West Marine Q4 2007 Earnings Call Transcript

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2008-04-07 18:59:28.0

Tags: West Marine Inc.

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from the line of Jeff Blaeser.

Jeff Blaeser - Morgan Joseph & Co., Inc.

I have a quick question on the store growth. Can you give us a little more color on terms of the size of the stores you expect to open, outside of the large store, and close, going forward?

Tom Moran

These would be mostly our standard size stores but sort of large standard stores. They’ll probably average in the 10,000 s.f. range.

Jeff Blaeser - Morgan Joseph & Co., Inc.

Okay. And then can you give a break down of regional sales production and maybe some category—I know you don’t break it out, but some category strengths and weaknesses in the quarter.

Tom Moran

You know, we really don’t break out regional sales or product sales.

Jeff Blaeser - Morgan Joseph & Co., Inc.

Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Anthony Lebiedinski.

Anthony Lebiedinski – Sidoti & Co.

Good morning. I have a few questions. The 2008 guidance—what kind of tax rate does that assume and also what’s your expectations for catalogue, Internet, and the port supply sales?

Geoff Eisenberg

The tax rate would be close to the statutory tax rate of 39.5%. We expect continued growth in the—without getting into a lot of granularity, we expect continued growth in the Internet to drive the growth in port supply, probably a little bit softer in our stores retail is one of the pieces that’s driving the negative comps.

Anthony Lebiedinski – Sidoti & Co.

Okay. And I know you guys don’t give quarterly guidance, but we’re only a few days away from the end of the first quarter. Can you give us a sense as to where same-store sales are so far in the first quarter? Any kind of indication would be certainly helpful.

Geoff Eisenberg

We would love to but April 24 we’re going to do our quarter earnings results and two weeks ahead of that—the second Thursday in April—we do our sales results.

Anthony Lebiedinski – Sidoti & Co.

Okay. And as far as the legal expenses—I know that the guidance excludes any of the legal expenses—can you give us a sense as to how much are the legal expenses so far in the first quarter? For the SEC investigation.

Geoff Eisenberg

We really wouldn’t disclose that yet. As you know, it’s a challenge to predict and so what we’re really just trying to do is keep people posted as everything unfolds, both from an action and an expense standpoint. So we will have an update on what the Q1 expense was when we do the Q1 call in a couple of weeks.

 

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