016, as I mentioned earlier, we expect the impact of competitive openings to continue in the second quarter before abating in the back half of the year. In addition, we do not expect a significant improvement in the macro backdrop as it relates to the consumer spending patterns in the second quarter.

However, on the positive side, we feel very good about the continued positive momentum we have seen in the past few months in the used categories of hunting, fishing and camping, indicating our customers are continuing to take advantage of the activities available to them in the outdoors.

In addition, as oil prices continue to rise and we anniversary the impact of falling oil prices from last year in the second quarter, we expect this competitive headwind to abate as we move into the second half of the fiscal year.

Finally, while the weather continues to move in an unpredictable fashion, the drought conditions that existed in many parts of the Northwest last year have lessened and in many areas the availability of water for fishing is back to more user-friendly conditions.

Before I end, I want to thank all of our team members for their tireless work and dedication to executing with discipline every single day. They are the reason for our customers enjoy shopping our stores and reward us with their loyalty. With that, I'll turn the call over to Kevan to discuss our financials..

three new store openings, revenue to be in the range of $178 million to $183 million, same store sales in the range of down 1% to positive 1% compared to the second quarter of last year and earnings per diluted share of $0.15 to $0.17 on a weighted average of approximately 42.6 million estimated common shares outstanding.

For the full year, fiscal year 2016, we are reiterating our earnings outlook initially provided with our 2015 year end release. We are revising our sales outlook to conform to the revision in revenue presentation for hunting and fishing licenses from a gross basis to a net basis.

As I said earlier, this change in presentation has no impact on gross profit dollars, operating profit dollars, net income or earnings per share.

For fiscal year 2016, we expect revenue of $770 million to $790 million; same store sales change in the range of flat to positive 2% compared to fiscal year 2015; and adjusted earnings per diluted share of $0.65 to $0.73 on a weighted average of approximately 42.5 million estimated common shares outstanding.

We are still on track to open all 11 stores in our 2016 class of stores, including three smaller format stores.

We continue to expect operating margins to be flat year over year as slightly higher gross margins are offset by SG&A deleverage as a result of the previously announced investments in personnel and resources to support our planned growth in the back half of the year.

We ended the quarter with $63.3 million in outstanding borrowings and $49.6 million in borrowing availability under our credit facility.

As it relates to capital expenditures, we anticipate incurring approximately $35 million to $40 million in capital expenditures in fiscal year 2016, which will include the 11 stores in our 2016 class of stores as well as work on our 2017 new stores. With that, I will now turn the call back over to the operator as we open up the call for questions..

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Seth Sigman from Credit Suisse..

Just one clarification question.

When you look at the sales guidance, $770 million to $790 million, the change from the prior guidance, is that just the accounting change, because it seems like there's no real change in the comp outlook, just wanted to clarify that?.

That is correct. It is simply a result of the gross versus net revenue presentation..

And then outside of the competitive headwinds that you pointed to, a number of retailers have pointed to weather impacting sales in April, maybe a little bit in March too.

Can you talk about any variability that maybe you saw in performance across your store base from a regional perspective?.

Seth, our clothing and footwear is really used clothing and footwear except in the second half of the year where you have all kinds of outerwear being sold.

So we're seeing some movement in things like waiters, active wear I think where you're seeing depressed sales throughout the retail environment and in general active wear we're seeing that as well.

And frankly the first two quarters aren't that big of a deal for us in terms of camel clothing and things like that, so we expect that from an overall retail environment that our active wear would be down and we really don't make that up with the kind of product that we sell in clothing and footwear.

So bottom line, the weather is actually getting better in the West in terms of being wet enough to fill up some of the dry waterways that we had last year, so fishing can take off a little better. And in terms of the unpredictability of weather is – that's an ongoing thing that really just keeps hitting everybody..

Just to follow up on that, John, in light of maybe conditions getting a little bit better, the guidance for the second quarter of comps down 1 to up 1.

Can you give us a sense of where you may be tracking currently within that range or above that range, and how to think about some of the headwinds and tail winds for the quarter?.

I think it's really too early to talk about the second quarter.

I know various other retailers, some have said things have and some haven't and I don't want to be coy or anything but frankly, Seth, we've got Memorial Day weekend ahead of us, Father's Day and July 4 in the second quarter and those are – for our business, those are all major events because they have to do with outdoor activities, they have to do with sales.

So it's really just too early to say what's going on in the second quarter. I think our guidance on the second quarter is really reflective of what we talked about in the fourth quarter. We see people paying attention to the presidential election. We see people being a little bit cautious with their spending.

We see our customer really focusing on the used categories as opposed to the ancillary categories.

And really we expect that to continue until we get into the back half of the summer, when the fall hunting seasons begin and people really start gearing up and we have a little more clarity on which way the Senate is going to go, which way the presidential election is going to go or at least people start having an opinion on that..

Our next question comes from Stephen Tanal from Goldman Sachs..

Just thinking about the gross margin number, so up about 100 bps, it sounds like clothing and footwear together probably contributed about 80 bps, if my math is right, then you've got probably another 20 bps.

Is that right? And if so, on the other 20 bps, what's going on there that’s driving the upside?.

I think your math is relatively close. We haven't done it ourselves to that detail. Our customer is really telling us they're coming in with an intent to purchase. That's why our average ticket is up and that's why our conversion is up.

So we're doing things on an inventory basis to basically say listen there are several times a year where the customer expects you to have a sale event and I just mentioned three of them, Memorial Day, Father's Day, July 4.

But there are also times where you would do events, whether it’d be a balloon pop or a customer appreciation event to try to drive incremental traffic and we have chosen not to do that in the first quarter and we will not be doing that in the second quarter.

And in the first quarter, just to give you an example, on the customer appreciation sale, that probably cost us $250,000 in sales, but increased our gross profit dollars by almost $600,000.

So I think our customer is telling us they have a reason to come in and we're not going to get them to come in if we just put random things on sale and I think that's the biggest reason for the additional 20 to 30 basis points you're talking about..

And on SG&A, that number looked pretty good, much lower than we had modeled.

Is there anything in the quarter that we should know about? Are there one-time issue nature or what just enabled that discipline there?.

There's really nothing to call out that we didn't call out in our prepared remarks. Really, the SG&A was impacted by the offering expenses and then the shift in the cooperative marketing. Those were the two biggest factors there.

We’ve tried to do a good job of controlling our expenses and managing through our budgets and I think the first quarter was a good example of how we were able to successfully achieve that..

And just lastly, would you mind quantifying the vendor shift, just so we can get our heads around that a little bit?.

That shift is 10 to 15 basis points of that – the 100 basis points came from that shift in cooperative marketing..

Our next question comes from Lee Giordano from Sterne Agee..

Just following up on the firearms category, up 18%, and you talked about you’re expecting that to continue to normalize at this pace.

Are you expecting sales to be up double digits for the rest of the year? Is that how we should think about it or is it going to be varied?.

I think in the past we've always said that the NICS data has been a little higher than we had anticipated and we thought a steady state was in that 7% to 9% range. So we're modeling still in that 7% to 9% range. I don't know that that's overly conservative. I don't think it's aggressive. I think it's probably ultimately realistic..

And then just secondly on the competitive openings, are you seeing anything differently from your competitors when they come into your markets? Are they being more aggressive on their promotions out of the gate? Just anything new there would be helpful..

We’ve seen two new competitive openings impacting three stores in this first quarter and other than some layout changes within the stores themselves that I think our competitors have talked about we really haven't seen anything that's been unusual on the marketing side or the promotions side.

So it's just pretty much following the historical path that we've seen for the last several years..

The next question comes from Daniel Hofkin from William Blair..

Just to clarify a little bit more on the sales pattern in the quarter, is it fair to say that things slowed over the course of the quarter with the weather and now you're seeing things pick up a little bit so far? Is that a fair way to categorize the quarter plus so far in 2Q?.

We've never talked about our inter-quarter sales patterns or cadences or anything else there. And as John indicated earlier with respect to 2Q, there's still a lot ahead of us with respect to that in terms of events there. So I don't know that we can provide anything there with respect to cadences within the quarter itself. There's been no surprises..

And then in terms of your full-year comp outlook and your expectation that things ease in the second half, you obviously have a little tough comparison to the fourth quarter, but is there anything that you're seeing within your sales pattern right now that suggests acceleration, or is it mostly the items that you highlighted, reduced competition and whatnot in the second half?.

Those are the two biggest factors as we look to the second half of the year. The big spike, I guess I should say the impact in oil occurred really in late second quarter of last year, that's when we really started to notice that.

So as we get past – anniversary those events, we have seen some, a little bit of a rebound in oil prices and some talk in our markets that that is going to have a positive impact on the employment in those markets, so that remains to be seen.

But as we anniversary that significant decline in oil prices of a year ago, we expect those factor to wane, as well as additional stores coming into our store base and getting further along into that curve on the competitive openings that John discussed by the end of the year, we anticipate that the headwind from competitive openings will have a significant benefit for us as far as improving our comp position and that's why we're comfortable with that flat to positive 2% guidance for the year..

Our next question comes from Andrew Burns from DA Davidson..

Congrats on 1Q performance in this environment. A couple of follow-ups.

In terms of the average ticket increase, is that really just firearms is what we are looking at or were there any trends outside of that category to call out in terms of driving average ticket price?.

On an overall basis, I think it's more due to our loyalty customers. They tend to buy more items and spend more money. I will give you – while we’re certainly selling more firearms, we’re still selling the same amount of units of clothing. But the average price of the clothing is decreasing.

So it's a little bit of a mix to firearms, but I think the bigger deal is the people who are buying from us are the users and they’re buying products for use which obviously is in firearms..

Our loyalty customers obviously have had a significant impact on that. As John mentioned in his prepared remarks, 44% of our sales dollars are now flowing through the loyalty program. Our loyalty customer spend almost twice as much as our non-loyal customers.

And as we're able to continue to get penetration into our loyal customers, we're seeing the increase in the frequency of those customers go up as well as the positive of benefits from that two times average ticket and that is helping us as well.

So clearly firearms is a large portion of our business, drives the average ticket, but the impact of our loyalty program we believe that we're starting to see the benefits from as well..

And it didn't come up in your prepared remarks, so I'd assumed it is immaterial, but just any implications from store closures from Sports Chalet, Sports Authority, whether it's real estate locations or some indirect impact to your apparel or soft goods performance embedded into that quarter guidance?.

I don't think it's a material impact. There were about three of our – you know what happened in the first quarter were as TSA moved from a sale to a liquidation, you go through a process of first markdown, second markdowns, third markdowns.

Some of our markets that TSA also was in happen to be some of their better markets and we saw relatively large influx of goods coming into those stores, so they continued their first markdown process, but the effect was actually pretty minimal.

On the real estate side, we've looked at all 450 locations and frankly there really aren’t a lot that are intriguing to us. So I don't know that there's any real estate benefit moving forward and that's probably why we just didn't see the necessary to bring up the topic..

Our next question comes from Peter Benedict from Robert W. Baird..

It’s Justin Kleber on for Pete. Just wanted to clarify the comment on firearms business. John, that 18%, I assume that was a net sales number.

Can you help us out on what the comps were in firearms for the first quarter?.

We've not disclosed comps. That is the overall store, the 18% is what we were up in total for firearms. We do not disclose the comps on the firearms..

So on the ammo being down 4.4%, that was a comp number though?.

That is correct; that is a comp number [indiscernible] so that’s why we use the total number on firearms and ammo it's better to talk on a same store basis because that makes more sense..

And then on the oil and gas region, 90 basis point hit, can you remind us what that was 3Q and 4Q last year?.

It was between 70 and 80 bps in 4Q, it was 60 bps in 3Q. I don’t recall the 2Q hit off the top of my head from a year ago. But I want to say it was 30 or 40 bps..

And then, Kevan, just this new overtime rule that's being enacted later this year, have you had time to dig into those changes? What, if any, type of financial impact do you foresee later this year or into 2017, how are you guys planning for that?.

We have not had a chance yet to dig into that guidance. In fact, I've got a call scheduled later this week to begin that process. I'll be able to speak to it better in our next quarterly release..

As there are no further questions, I'd like to turn the floor back over to management for any closing remarks..

Thanks everyone for joining us today and have a great rest of the week. Thank you very much..

This concludes today’s teleconference. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time..