Edward Stack
Analyst · Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Thank you, Anne-Marie. This morning, we announced our first quarter results, including consolidated non-GAAP earnings per diluted share of $0.50, below our guidance of between $0.51 and $0.53. There were 2 major issues that significantly affected our business in Q1, offsetting strong performance across many product categories. One issue we believe to be temporary; the other may be longer-lasting. We are going to provide more granularity on how we built our plan and performed against it than we normally would, as we believe it's important to help our investors understand these drivers.
Our hunting business missed its first quarter plan by approximately $15 million and comped down high teens to last year. We had anticipated this category to be below last year, as did others in the space, but we underestimated the decline. We all knew the significant increase in sales during the past couple of years was temporary and driven by concerns about legislative action that would broadly change our gun laws. The hunting business is anticipated to continue this negative first quarter trend through the second quarter, improve slightly from this trend in the third quarter and be relatively flat in the fourth quarter. We continue to be enthusiastic about the outdoor business for both DICK'S and Field & Stream longer term, as we are confident the results here are just rightsizing the business from the panic buying that began in 2012. To illustrate this point, subcategories of the outdoor business, such as paddle sports, hunting and fishing apparel, all grew double digits.
The more concerning and unpredictable issue is the golf business. We anticipated softness, but instead, we saw a significant decline, with Golf Galaxy down 10.4% and the DICK'S Sporting Goods golf business off by high single digits. Our overall golf business missed our first quarter 2014 sales plan by approximately $34 million. We don't feel we've found the bottom yet in the golf sales number. We now expect this trend could continue for the balance of the year and will impact our prior guidance, which assumed a slight improvement in the golf business for the balance of the year. As you know, the second quarter is the most important quarter for our golf business.
The issues in golf are threefold. First, there is a glut of inventory in the market at both wholesale and retail as a result of the lackluster sales over the past 15 months. The vendors have been more aggressive in pricing discontinued and cascaded product. For example, we're selling drivers in our stores this spring for $99 that were $299 approximately 20 months ago. The deep price reductions, combined with the increase in inventory of cascaded products, caused our AUR on men's drivers to drop 16% in Q1, while our units were only down 2%.
The second issue is that the core golfer doesn't seem to understand or has not yet fully embraced the new technology our vendors have brought to market. The technology and game improvement possibilities, especially in drivers, are fantastic. But since it's not yet completely understood or embraced, the core golfer has not replaced his equipment, and the more casual player has elected to buy closeout products at a lower price.
Third, we are continued -- we continued to be concerned about the structural issues of the decline in rounds played. As an industry, all parties are looking at ways to reverse this trend.
The effect of both the golf and hunting issues is that our earnings were, and will continue to be, significantly impacted, as these 2 businesses represent close to 30% of our annual sales. Their miss to our sales plan impacted our earnings in Q1 by approximately $0.06. If these trends continue, it could have an approximate $0.30 impact on our annual EPS.
Normally, we don't discuss how the business is performing during the quarter, but given the magnitude of our revised expectation, I believe it's important to share current trends in these categories. Recognizing that we're only approximately 2.5 weeks into the quarter, golf comps are trending in the negative low teens, while hunting is still in the negative high teens. For Q2, these categories were approximately 30% of our sales. It is because of the hunting and golf businesses, along with some buildup of inventory partly due to our sales miss, that we're revising our full year EPS guidance from $3.03 to $3.08 to $2.70 to $2.85 per share.
With all of the above said, the balance of our business is quite good. Our women's athletic apparel initiative, which has provided great results, with comps in the low teens range. Our youth athletic apparel business has done even better than the women's business, although off a smaller base. Team sports, along with footwear, have been strong as well. If we take out golf and hunt, which we know we can't, our first quarter comps would have been 6.6%. Our eCommerce business is also doing well, growing to 7% of our overall business, up from 5.8% last year. And we've moved up to #72 on the Internet Retailer Top 500 list, up from #94 last year.
We're excited about the progress on the key strategic elements of our business, such as eCommerce, the performance of such categories as women's, youth, footwear and the license business. However, the balance of this year is expected to be difficult because of the trajectory of golf and the hunting businesses. Be assured, our associates, management team and others will be working tirelessly to make this a successful year while continuing to make the right investments and decisions for the long-term growth of our business.
I'd like to now turn the call over to Joe.