Jose Luis Laparte
Analyst · Scotiabank
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. A lot of activity – activities took place during our third quarter at PriceSmart, and we will spend the next minutes providing more details on our results. This is Maarten Jager’s first conference call with PriceSmart as our Chief Financial Officer, and we’re happy to have him as part of our team. Let me start with our net merchandise sales that were $750.5 million, an increase of 5.6% compared to the third quarter last year. This quarter, we have 41 warehouse clubs compared to 39 clubs a year ago. In terms of comparable sales for the 13-week period ended June 3, we saw an increase of 12 – of 2.7%. Net income for the third quarter of fiscal year 2018 was $18.7 million, or $0.61 per share, compared to $18.8 million, or $0.62 per share in the comparable period last year. I would like to add though that the Aeropost acquisition negatively impacted earnings by $0.08 per share. In addition, during this quarter, we had higher operating expenses from the addition of two warehouse clubs and the ongoing investments that we recorded in SG&A associated with specific initiatives that adds near-term costs, but as mentioned previously, we believe these will help drive additional growth in the future. Let me now provide you more detail on our sales growth. The 5.6% growth on merchandise sales resulted from a 4.6% increase in transactions and a 0.9% increase in average ticket. When we look at the different regions, we have Central America with a 2.9% increase on total merchandise sales, but a decrease in comparable sales for the – of 1% for the third quarter. We estimate that the transfer of sales related to the opening of the Santa Ana club in Costa Rica negatively impacted our comparable sales for this segment of Central America by approximately 110 basis points for the quarter. In addition, we saw decrease of sales in two markets in this segment, one being Panama, whereas reported on the last earning calls, we have seen general slowdown in their economy after several years of robust growth. The other market with a slight decrease in comparable sales versus last quarter was Nicaragua, which finished with a decrease of 1.2% and negatively impacted the comp sales for Central America by 90 basis points. I will provide greater detail later about this country and our expectations going forward, given the political challenges it is currently facing. Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, all had positive comparable sales. The Caribbean region had a total merchandise sales growth of 6.7% and comparable sales of 4.5%. Trinidad, Aruba, and Jamaica, all reported single-digit comparable growth. Dominican Republic had negative comparable sales and USVI had a double-digit growth due to the incremental business we’re capturing as a result of other competitors on the Island, still recovering from the hurricane in September 2017. Barbados is the only market in this segment having challenges in their economy and it ended the quarter with a decrease in sales compared to last quarter. In Colombia, we finished with a double-digit growth of 17.4% in comparable sales. The currency remains relatively stable only moving within a small band just below 3,000 pesos to the dollar level. It is good to see this market showing improvement, not only in sales, but also on margin, increased membership accounts and 1.6 million in additional operating income compared to the same period a year ago. This morning, we also released our June sales. We finished the month with sales of $243.7 million, representing a growth of 5.9% versus the same month a year ago. In terms of comparable sales for the four-week period ended July 1, 2018, our increase was 0.6%. The comparable sales figure was impacted by different events. Nicaragua sales were down almost 24%, which affected our comparable sales growth by 92 basis points. The addition of the San Isidro warehouse in Dominican Republic, which is transferring a portion of our sales from two of our existing warehouses and Panama and Costa Rica comp sales. While we did have some impact – positive impact in June in some departments like electronics, TVs in some countries, in general, the traffic and transactions in the clubs got impacted by some of the activities related to (indiscernible). I would like to spend a few minutes talking about some of the merchandise categories and the highlights from this quarter of 2018. We continue to see good results with even double-digit growth in gourmet deli, fashion apparel, and toys. Other departments with high-single-digit comparable growth includes candy and nuts, produce, poultry and sporting goods. Electronics, as I mentioned, had single-digit growth, driven especially by incremental business on TVs during the last month of the quarter May, which is the effect of World Cup Russia 2018. TV sales, as I mentioned, remained also strong in June before the beginning of the game. Our foodservice and bakery business also reported growth during this quarter. Challenges or slight decreases were seen in areas of foods like soda and juices and in non-foods, we saw decreases in small appliances, housewares, computers, and furniture. I would also like to comment on some other initiatives that we have in place within the company that keep creating excitement in all our clubs and intend to make the membership a bigger part of our members life. As I mentioned before, we’ve started the optical business last September 2017 in Costa Rica. And so far, we only have two locations with that service, but we are looking at adding that to the rest of our Costa Rica locations in the next few months. Our Regional Distribution Center, which we’ll open in Costa Rica at the end of August or early September, we’ve also been keen to improve the flow of goods throughout the Central American region and reduce our landed costs. While working on two product distribution centers, one in Costa Rica and one in Panama, that will help improve our sourcing of produce, both for imports and local by sourcing directly from local and regional farmers ensuring quality and freshness and passing more savings to our mix. Merchandise margins for the period came in at 14.6%, compared to 14.0% a year ago as a result of additional marketing money during this quarter. For the nine months ended May 31, 2018, margins remained consistent with last year at 14.5% as our intention remains to transfer any savings back to our members, expecting to see results in incremental sales. Moving on to membership, we finished the quarter with approximately 1.6 million accounts, up 3.2% from a year ago. Membership income was up by 6.8%. The 12-month renewal rate at the end of May was 85%. Excluding Colombia, the renewal rate was even higher at 87%. We also saw improvements in the renewal rate in Colombia that at the end of May finished at 78% compared to 76% a year ago. Platinum membership is now in place in Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, and Panama, and we’re planning to add Trinidad and USVI before the end of this fiscal year 2018. During the third quarter, we completed the expansion of our Pradera club in Guatemala, holding a special events with members and government representatives. This expansion provided more sales floor space and additional parking space for our team some club in Jamaica, we’re doing a similar expansion that should be completed during these four quarters of 2018. In terms of new clubs on May 3 we successfully opened our fourth warehouse club in the San Isidro area of the Dominican Republic East of Santa Domingo. Although we transferred some sales from the other two clubs in the city, we keep seeing new sign ups and even some members coming back to renew and shop in these locations that is more convenient from more than in this area of Brazil. In these same markets, we’re making progress with the construction of our fifth club in this country with an opening expected for spring 2019. We also started construction during the third quarter on another new club located in the country of Panama. We acquired a site of approximately 223,000 square feet in the city of Santiago, the capital City of the Province of Veraguas.
. : We may see a slight transfer of sales from some members who make the long trip to the David. But we’re hopeful that with a PriceSmart location in closer vicinity, we will see increased shopping frequency from current members, as well as attract new members from the neighboring communities in that area. The distance to Panama City is about 160 miles. This will be our sixth club in the country of Panama. We are aware of the way retail business has been involving, especially in the United States, given the fact that technology and online are becoming more relevant for all the retailers in this country. We do believe that even though in our country, it is not as developed, it will continue to become more important, too.
.: This is driven in some cases to the availability of land, which is the case for the Money Center [indiscernible], but also by our new initiative to work on that integration of the brick-and-mortar and the technology online. In fact with that hope, we – with that, we hope to maximize our sales floor space and reduce the investment into our construction and potentially land. Some of the new items – some of the items on categories may not be represented with the same amount of item in these new clubs. But with our e-commerce platform now in development, we believe we will be able to offer our members most of the selection of items available in the other warehouse club. This initiative is important, because again, it will allow us to find more opportunities for land in the future, especially in proven series at a reduced investment, not only in construction, but also on Santa Ana with utilities, et cetera. In conclusion, we keep looking at ways to enhance the value proposition to our members and the Aeropost acquisition to help us combine it with our warehouse club formula that has been successful for many years. During this third quarter, we finalized acquisition of Aeropost in – on March 15. As a reminder, Aeropost is a cross-border logistics and e-commerce provider in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Aeropost service is an exciting high-value addition to the products and services we offered to our members. The combination of our two companies brings PriceSmart brick-and-mortar excellence, buying power and distribution and operational expertise together with Aeropost exceptional cross-border logistics delivery option and e-commerce know-how.
’s: Let me remind everyone that one of our goals with acquisition of Aeropost was to benefit from their expertise in technology and use that to find better ways to serve our members. With that said, one of the tasks already initiated by the Aeropost setting is a development of our – the development of our new e-commerce platform, which will be launched in some countries at some point during our next fiscal year 2019. Much activity took place in the third quarter related to the integration of Aeropost within our company. The integration includes additional cybersecurity measures, consolidation of the financials within PriceSmart, Inc.’s financial results and getting to know more about the Aeropost team. During his remarks, Maarten will spend sometime – some more time describing how the integration of Aeropost is impacting our financial results. Now returning to my comments about sales. In Nicaragua, we experienced a slight decrease in sales during the third quarter, driven by political challenges that the country is facing under the government of Daniel Ortega. In the past few weeks, Nicaragua protesters have voiced their strong opposition to the president. Negotiations between protesters and the governments have broken down and the violence shows no signs of abating. At the point, Nicaragua is experiencing its largest crisis since the end of the Civil War in 1979, and as a result, security in the country is deteriorating. We have been operating our warehouse clubs with limited hours of operation as most of the retailers are doing to allow employees to commute back to their homes before nightfall, while it is safer to move around the city. We have also seen our sales in some categories affected, especially in the non-food areas since most of the people shopping in the clubs are just by make basic consumables and food items. We then reduce the amount of non-shipments – non-food shipments we’re bringing to this country. The situation may also had an impact in the flow of merchandise along the Central America region, as some of our merchandise out of Panama and Costa Rica needs to cross Nicaragua to make it to the North and Central America locations. Likewise, some shipments coming south and from the north have to cross the country of Nicaragua as well. In conclusion, participants on protests have caused major disruptions to all businesses in Nicaragua, as well to supply chain that pass through it. In the month of June, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, our sales in the country experienced a decrease of almost 24% versus last year. Our priority in this country has been the security and wellbeing of all our employees and our members. It is still uncertain how fast the country will find a solution to these problems, but we’re sure hope it comes soon and provide the relief that such a great country we set. Last but not least, I would like to comment on our recent management change within our merchandising team. Starting August 1, 2018, we welcome Ana Luisa Bianchi, as the new EVP and Chief Financial Merchandising Officer for PriceSmart, Inc. Originating in Guatemala, Ana Luisa currently live in Columbia, where she has been for the last seven years helping us with all the merchandising efforts as we enter into that country. She has been with PriceSmart since 1998, working in different merchandising positions. Ana Luisa and her family will relocate to our Miami office in the next year, a strategic location for our new CMO to be able to travel to all our locations, interact with the U.S. buying team, operations team and with our Miami D.C. Congratulations to Ana for her new role. Jesus Von Chong, who was running our merchandising team for almost two years and has been with the company for almost 22 years, will assume a new role, focusing solely on the local regional volume of the Central America, the Caribbean and the Columbia region, representing nearly 50% of our global sales volume. I want to thank Jesus for his contribution in his role, as our Chief Merchandising Officer for the past two years. Thanks, again, for joining us today. After Maarten’s remarks, we will take your questions.