Price Cooper
Analyst · Longbow Research
Thanks Kent, and thank you all for being on our call today. For the second quarter of 2014, we reported a double digit increase in revenue and earnings growth. Also associated with our annual managing partner conference we’re much lower year-over-year which did help on the earnings side. Starting at the top our revenue has increased 12.3% as a result of a 9% increase in store weeks and a 2.4% increase in average unit volume. Average unit volume growth was again outpaced by comp sales growth of 2.9% during the quarter. comp sales were split about 50:50 between traffic and check growth as traffic increased 1.5% and average check was up 1.4%. By month comparable sales increased 1.6%, 3.4% and 3.7% for our April, May and June periods respectively. We call April comps for a little weight down by the shift in Easter period. Also as reported in our release July comps increased 4%. Restaurant operating profit increased 9.6% or $6.2 million for the quarter compared to the prior year. Although little less in our sales growth is, while restaurant margin dollars grew both in total on a per-store basis, restaurant margin percent decreased 45 basis points for the quarter compared to the prior year. As we anticipated, we lost from leverage on both the cost of sales and labor line this quarter, food inflation of 3.8% outpaced our check increase of 1.4%. Our food inflation in the second quarter as compared to the first quarter was driven by beef, berry and produce costs being higher year-over-year. Some of this was a result of how we contract certain items. We expect the food inflation in the second quarter will be the highest that we experienced for the year, overall we continue to expect low single digit food inflation for 2014. On the labor line, our healthcare cost in the re-classes and costs from other operating drew margin compression. We’re seeing average weight raise increase basically in line with our average check increase, however we expect that it will difficult to leverage labor in 2014 with the ongoing combination of healthcare cost and increases in the re-class. As we did in the first quarter, we gain leverage on the other operating cost line. The improvement versus the first quarter was driven by deceleration and utility cost increases versus the prior year. We expect to leverage this line for the full year, however, the third quarter is much more difficult as we overlap a $1.3 million general liability insurance credit from the prior year. Pre-opening costs were $215,000 this quarter as compared to the prior year, we opened one less restaurant this quarter, however, we continue to see higher pre-opening cost on a per-store basis. We did slightly modify our store openings expectations for this year, however, we do not expect any real benefit on the pre-opening line as the delayed openings were just pushed back into early 2015, so we would still have many of the pre-opening costs hit this year. Appreciation costs were up $2.2 million this quarter compared to the prior year primarily due to depreciation on new restaurants. D&A costs were down $500,000 or basis points as a percentage of revenue versus last year. Cost associated with our annual managing partner conference came in below expectations and were $2.4 million lower than the prior year. Thus on a reported we show a considerable leverage on this line. Factoring out the change in conference expenses which was about 70 basis points, the leverage was more modest as we continue to invest in supporting our business. The income tax rate for the quarter came in at 29.8% which is higher than the 29.2% rate last year primarily due to the expiration of work opportunity tax credits at the end of 2013. We continue to expect our full year rate to be 30% to 31% which is up from the 2013 of 28.9% and large part due to the expiration of the same tax credits. We ended the quarter with $77.5 million in cash, a decrease of $13 million from the end of the first quarter. During the second quarter we generated $36 million in cash flow from operations. We spent $31 million on capital expenditures, $10.5 million on dividends and $7.6 million to repurchase 300,000 shares of our common stock. The 1.7 million shares of stock we’ve repurchased over the course of last 12 months, our total share count was down on a year-over-year basis. As we discussed last quarter, we’ve continued to allocate a portion of our free cash flow towards share repurchases and plan to do so going forward. Finally, on the development front, we continue expect our capital spending to be $100 million to $110 million for 2014. With that said, I’d like to turn the call over to our President Scott Colosi.