Staples, Inc. F4Q08 (Qtr End 1/31/09) Earnings Call Transcript

  • download
  • Print
  • Recommend
  • 0

2009-03-11 12:44:21.0

Tags: Staples Inc., Call Transcript, Earnings, Morgan Stanley, Sales Strategy, Sales Force Management, Sales, Seeking Alpha

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

Thank you, sir. (Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Oliver Wintermantel – Morgan Stanley.

Oliver Wintermantel – Morgan Stanley

In Contract, could you give us some color on sales per existing customers versus acquisition of customers? And secondly, did this vary by geographic location?

Joe Doody

The declines that we're seeing, Oliver, in Contract first are more heavily towards the larger customer, Fortune 1000, and they are the mid market. And as far as the split between existing customer sales versus new account, almost all of our decline is due to lower sales from existing accounts. We're very satisfied with our new customer acquisition, both in the mid market as well as the larger Fortune 1000, so you're seeing the decline really being driven by lower sales from existing customers, and again, heavily around the durables, the discretionary items, and furniture.

Oliver Wintermantel - Morgan Stanley

Geography?

Joe Doody

Geography, it's gotten more broad-based throughout the country. If you go back to the beginning of the year, we were seeing sales declines in just one state. By the fourth quarter throughout NAD we're seeing negative sales in more than 30 states. So it's pretty broad-based; no geographical areas of great strength or weakness.

Ron Sargent

Oliver, the only thing I'd add is that about 10% of our sales in the Delivery side is related to financial and financial institutions, which certainly isn't helping us any right this very minute.

Joe Doody

Yes. And they weakened earlier in the year. It then spread to insurance and it spread through pretty much all sectors. The one sector that has held up pretty well is government - government across the board, be it federal or state and local.

Oliver Wintermantel - Morgan Stanley

And I just have one question on Retail. Could you comment on your new market entries and how they performed for the last year and if you plan to enter more new markets this year.

Demos Parneros

As you know, we've been entering a number of new markets. A few examples include Minneapolis, Houston, which is a bigger one, Austin, Kansas City, San Antonio and Omaha, and actually we're quite pleased with the way that these new markets have opened up despite the difficulties out there, so no plans for any major big-bang markets but a continuation of the plans that we've got in place.

Oliver Wintermantel - Morgan Stanley

 

BNET TalkbackShare your ideas and expertise on this topic

Please add your comment:

  1. You are currently: a Guest |
  2.  

Basic HTML tags that work in comments are: bold (<b></b>), italic (<i></i>), underline (<u></u>), and hyperlink (<a href></a)

advertisement
advertisement
  • Click Here
  • Click Here
  • Click Here
advertisement