Glenn J. Chamandy
Analyst · Sterne Agee Capital Markets
Well, there's no guarantee what can happen in pricing. But I would say this, is that, first of all, where the pricing is in the market today, we've anticipated the pricing, first of all. And if you look at some of the other competitors that have announced results recently, they've had to take write-downs of their inventory because they're selling the inventory under their cost. So in certain cases, I would say that there's definitely irrational pricing going on in the marketplace at even today's levels. So if the price does continue to deteriorate, it's because it's irrational, it's not something that, I think, is sustainable, first of all. And as well as the same competitors that are pushing pricing down potentially in this channel are raising as fast as they can to raise prices at retail because their running through all their high-cost cotton. So I think as an industry, everybody is in the same boat. We're going to be obviously, consuming our high-cost cotton by the end of -- the beginning of our third quarter. And we feel comfortable with our positioning. And we also feel comfortable we can command a premium for our product. So if you noticed over the last course of even last year, we commanded a significant premium over the market pricing because of the brand and the strength of our brand in the marketplace. So I'm not concerned necessarily about the actions of some of these competitors, but we're prepared. We've taken the stance and I think one of the things maybe as being a leader in our channel, by taking the bull by the horn and devaluing and bringing our price to market like we did in November, not only is that going to benefit Gildan, but based on what we see in our POS in the month of January, which has also picked up much more significantly in the month of February, we projected this quarter to be down 5% and we're significantly so far ahead of that and when the press comes out, we'll probably -- you'll be able to see that, but we track our POS on a daily basis. So we're very comfortable that we've positioned pricing in the market so that we can, as an industry, create more demand and get end users buying T-shirts again. And we factored the current pricing forecast that we knew that this is going to take place and we feel very comfortable with our pricing.