Rent-A-Center Inc. Q4 2008 Earnings Call Transcript

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2009-02-03 13:06:15.0

Tags: Call Transcript, Earnings, Pricing Strategy, Rent-A-Center Inc., APU, Pricing, Marketing Research, Operational Accounting, Personal Finance, Marketing, Finance, Seeking Alpha

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

Your first question comes from Arvind Bhatia - Sterne Agee.

Arvind Bhatia - Sterne Agee

Couple of questions, first I’m wondering if you can comment on the rentals being slightly weaker than you had projected. Is that the APU factor that you were talking about or there something else? I’m wondering if you have any latest thoughts on the regulatory environment particularly on the payday loan business, Mark, what you see as developing and how you guys will confront that in the next quarter or two.

Mark Speese

Sure. Mitch, do you want to talk on the first one, the APU?

Mitch Fadel

Actually the demand, Arvind, in the fourth quarter was a little better than we expected and by metric of deliveries, it was stronger than we’ve been expected. So, the good quarter from a traffic standpoint, the overall revenue was slightly off because the APU went down and that's what I mention, where we’re going to maintain the Super Value’s approach because we think it is helping us with the lower income consumer primarily, but there are some other prices we can tweak up a little bit to make up with that.

We think we’ll get that APU back in the first half of '09 and when I say some of the other prices it certainly as I mentioned, you can get a dollar. If you raise the dollar you get a 4% increase, so that’s how we taken the price from $25 a week to $26 a week and what we’ve seen over our history of the dollar doesn't matter much and on some items to be competitive.

We also have the ability to bring down the term. So, we can get the APU up, but take a month or two or three off the overall rental term as the competitive an overall place. So, there is a lot we can do with pricing and how they doing with pricing to get that APU back in the first half of the year. Sticking with the hot deals for those will confirm demand was strong and we’ll get the APU back by tweaking some of the other pricing in the first half of '09.

Mark Speese

On the regulatory question and I know you said primarily financial services, certainly as it results to rent-to-own, we were comfortable, there are 47 states anyone knows that they’ve got environment is pretty good and we continue to work on others. From the financial standpoint, there has been a lot of commentary around it. Again, there are approximately 35 or so states today that have enabling legislation. We’re in about half of those, we’re very mindful.

 

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