Best Buy Co., Inc. (BBY) on Q4 2022 Results - Earnings Call Transcript
Mollie O’Brien: Good morning, everyone. My name is Mollie O’Brien, and I’m Head of Investor Relations at Best Buy. We are very happy to welcome you all this morning. Thank you for joining us. Hopefully, you were able to review our earnings press release from this morning. This press release and the downloadable PDF of today’s slide presentation can be found on our IR website, investors.bestbuy.com. Today, you will hear from several Best Buy executives, including Corie Barry, our CEO; Matt Bilunas, our CFO; Jason Bonfig, our Chief Merchant; Damien Harmon, our EVP of Omnichannel; and Deborah Di Sanzo, our President of Best Buy Health. Here is our agenda for the morning. First, Corie and Matt will recap our Q4 and fiscal ‘22 financial results as well as our fiscal ‘23 outlook. Then, we will begin the strategic update portion of the event. Corie will start with the strategic setup and discuss our membership program. As part of the strategic setup, Jason will talk about technology innovation and merchandising. Damien will follow them with a review of our omnichannel initiatives, then Deborah will provide an update on Best Buy Health. After that, Matt will come back to the stage for the financial discussion. Corie will provide a quick wrap up before we break. We expect to take a 10-minute break at approximately 9:20 a.m. Eastern Time. After the break, we will start our Q&A session. Before we begin, I would like to note that our presentation today contains non-GAAP financial measures that exclude the impact of certain business events. GAAP to non-GAAP explanations and reconciliations can be found in our earnings release and our presentation materials available on our website. Today’s presentation includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, and the company undertakes no obligation to update or revise such statements to reflect events or circumstances that may arise after today’s event. Again, thank you so much for joining us. We are looking forward to a great meeting. And now, I could not be more excited to turn the meeting over to Corie Barry, CEO of Best Buy. Corie Barry: Thank you so much, Mollie. Good morning, everyone. We are so pleased you could join us today as we report our fiscal ‘22 results and take this opportunity to update our longer-term strategy and our multiyear financial outlook. Today, we will discuss how our business has evolved and how we are planning to drive value over the next few years. We’re not planning to cover all our initiatives or all our business units. We’ve tried to be as succinct as possible to focus on the topics and initiatives that we believe are most important for you to understand about our business, our plans and where we believe we’re headed, both for fiscal ‘23 and for the longer term. First, let’s discuss our fiscal ‘22 results. Fiscal ‘22 was another record year. In addition to record revenue and earnings, our leaders continue to drive new ways of operating, and our employees continue to do amazing things in the face of unprecedented challenge and change to support our customers’ technology needs in knowledgeable, fast and convenient ways. As we discussed when we entered the year, we anchored on three concepts we believe to be permanent and structural implications of the pandemic that were and are shaping our strategic priorities and investments. One, customer shopping behavior will be permanently changed in a way that is even more digital and puts customers entirely in control to shop how they want. Our strategy is to embrace that reality and to lead, not follow. Two, our workforce will need to evolve in a way that meets the needs of customers while still providing more flexible opportunities for our employees. And three, technology is a need and is playing an even more crucial role in people’s lives. And as a result, our purpose to enrich lives through technology has never been more important. With these concepts in mind, we piloted numerous store formats to test and learn in the past year. We advanced our flexible workforce initiatives and invested in our employees’ well-being. We introduced new technology tools designed to support both, our customers and also our employees. And we also launched a bold new membership program called Best Buy Totaltech designed to significantly elevate our customer experience and drive incremental sales. We will be talking more about all these topics today. All of this was against a constantly evolving backdrop. During the year, we navigated supply chain and transportation challenges, uncertainty as virus peaks rolled across the country, and then most recently, the disruption from the Omicron wave. Our teams did an amazing job against that backdrop, expertly managing supply chain challenges since the beginning of the pandemic to bring in products our customers needed. During the year, we continued serving our customers digitally at much higher rates. Our online revenue was 34% of our domestic revenue. And while it declined versus last year, it was up 115% or $8.8 billion compared to two years ago. At the same time, we also reached our fastest package delivery speeds ever. We are an industry leader in fast and convenient product fulfillment for our customers. In fact, the percent of online orders we delivered in one day was twice as high as pre-pandemic levels, despite the significant increase in volume during that same timeframe. These record results are driven by the investment decisions we have made in the last several years in supply chain, store operations, our people and technology, many of which we discussed at our investor updates, both in 2017 and 2019. More importantly, these results are driven by our amazing associates across the Company. Over the past 24 months, they have flexibly dealt with rapidly changing store operations as we responded to impacts of the pandemic. They created safe environments for our customers, and they worked tirelessly to provide excellent service. In fact, despite all the changes we went through in the last year, we delivered NPS improvements, both online and in our stores. I’m truly grateful for and continue to be impressed by our associates’ dedication, resourcefulness and flat-out determination. From a financial perspective, we delivered record revenue and earnings per share. Our comparable sales growth was 10.4% on top of a very strong 9.7% last year, growing $8 billion over the past two years. Our non-GAAP earnings per share was just over $10, up 27% compared to last year. And compared to two years ago, we expanded our non-GAAP operating income rate by 110 basis points. Our non-GAAP return on investment improved 840 basis points compared to two years ago, and we drove more than $6.5 billion of free cash flow in the last two years. In fiscal ‘22, we returned $4.2 billion of that to shareholders in the form of dividends and share repurchases. We also continue to deepen our commitment to the community and the environment. Many of you may have had the opportunity to view the video that was playing before the event started. We continue to believe that our ESG efforts are directly tied to long-term value creation, and I am proud of all our initiatives, but we only have time for me to cover a few examples today. We committed to spend at least $1.2 billion with BIPOC and diverse businesses by 2025. The goal is to create a stronger community of diverse suppliers and to help increase by BIPOC representation in the tech industry. We also committed to opening 100 Teen Tech Centers by fiscal ‘25. During fiscal ‘22, we opened 9 to end the year with a total of 44. These provide teens in disinvested communities access to the training, tools and mentorship needed to succeed in post-secondary opportunities and careers. In addition, we’re building a diverse talent pipeline for jobs of the future. In terms of the environment, in fiscal ‘22, we were a founding member of the Race to Zero initiative, committing to accelerate climate action within the retail industry. We are also driving sustainability through the unique consumer electronics circular economy. We help keep devices in use longer and out of landfills by leveraging our customer trade-in program, Geek Squad repair services, responsible recycling and Best Buy outlets. These are initiatives our customers and vendors value and capabilities no one else has at our scale and breadth, and we are honored to be recognized for our work. Notably, we are placed in the top 5 on Barron’s Most Sustainable Companies list for the past five years in a row. This ranking recognizes our strong performance across all aspects of ESG. In addition, we are on the CDP Climate A List for the fifth year, which recognizes leadership in making a positive impact on the environment. Now, let’s move on to our Q4 results. I am extremely proud of what we accomplished during the fourth quarter. Our team showed remarkable execution and dedication to serving our customers throughout the important gift-giving season. This was evidenced by the fact that we drove improvement in year-over-year customer NPS metrics across almost all areas, particularly for in-store, online and chat experiences. In fact, we saw our best-ever customer satisfaction scores for our in-store pickup experience. Online sales were almost 40% of domestic revenue compared to 43% last year and 25% in Q4 of fiscal ‘20. We reached our fastest holiday delivery times ever, shipping products to customer homes more than 25% faster than last year and two years ago. We also completed the purchase of two companies that aligned with our strategy, which Jason and Deborah will talk about later this morning. We are deliberately investing in our future and furthering our competitive differentiation. This, as we expected, is temporarily impacting our profitability. The biggest areas of investment in Q4 were our new membership program, technology and Best Buy Health, all core to our future growth potential. In the face of unexpected change, I remain inspired by the way our teams across the enterprise remain flexible to ensure our customers were able to find the perfect gift. We remain well-positioned as we head into fiscal ‘23 as the unique technology provider for the home. I’ll turn the meeting over to Matt to cover more details on our Q4 results and fiscal ‘23 outlook. Matt? Matt Bilunas: Thank you, Corie, and good morning, everyone. Hopefully, you were all able to view our press release this morning with our detailed financial results. Our Q4 revenue was $16.4 billion. Our domestic comparable sales declined 2.1%, and our enterprise comp sales declined 2.3%. Revenue grew 8% versus two years ago. It was only slightly below the low end of our revenue guidance for the quarter due to a few factors. The first factor was inventory availability. We expected to have pockets of inventory constraints as we entered the quarter and called out a few areas, including appliances, gaming and mobile phones. As the quarter progressed, inventory was more constrained than we anticipated within a few categories and brands. These constraints included some high-demand holiday items, and the categories most impacted were mobile phones and computing. The second factor impacting our results was Omicron. The Omicron wave and the resulting high levels of employee callouts led to a temporary reduction in our store hours in January and to start fiscal ‘23. In mid-February, our staffing level started to improve and we increased store operating hours for the majority of our stores. Excluding these two factors, our revenue would have been comfortably in the guidance range we provided for the quarter. From a category standpoint, on a weighted basis the top areas with positive comparable sales growth included appliances, virtual reality, home theater and headphones. We saw comparable sales declines in gaming, mobile phones, tablets and services. Turning now to gross profit. Our non-GAAP gross profit rate decreased 50 basis points to 20.2%. This was about 20 basis points lower than we expected, primarily due to increased proportionality. When comparing to last year, the largest driver was our services category, primarily driven by Totaltech. Our product margins were largely flat to last year, as the benefit from category sales mix was offset by increased promotions. Higher profit-sharing revenue from our credit card arrangement was a benefit to gross profit rate compared to last year. Lastly, our international gross profit rate improved 210 basis points to last year, which provided a weighted benefit of approximately 20 basis points to our enterprise results. Our enterprise non-GAAP SG&A dollars grew 5% versus last year, less than our guide of 8% growth, primarily due to lower than anticipated incentive compensation. Within our domestic segment, our SG&A dollars increased $139 million. The largest drivers were, one, advertising, which included campaigns for both, holiday and to drive awareness for our new membership offering; two, technology; three, increased store and call center labor that helped drive the record customer satisfaction scores Corie shared; and four, Best Buy Health, which includes the impact associated with our acquisition. Before I discuss the ‘23 financial outlook, let me spend some time on our new Totaltech membership program. Corie will provide a more holistic overview later in her presentation, but I will add some color on the impacts to our Q4 results and for next year. Totaltech is a near-term investment to dive long-term value. The thesis is that over time, we will capture incremental product sales from our members that will lead to higher operating income. But, as we discussed in prior earnings calls, it does come with near-term profitability impacts. First, at $199, the standalone membership is profitable. It just isn’t as profitable as legacy service memberships, due to the breadth of benefits and the cost to fulfill them. Second, there is a loss of revenue and profit from existing revenue streams that are now included as benefits in the program. For example, previously standalone services like extended warranties and products installations are now included within our Totaltech membership. We still offer these services on a standalone basis or to nonmembers. But, you can imagine there’s an aspect of cannibalization as members are no longer paying incrementally for these items. So, what does all this mean? We expect that the gross profit rate of our services category will reset to a new level going forward that is lower than it was prior to launching Totaltech. The way to drive more operating income, despite this lower services gross profit rate, is to add far more members than we thought was possible under our previous membership offerings. The key to increased profit will be through increased volume through a combination of more recurring membership revenue and incremental product purchases of our members. The number of memberships grew very nicely in Q4, and our plans for fiscal ‘23 assume continued growth, but it’ll take some time to reach the scale necessary to offset the lower gross profit rate I just described. Therefore, Totaltech remains a pressure in fiscal ‘23, but we expect it to be a meaningful driver of both, higher sales and operating income dollars in fiscal ‘25 targets. Now, let’s talk about our overall fiscal ‘23 outlook. Our guide is anchored around a comparable sales decline in the range of 1% to 4% and a 5.4% non-GAAP operating income rate. Our non-GAAP diluted EPS outlook is $8.85 to $9.15. Before we discuss the broader assumptions driving our guide, I want to touch on our expected tax rate. Our non-GAAP effective tax rate is planned at a more normalized level of 24.5% in fiscal ‘23 compared to 19% rate in fiscal ‘22. As you may recall, our Q2 results this past year included a $0.47 diluted EPS benefit from the resolution of certain discrete matters. Now, I’d like to share a few important assumptions underpinning our guidance. First, we anticipate the traditional CE industry to decline in the low- to mid-single digits next year as we lap the high levels of growth and stimulus actions from this past year. In addition, we anticipate the number of store closures to be in the range of 20 to 30, which is consistent with the trend over the past five years. As I mentioned, our fiscal 2023 guidance assumes non-GAAP operating income rate of approximately 5.4% compared to 6% in fiscal ‘22. To be clear, the biggest driver of the lower operating income rate in fiscal ‘23 is our investment in Totaltech. As I just described, this near-term pressure will drive long-term value for our shareholders. There are of course, other factors that we expect to impact our results that for the most part offset each other in fiscal ‘23. We do expect higher levels of promotional activity to pressure our gross profit rate, which is partially offset by the favorable impact of expected growth and our monetization of our advertising business, or Best Buy Ads. We expect our full year SG&A expense to be lower than fiscal ‘22 levels. The largest year-over-year variance is lower incentive compensation expense as we reset our plans after paying out at higher levels in fiscal ‘22 due to the overachieving of our performance targets. We expect the lower incentive comp to be partially offset by a few areas. The first area is higher technology cost, primarily due to annualizing spend in fiscal ‘22; the second area is higher depreciation and store remodel expense, as Damien will discuss later; and lastly, we expect to see higher SG&A dollars in support of our Best Buy Ads business. Finally, as you may have noticed, we are not providing quarterly guidance, but I would like to provide some insight on the assumed phasing for fiscal ‘23. Due to the strong first half comps last year, we expect our full year comparable sales decline to be weighted more heavily in the first half of the year. In addition, we expect to see significantly more year-over-year operating income rate pressure in the first half of the year compared to the back half. To summarize, the two largest variables for fiscal ‘23 financial results are the short-term industry declines as we lap high growth in government stimulus and the investment in our new membership program that will drive long-term value. As we look to fiscal ‘25, we expect the CE industry will return to the high levels we saw in fiscal ‘22 and that Totaltech will drive meaningful growth. I will now turn the meeting back over to Corie to begin our strategic update. Corie Barry: Thank you so much, Matt. As I noted closing out my Q4 summary, we remain well-positioned as we head into fiscal ‘23. I’d like to expand on this a bit as we highlight our strategic positioning. There are three key points you should take away from this morning. First, technology is a necessity, and we are the unique tech solutions provider for the home. Second, we have built an ecosystem of customer-centric assets, delivering experiences no one else can. And third, we believe our differentiated abilities and ongoing investments in our business will drive compelling financial returns over time. We believe we have the right strategy to deliver growth and value for all stakeholders. And we are excited to go into more detail about our plans. But first, let’s do some level setting. Our purpose is unchanged and more relevant today this minute than ever. Our purpose to enrich lives through technology is enduring, and we have honed our five-year vision. We personalize and humanize technology solutions for every stage of life. Technology is no longer a nice to have, it is a necessity, and it is expanding into all parts of our lives and homes. Working has forever changed. Streaming content has exponentially grown. The metaverse is coming to life. We can power our homes with connected solar panels. Cars are connected. And we can monitor our health, including connecting with the physician from our living room. Every aspect of our lives has changed with technology. And we uniquely know how to make it human in our customers’ homes right for their lives. For example, we will send a consultant to your home for free to optimize the tech you have or have the tech you want. We can repair your phone screen and you can try VR headsets while you wait. You can meet with a fitness consultant in our virtual store, who will match your fitness goals with our fitness products, or you can use our Lively device to connect with a carrying center agent, who can help you schedule a lift. These are just some examples, and you’ll see this come to life in many more ways throughout our presentation this morning. From a financial perspective, we delivered remarkable results over the past two years, and we are far ahead of where we expected to be when we set our long-term financial targets back in 2019. As I mentioned earlier, in the past two years, we have delivered more than $8 billion of revenue growth and improved our operating income rate by 110 basis points to 6%. We are in a strong position to drive the business forward and deliver growth. We do not, for one minute, believe we hit our peak revenue and margin this past year. As Matt outlined, we do expect fiscal ‘23 to look different as the industry cycles the last two years of unusually strong demand. And we leverage our position of strength to continue to invest in our future. But in fiscal ‘25, we expect to deliver revenue growth and expand our operating income rate beyond what we reported in fiscal ‘22. As we have always said, in order to deliver these financial results, it is paramount that we stay focused on our goal to remain a best place to work and we continue to deepen relationships with our customers. As you can see, our new fiscal ‘25 targets are materially higher than what we thought just back in 2019. We now expect to generate approximately $1 billion more in operating income than our original targets. Given our margin rate, this is considerable growth in operating income. So, what’s changed since 2019? Well, the CE industry is larger than we expected. Our online mix has nearly doubled. We have found ways to make our operating model more flexible and efficient while also investing in wages and benefits. We are accelerating our category expansion. And we have launched an entirely new membership program. On the flip side, the financial contribution from Best Buy Health is clearer, but also a bit longer term than we had originally modeled. This is based on primarily two things. First, demand in active aging business and product constraints were impacted by the pandemic. Additionally, based on our internal learnings and insights from consumer behavior changes over the past two years, we tuned our strategy to focus on the growing virtual care opportunity, which Deborah will discuss in more detail later. As we think about our strategy going forward, it is important to look at how dramatically our business has evolved over the past several years. Here, we use fiscal ‘15 to give a longer-term view to what a different business we have become. Most of these changes were already in motion before the pandemic and then accelerated significantly in the past two years. Let me expand on a few points here. I already mentioned our fiscal ‘22 online business was 34% of our domestic sales. That is more than $16 billion in sales compared to just $3.5 billion in fiscal ‘15. When you look at how we use our stores for fulfillment, the increase in the sheer number of products customers are picking up in our stores is impressive. This is even more meaningful, when you consider the fact that our delivery speed is industry-leading, and we cut the delivery speed essentially in half over the past several years. Clearly, customers value our stores and the convenience and choice they provide. As Damien is going to discuss, we are increasingly interacting with customers via digital channels, like chat and video and in their homes. And finally, membership is incredibly important, both now and into our future. Our Totaltech membership is a big theme of today’s presentation. But don’t lose sight of the fact that we were a pioneer in loyalty programs. And our My Best Buy program now has more than 100 million total members. So, with all of that as background, I’d like to tap back to our first key takeaway. Technology is a necessity, and we are the unique tech solutions provider for the home. So, let’s start with some industry context. The traditional CE industry is large and growing. There is no perfect external source that tracks our business. So here, we’re showing a historical view based on selected government PCE category data. Our outlook is based on multiple industry forecasts and internal data. As you can see on this chart, the industry was growing for several years and then accelerated during the last two years. As Matt mentioned, we expect it to step back this year as the industry absorbs the very high growth of the past two years. By fiscal ‘25, we believe it can be back to fiscal ‘22 levels, which is materially higher than it was pre pandemic. In addition, we’re expanding our addressable market by entering new categories in areas like health and electric bikes that are being disrupted by technology in a good way as well as areas where we can really complete solutions for customers, like indoor and outdoor living. Jason will provide a bit more detail on these in a few minutes. As a reminder, this is also a stable industry. Contrary to some sentiment, technology is no more volatile or cyclical than other large durable goods categories over time. And the last two years have significantly underscored the importance of technology in day-to-day life. What historically was seen as a want has become a need. 40% of Americans use digital technology or the Internet in new or different ways compared with before the pandemic. And the use of telemedicine is triple what it was in just Q1 of 2020. The majority of people who started or increased activities like online fitness, telemedicine, videoconferencing and connecting socially with others virtually say they plan to continue this increased usage even after the pandemic. Terms like home nesting and virtual care have been invented to describe what all of us know so well, that where we work, entertain, receive health care and connect has changed, and our homes are now central to our lives more than ever before, and they’re also more tech connected than they ever have been before. As a result, there is an overall larger installed base of consumers using technology. People own more tech devices than ever before. This combination of more devices and more activities also means customers need their tech to work seamlessly every day. True tech support when the customer wants it underpins living this way and is our unique asset across all these devices. And technology is extending in all aspects of our home, and we’ve all grown to depend on it. This is not a hit-driven category. It is an industry that is need-based, stable and has been growing. We firmly believe people will continue to use technology more and both need and want to replace or upgrade their products. Billions of dollars of R&D spend by some of the world’s largest companies and likely some we haven’t even heard of yet, means innovation is constant. And that innovation drives interest, upgrades and experimentation into the future. This is not a static industry. So, to talk about this exciting world of technology innovation, I’m honored to welcome Jason Bonfig, our Chief Merchandising Officer. Jason Bonfig: Thanks, Corie. Good morning. We continue to lead the tech industry with significant high-share and high-consideration categories. What I mean by a high-consideration category, generally higher ASPs in a longer period of time from when you start to think about purchasing to when you actually purchase. Continuing to grow our share in these large categories like televisions and computing will always be a cornerstone of our strategy. But to be truly there for our customers and all their technology needs, we need to accelerate our share across other areas of technology as well and also some new spaces. This is where Totaltech comes in. Products with lower ASPs and shorter upgrade and consideration cycles, our share is generally lower. Totaltech creates a new value proposition that benefits customers when they consolidate their technology shopping at Best Buy. I want to give three examples of a customer journey that illustrate this point. Let’s start with a customer that actually wants to upgrade their kitchen. They want to buy an entirely new kitchen suite with three pieces. That customer that has Totaltech does not have to worry about delivery and install. It’s included in the price. That could be between $400 and $500 value. A little bit later in the year, the same customer hypothetically breaks their phone. They want to get a new iPhone. When they purchase that iPhone at Best Buy, AppleCare is included. Just in the first year, that’s just under $120 of value. Then a little bit later in the year, they want to get a new pair of wireless headphones. If you purchase those headphones at Best Buy, the warranty is also included and you’re a Totaltech member. That’s a $30 value. Examples like these is where Totaltech benefits come to life for our customers and create a reason to make a considered visit to our app, our website, our store, and increases Best Buy share across all of the categories on the slide behind me. Technology innovation never stops. And even when you look over the past three years, you can see value of the new technology and what it creates for our customers. During the pandemic, the majority of the focus was around creating products to meet customer demand. This was a distraction, but even with that, there was significant innovation and value created by our vendors. The slide behind me highlights an upgrade over a three-year period of similar price points across laptops and televisions. While I won’t hit on every new feature and advancement that happened, I’ll highlight a few. For televisions, you get a full 10 inches more in screen size, almost no bezel and the ability to navigate your TV with voice, if you’d like to. On the laptop side, you can log in with your face. It’s faster, thinner, lighter and has significantly longer battery life. These continued evolutionary innovation cycles are never ending, and they drive growth. They create reasons to upgrade and unlock new and better experiences for our customers each and every year. In fact, when we look at our customers’ behavior, we’re seeing a 7% to 15% reduction in the amount of time it takes a customer to get back into a category. They’re coming back to categories faster because of these innovations by our vendors. I’ve highlighted how Totaltech and our vendor innovations will drive growth. Now, I’d like to highlight some macro trends that will also drive opportunities in our business. I’ll start with 5G and fiber. The expansion of speed and networks in general are really, really good for customers and technology. You can download a movie in minutes, collaborate with others instantly, excess a video game or video content anywhere you want without latency. These are things that will drive new experiences and growth for our customers. The next trend is the metaverse and cloud, have virtual experiences, play golf with friends or family members virtually, travel to places that you actually can’t and have a full experience in the virtual world. In addition to that, when you look at the virtual world and cloud, there are new experiences that are created. Previously, you could just play a game on a gaming system and your television. Now you can take that same game seamlessly from the system, to your phone, to your tablet. In fact, if some of you have children like I do, you’re constantly battling the ability for them to play anywhere they want, anytime they want. The cloud also solves significant customer pain points. Previously, our customers would tell us when they wanted to upgrade a computing product, it would take them 60 minutes to get it the exact way they’d want to. That would be moving their icons, their data, just getting it the way the old one was and having the features of the new. Today, with cloud, you’re simply putting your credentials and in 10 to 15 minutes, it’s actually exactly the way you want. You get all the benefits of the new technology and you get all of the placement and all the setup of your old product instantly. That does drive upgrade and it drives interest in customers in upgrading more frequently. The next trend I’d like to talk about is automation and support. The connected home has been around for years, and it’s now moving into automation and support more specifically. Single-function devices like robot vacuums today, tomorrow, they’ll move into security of the entire home, communication and assistance for individuals. This is very, very important as our population ages and people want to stay in their homes longer. Automation and support is one of the ways where technology can enable people to just do that and accomplish their goals and solve that pain point. Next, I’d like to talk about customization and personalization. Customers have always wanted to express themselves, and technology is not excluded from that. But there has been significant advancement in manufacturing from appliances to cell phones where customers can express themselves with a touch of color, a family photo or any other type of personal expression that they’d like to integrate into the products. Sustainability is also a significant trend that’s important to customers, but also very important to Best Buy. I’ll start with a vendor example. Samsung televisions that we sell in our stores today have what is called Samsung solar cell technology in their remote controls. This eliminates the need for batteries, which is obviously very beneficial to the environment, but it also charges off of not only solar, but ambient light in the home. And it means that you’re never going to have a remote that’s out of power. That solves a significant customer pain point. Technology like this will expand to more and more categories and drive upgrade cycles. In addition to that, we want to make sure that we’re supporting customers that want to upgrade more frequently. Today, you see that come to life with our recycling and trade-in programs, which are a very important part of our value proposition to customers. Over time, that will start to move into new usage models that may actually be upfront conversations about exactly how long a customer wants to use a product, and when that next upgrade will happen? Will it be a year? Will it be two years, or will it be three years as we move forward? Let’s watch the video highlighting many of the areas I’ve talked about and even some new additional areas that will drive growth. Jason Bonfig: I’d like to thank our friends at Samsung for that assist in that demo. As we look over the past decade, we’ve had over $12 billion in sales growth with the vast majority coming from large categories like TVs, computing and appliances, and one-third coming from new categories like wearables and VR, just to name a few. As we move forward, that innovation will continue and there will continue to be new categories that don’t even exist today. We’re also looking to accelerate that expansion by entering new categories that are aligned with where our customers want us to be in places where Best Buy can solve real customer pain points. For the next 12 to 24 months, we’ll continue to focus on these five areas of expansion. I’ll go a bit deeper on three of these: fitness and wellness, outdoor living and personal electric transportation, in the next few minutes. I’ll start with fitness and wellness. This is a $34 billion industry that we are uniquely positioned to compete in with our blue shirts, but also our large product fulfillment network that was built for televisions and appliances. Our assortment has grown by 650% in the last 12 months, and we are implementing a larger, more premium experience in 90 stores over the next 18 months with dedicated zones for vendors. Damien will touch on the virtual store a little bit later, but customers today actually have the ability to have a virtual chat or video consultation with a fitness expert. The next area I’d like to talk about is personal electric transportation. This is a $3 billion industry with rapid growth. We’ve introduced 250 new products this holiday with 500 additional accessories around those products. We’ll be adding physical assortment to 900 stores and a more premium experience in 90 stores over the next 18 months. We currently offer assembly, and we’re in the pilot stages of service and support and repair for our customers. The last category I’d like to highlight is outdoor living. This is over a $30 billion industry, and our acquisition of Yardbird, a leading premium outdoor furniture company, provides the ability for us to accelerate this business across a nationwide network. That acquisition, combined with our strength in outdoor television and audio, and new partnerships with leading brands like Traeger, Weber and Bromic, create a comprehensive solution for our customers. When we couple that assortment with our home consultants, and the physical and digital experiences that we’ve developed for customers, this is a really, really fast-moving category that has the ability to grow. You’ll start to see Yardbird products as fast as this spring in Southern California market, and we’re very excited about that. To reiterate, we expect growth from Totaltech, consistent innovation from our vendors, macro trends that I’ve mentioned, new product categories that we don’t even know about yet and five new areas of expansion to move our business forward. Thank you. I’ll hand it back to you, Corie. Corie Barry: Thanks so much, Jason. Obviously, you are the expert. Back to our second key takeaway. We have built a unique ecosystem of customer-centric assets, delivering experiences that no one else can. Consumer electronics is a distinctive industry. The products are constantly evolving. They’re connected to networks that are constantly evolving. They all use different operating systems, and they range from small and powerful to large and breakable, often at high price points. And customers are more comfortable using tech than they have ever been yet. They also admit it’s likely not doing all it could to make their lives better. Against that backdrop, we have built a unique ecosystem of assets that all work together to create a stickier and more valuable relationship with the customer. And we’re investing in this ecosystem as we pivot against a backdrop of even higher customer expectations. We’ll provide more depth on a number of these assets through the rest of the presentation. So, anchoring this ecosystem is our expert advice and service. Customers are excited about tech and want to be confident in their purchase. We provide that in ways literally no one else can, from our expertly curated assortment to in-home consultations, all the way to tech support when your tech isn’t working the way you want or trade in the recycling when you want to upgrade. And then building on that strength, our Totaltech membership ties these experiences together and provides unique benefits that customers value and no one else can provide. We then combine those unique experiences with our strength in omnichannel retailing, industry-leading and seamless shopping experiences and services across all channels, including in-home, in-store, digitally, remotely and virtually. And finally, all these interactions provide us rich data and insights across customer experiences to create personalized technology solution tailored to the customer-specific technology and needs. And all this data fuels our business, like Best Buy Ads, matching our partners’ marketing to the most appropriate audiences based on our first-party data. When this ecosystem works together, it provides a unique experience tailored to the customer. It also reaches beyond our consumers into business partners, suppliers and other strategic relationships that leverage our capabilities. Whether it’s our consultative services highlighted on partners’ websites or vendors leveraging our in-store pickup to fulfill from their websites, others value our capabilities. So, let me add some color around the first part of the ecosystem. As I said, customers are excited about tech and want to be confident with their purchase, particularly when it’s part of their daily life at home. So, instead of me trying to describe all the parts and pieces to you, I think this video does an excellent job bringing to life the unique ways we provide expert advice and services, seamlessly across all our touch points. Corie Barry: So again, just to reinforce, there is no one else that can provide this type of immersive experience at scale in a world where more and more of our lives are being lived in a way that requires technology. And we felt it was important to double down on our unique capabilities with an equally unique membership offer. This represents literally years of customer research and innovation and truly puts the customer at the center of our investments. Matt talked earlier about the financial implications of our new membership program. Now, I get to talk about the fun part. Fundamentally, Totaltech is designed to provide our customers complete confidence in their technology, buying it, getting it up and running, enjoying it and fixing it if something goes wrong. Matt and Jason already mentioned some of the benefits. But as a reminder, Totaltech includes product discounts and periodic access to hard-to-get inventory, free delivery and installation, free technical support, extended warranties on products and much more. Because the membership is so comprehensive, it has broad appeal among our customers. There is truly something for everyone. And the benefit that’s most appealing can vary based on a customer’s unique shopping journey or their stage in life. So, let me share some early examples. I say early because as a reminder, we literally just rolled this program nationally in mid-October. The benefits associated with purchasing products like product warranty and member pricing are being leveraged the most. Younger generations are using these benefits, especially AppleCare at a higher rate than older generations. This is exciting and important, as extended warranties as a stand-alone business was definitely not a growing part of our business or strategy. And additionally, it’s exciting that our employees have embraced this offer, realizing the suite of benefits means there is something in it for every customer. This makes for a more comfortable and natural sales environment and allows the employees to truly focus on the customers’ needs. The VIP access to phone and chat support and access to Geek Squad support and services in general are used more often by older generations, which are legacy plans over-indexed on. And the access to hard-to-get inventory is resonating with some of our most engaged customers who already interact and spend with us very frequently. That broad appeal is one of the main reasons we rolled out this program. We have significantly elevated the customer experience by packaging up unique benefits our customers value that no one else can provide. And by doing so, we believe we have made it inconceivable for them to purchase their tech anywhere else. From a business perspective, of course, the goal is to increase customer frequency and capture a larger share of CE spend. As a specialty retailer, our customer frequency has a different profile than mass merchants. As a result, it is even more crucial that we stay in the consideration set as customers are building out their technology solutions. I am incredibly happy to say that we are indeed seeing increased interactions with our Totaltech customers to the tune of about 60%. Also, when we look at NPS surveys, specifically from customers who are Totaltech members, they are running about 1,400 basis points higher than nonmembers. From a spend perspective, it’s difficult to calculate with precision, given the early stage of membership and our historical customer frequency. But we currently believe customers who sign up for the membership are spending about 20% more than they would have if they did not have the membership. We already have 4.6 million members. Now to be transparent, we auto converted 3.7 million Totaltech support and other legacy support programs. We have actively enrolled more than 1 million members since launching nationwide in October. And we see a path to double the number of members by the end of fiscal ‘25. This membership program is a vital addition to our customer relationship ecosystem, providing an offer that no one else can and interaction data that is incredibly valuable to all aspects of our business, fueling our growth over time. And to deliver this offer seamlessly, we leverage another part of our ecosystem, omnichannel retailing strength. To provide more depth on the evolution of our omnichannel retailing model, I am pleased to welcome Damien Harmon, our EVP Omnichannel, to the stage to talk to you about how we are optimizing our workforce, reimagining our physical presence and leveraging technology. Damien? Damien Harmon: Thank you, Corie. It’s great to be here with you today to talk about our accomplishments and our plans for this year and beyond across our omnichannel portfolio. As Corie mentioned earlier, omnichannel retail is a critical component of our strategic ecosystem. It’s the most direct way to connect our strategy to the needs of our customers and employees. Let’s look at the last two years before we dive into where we’re going. These last two years have challenged our employees in ways we could have never imagined. Powered by our strategic investments, we were able to serve our customers’ needs and grow the business. There are two areas I want to highlight. First, the connection between our online sales, which expanded to 34% of our total domestic revenue and the 150% growth we’ve seen in our virtual interaction across video, chat and voice. Today, 84% of the Best Buy customers use digital channels throughout their shopping journey. These virtual opportunities have created new ways for us to offer customers the immediate ability to shop with an expert wherever they are. Second and also connected to our customers using digital channels throughout their shopping journey is we’ve seen a 72% growth in customers who are using our app while in our stores. This also creates an opportunity for us to build more digital interactions and technology-related solutions to support their needs. These numbers are amazing. We could not be more proud of our teams and how they deliver. Just as importantly, it gives us an incredible foundation for continued growth and optimism as we look to the future. Now from an omnichannel perspective, we look at the combination of customer experience, loyalty plus operating efficiency. The two main drivers of that and what I’m going to talk about today are how we optimize our workforce and reimagine our physical presence in ways that serve our customers’ needs in an ever-growing digital world. Our focus is on further developing our teammates to give them the skills to help customers inside and outside of our stores, but more importantly, through any number of digital channels that at our customers’ fingertips. At the same time, we will optimize our store portfolio. And as Matt mentioned, we will maintain the trend of closing 20 to 30 stores per year. However, with online penetration growing so rapidly in the last two years, we’re making investments in our stores to provide a better, more seamless shopping experience as customers move from online shopping to visiting our stores to video chatting from their home. So, I’ll start with our people. We have significantly improved efficiency and productivity of our store labor model. We’ve seen a more than 100 basis-point improvement in store domestic labor expense as a percentage of revenue compared to FY20. We’ve also materially increased store productivity over the past two years. We’ve done this by reskilling our teammates and making investments that lean into physical and digital shopping experience. A few examples include our fulfillment improvements, consultation labor and our virtual store. This allows us to leverage our employees more effectively inside and outside of our stores. The great news is that as we’ve made these adjustments, we’ve maintained a strong NPS in our stores. These investments in our people have allowed us to help them learn new skills, grow their careers, gain flexibility and realize their dream by keeping them with us longer. We’ve increased our average wage rate 20% in the last two years by raising our minimum wage to $15 an hour and shifting some of our employees into higher skilled, higher paying roles. In fact, our average wage for our field employees this year will be over $18 an hour. Since we started our flexible workforce initiative in 2020, 80% of our talented associates are now skilled to support multiple jobs inside and outside of our stores. And we’re proud of the fact that our fill turnover rates remain significantly below retail average and are near our pre-pandemic turnover rates. Overall, we’re in a place we like right now. We’re becoming more efficient without losing sight of delivering amazing experiences for our customers and our employees. We’re going to continue to strike the balance between spend and productivity as we look at the factors that I just outlined. Now, an obvious differentiator for our workforce is our Geek Squad team, which continues to deliver an experience that creates repeat customers. We have nearly 21 million services interactions across in-store and in-home services. We’ve significantly expanded our repair capabilities in categories that are important to customers helped us produce fantastic NPS results in-store, in-home and through our remote support. And after we complete the repairs, customer spend one times more . In fact 35% of our mobile phone customers are new or reengaged with Best Buy. This is enabled by a technical workforce that has an average tenure of almost nine years and a retention rate an 86%, no-one can match that level of expertise at the scale we can. That’s huge. That team here has helped us produce fantastic NPS results. In-store, in home, and remote areas, customer spend 1.7 times more and engage 1.6 times more often across all Geek Squad services. Geek Squad will be a viral part of our Totaltech initiative, and we’ll continue to offer standalone services that matter to customers, deepen those relationships and drive frequency. Our customers are also leveraging our expertise through consultations as well, both inside and outside of our stores. These consultations provide a direct access to customers for an ever-growing set of experts. Employees who have the skill sets to complete a consultation has grown by 78% last year. And with each consultation, we can inspire what’s possible. Customers spend 17% more across their lifetime value, and they purchase more often when engaged for a consultation. Customers are loving this experience, and we’re seeing strong NPS. When surveyed, 92% of customers say they will likely continue working our expert. And when customers engage with one of our consultations or designers, they shop with Best Buy 2 times more frequently. So looking ahead, we believe our annual consultations will grow by more than 200% by fiscal ‘25. As you saw earlier, we had 45 million virtual interactions across all channels, creating opportunities to engage our customers differently. We’re excited about our virtual store, which just launched last fall. To date, our virtual store in comparison to historical chat experiences is generating higher close rate, higher sales and a 20% improvement in customer satisfaction. And that’s not all. Our vendors are extremely excited about it as well. We started with 17 vendors on board, and we will end fiscal ‘23 with over 60 vendors investing in our virtual store. This is an investment in us and the belief that we’re creating a totally differentiating experience. We’re expanding our virtual store and adding more categories like appliances and home theater. And we expect our virtual sales interactions to double by fiscal ‘25. So, let’s talk about ways we are reimagining our store in support of our physical and digital shopping experiences. We are very excited about the things that we’re testing, learning, in some cases, implementing in our stores. First, let’s talk about experiential store. In 2020, we launched a test in one of our Houston stores and added two additional locations since then. Some of the key enhancements include dedicated showcase spaces for some of the new categories Jason mentioned earlier, like e-transportation, outdoor living, fitness. We expanded our Microsoft and Apple shops and dedicated more space to premium experiences like appliances, home theater and audio. We expanded our Geek Squad presence for more customer interactions and space for repair services. And we’ve also enhanced the fulfillment capabilities to include exterior lockers, additional space with shipping, packing and fulfilling from our store warehouses. And we’re excited about the performance. We’ve seen a 370 basis-point improvement in NPS. We’ve seen a steady lift in customer penetration in the retail trade area as well as overall customer spend. And we expect to continue to see strong revenue lift in these experiential stores, and we will remodel 50 locations in fiscal ‘23 and about 300 locations expected by fiscal ‘25. Now, I want to highlight our 16 outlet stores that are open-box clearance, end of life and otherwise distressed large product inventory across major appliances and televisions, which might otherwise be liquidated at a significant lower recovery rate. These outlets unlock value by alleviating space and capacity from our core stores, and they are an important element of our circular economy strategy by providing a second opportunity for products to be resold instead of ending up in the landfill. In FY22, gross liquidation recovery rate is almost 2 times higher than alternative channels. These locations are attracting new and reengaged customers. 16% of customers are new and 37% of customers are reengaged. In FY23, we will double the amount of outlet stores, and we’ll test expanding our assortments by adding computing, gaming and mobile phones. As we discussed last year, we launched a test in Charlotte of a new holistic market approach. And as I mentioned earlier, the ways people are shopping today are entirely different than how they shopped two years ago, and our stores and the way they operate need to change and adjust accordingly. This work in Charlotte is a manifestation of this shopping evolution, and this pilot leverages all of our assets in a full portfolio strategy across stores, fulfillment, services, outlets, consultation labor, and we bring it all together with our digital app. Within the test, we are looking at how a variety of store formats across 15,000, 25,000 and 35,000 square feet locations can serve customers’ needs. And this summer, we will be introducing a 5,000 square-foot store into the marketplace. When you look at the before and after map of the Charlotte market, you can see we have reduced our overall square footage by 5% and yet we’ve increased our customer coverage in the marketplace from 76% to 85%. We’ve also added 260 access points, where customers can get their gear and employee delivery covers nearly half of the metro. So looking ahead, we’ll be focusing on using this market to learn in fiscal ‘23 before we make decisions on what to scale or what not to. Technology enhancements are at the center of many of the changes I just mentioned, from self-checkout to virtual store, technology supporting our teams and customers in new and exciting ways. Take a look at this video to see what we’re doing. Damien Harmon: As we can see, technology brings it all together in support of our optimized workforce and how our physical locations will enhance the shopping experience inside and outside of our stores. We’re excited about this year and our future as we focus on the combination of customer experience, loyalty plus operating efficiency. Now, I’d like to turn it over to our President of Best Buy Health, Deborah Di Sanzo. Deborah Di Sanzo: Thank you, Damien. Here is the ecosystem slide Corie and Damien shared, and it’s a perfect introduction to Best Buy Health as our work is an excellent example of the Best Buy ecosystem and flywheel. Today, I will share the strategy of health at Best Buy. But first, let’s see it come to life in this video. Deborah Di Sanzo: I hope the video begins to answer the question that I hear often, “Why in the world is Best Buy in health?” I understand the question because health is complex. It has a longer return on investment, and other companies have not succeeded. So why will Best Buy succeed? We didn’t build this strategy to be like any other company or to change who Best Buy is. We built our strategy on Best Buy strengths, our world-class omnichannel, distribution and logistics, strong analytics, presence in the home and our empathetic caring center agents. Our strategy is supported by the rapid consumerization of health and two significant trends. First, Technology is moving into health. We recognize an $80 billion market opportunity for health technology and the desire for consumers to use technology to manage their health. And second, health is moving into the home. By 2025, an estimated $265 billion in Medicare services will move into the home, and 61% of patients say they would choose hospital care at home. And Best Buy has long proven we’re a trusted advisor for technology in the home. 70% of the U.S. population lives within 10 miles of a Best Buy store, able to shop health and wellness products, speak with our expert blue shirts and utilize our distribution hubs to fulfill their health technology needs. Geek Squad makes 9 million home visits annually, helping consumers set up technology and perhaps more importantly, teaching them how to use it. And we have the confidence of our customers and partners as we work to help enhance the health industry. Our strategy is to enable care at home, building on the strengths in three focal areas. In consumer health, we provide curated health and wellness products; in active aging, we offer health and safety solutions to enable adults to live and thrive at home; in virtual care, we connect patients with their physicians and enable care at home. Our presence in each of these focal areas creates a flywheel where growth in one adds momentum to the other two. This is the strength of our story. Now, let us look at the customer journey. Jason touched on a few areas of consumer health earlier and our video introduced you to Angela, a 45-year-old mother and caregiver to an aging father. You saw her purchase a TytoCare home medical kit when her son was sick. And Angela can find countless other products to support the health of her family from weighted blankets to exercise equipment to blood pressure cuffs and more. These products not only support our customers and their day-to-day health but also serve as an entry to our other two focal areas, active aging and virtual care. Lively supports adults who want to age independently at home. Our easy-to-use phones and personal emergency response devices feature one touch access to our caring center and services like urgent response, fall detection and more, providing patients and caregivers with a peace of mind that care is only a call away. Last year, we launched our new Lively brand and a Lively partnership with Apple to feature our health and safety services on Apple Watch. And today, I’m happy to announce Lively on Alexa, which will launch this spring. Our Lively monthly subscription service provides a consistent revenue stream. And last year, we drove 15% year-over-year growth by adding 348,000 new lives served. Our caring center agents connected with our customers over 9 million times last year, offering a variety of health and safety services. So, let’s jump back to Angela’s story. Angela worries about her father living at home alone, so she purchases a Lively smartphone and an Amazon Echo for her dad from Best Buy, along with a monthly Lively health and safety subscription plan. Jacob uses his Lively Smart to request to lift drive to a doctor’s office through a caring center agent. He has a minor fall at home and uses his Amazon Echo to alert the caring center, who can follow protocol to determine if emergency medical services are needed. And this patient journey is just one example of the many ways Lively supports active aging adults at home. Now let’s look at virtual care. Accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, perhaps the most exciting opportunity lies within virtual care, where we enable patients to connect with their care teams. In November, we acquired Current Health. Current Health is making inroads into care at home through securing strong partnership -- strong partnerships with successful programs at Baptist Health, Mount Sinai, AbbVie, the Defense Health Agency and more. Our acquisition merges Current Health’s FDA-cleared at home platform with Best Buy’s scale, expertise and connection to the home. Together, we create a powerful virtual care experience. Jacob is in the hospital with . The hospital physician identifies and enrolls Jacob into the hospital’s hospital-at-home program. Best Buy sets up Jacob’s home with the technology needed for remote patient monitoring and trains both, Jacob and Angela on how to use it. This ensures the hospital physician can focus on treating patients rather than being a tech consultant. This is a job that physicians had to play during the pandemic, and it overtaxed our health system. At home, Jacob is monitored by Current Health’s platform and a virtual command center. The hospital physician checks in daily with video visits to ensure he’s healing on track. The command center coordinates Jacob’s home medications and notices a lack of data from his monitor. After discovering that he’s improperly wearing the device, Geek Squad is deployed to a system. The platform’s algorithm alerts the command center that Jacob has a persistent fever and the on-call health system physician prescribes therapeutic, which is delivered by the pharmacy partner. When Jacob recovers, the hospital physician discharges Jacob, and Jacob continues to be supported by Lively. A few of the pieces in this patient journey are still in development. The Geek Squad integrated with Current Health, for example, but this is our direction. And you can see Best Buy is there for the patient with technology, support and connections to enable care at home. And we’re not building this alone. We’re creating an ecosystem to support consumers and their care-at-home journey. Consumers are at the heart of our strategy, and throughout a lifetime of health needs, Best Buy is there to help enrich and save lives through technology and meaningful connections. As I mentioned earlier, our health opportunity creates a flywheel, driving growth in all three focal areas. Our revenue in fiscal year ‘22 was $525 million. We’re growing 35% to 45% a year, and we are accretive in fiscal year ‘27 as the health industry has a longer return on investment. Thank you for your time, and I’ll turn it back to Matt. Matt Bilunas: Thank you, Deborah. You’ve heard details from Corie, Jason, Damien and Deborah about some key areas that give us excitement about the opportunity in front of us. We firmly believe our differentiated capabilities and focused investments will lead to compelling returns over time. While fiscal ‘22 was certainly an amazing year, we see a path to even higher revenue and earnings by fiscal ‘25. And as we look beyond fiscal ‘25, we see even more opportunity for revenue growth and operating income rate expansion as the benefits from our initiatives like Totaltech and Best Buy Health grow even further. Before I share additional details on our fiscal ‘25 targets, I would like to review a few guiding behaviors that have been our brand for several years. First, we plan to fund our growth through the cash we generate and return excess cash to shareholders. Second, we are committed to leveraging cost reductions and efficiencies to help offset investments and pBBY Ratings Summary
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Best Buy Reports Strong Q2 Results, But Shares Plummet 5%
Best Buy Co., Inc. (NYSE:BBY) shares plunged more than 5% on Wednesday despite better-than-expected Q2 results and reaffirmed guidance for the balance of 2022.
Q2 EPS came in at $1.54, better than the Street estimate of $1.29. Revenue was $10.33 billion, compared to the Street estimate of $10.29 billion.
The company expects Q3 comp to decline slightly greater than Q2 levels of (12.1%). On a three-year-stacked basis, Q3 guidance implies comps of 11–13%.
While the analysts at Oppenheimer look favorably upon longer-term prospects for the company and admire the efforts of management to reposition the company, they recommend investors await clearer indications of top-line recovery, before moving into shares.
