Earnings Call Excerpt
Carters Inc. (CRI)
Q3 2007 Earnings Call
Oct 24, 2007, 8:30 a.m. ET
Executives
Mr. Fred Rowan - Chief Executive Officer
Mr. Joseph Pacifico - President
Mr. Michael D. Casey - Chief Financial Officer
Analysts
Robert Ohmes - Banc Of America Securities
Brad Stephens - Morgan, Keegan & Company, Inc.
Jim Chartier - Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co., Inc.
R. Hottovy - Next Generation Equity Research
Margaret Mager - Goldman Sachs
Omar Saad - Credit Suisse
Margaret Whitfield - Sterne, Agee & Leach
Presentation
Operator
Welcome to Carter’s third quarter conferece call. On the call today are Fred Rowan, Executive Officer, Joe Pacifico, President and Mike Casey, Chief Financial Officer. After today’s prepared remarks we will take questions as time allows. If you have any follow-up questions after today’s call, please direct them to Eric Martin, Vice-President of Investor Relations. Mr. Martin’s direct telephone number is (404) 745-2889.
Carter’s issued its third quarter earnings press release yesterday after the market close. The text of the release appears at Carter’s website at www.carters.com under the press release section.
Before we begin, let me remind you that statements made on this conference call and in the company’s press release, other than those concerning historical information should be considered forward-looking statements and actual results may differ materially. For a detailed discussion of factors that could cause actual results to vary from those contained in the forward-looking statements, please refer to the company’s most recent annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Also, on this call the company will reference various non-GAAP financial measurements. A reconciliation of this non-GAAP financial measurements to the GAAP financial measurements is provided in the company’s earnings release.
Now I would like to turn the call over to Mr. Rowan.
Frederick Rowan
Good morning. We are pleased with the progress we made during our third quarter. We position our company well before the quarter to concentrate on certain vital initiatives that would fix problem areas and lay the groundwork for restoring us to high quality growth. Those initiatives are recruit and retain key talent, fix the operational issues affecting our retail stores, fix the OshKosh product value, make every core product in all our brands significantly more competitive, make our wholesale customers more profitable and raise the level and breadth of investments.
We have made lots of progress in each. The benefits are being tempered somewhat by market conditions. I think any logical thinker would admit that this marketplace is still uncertain and that all levels of distribution are feeling the effect of reduced consumer traffic. Nevertheless, we take some comfort in the fact that we can make up ground correcting the mistakes we made in ’07 which were not market related. They are lack of sufficient inventory in our stores, miscues and lack of key management skills, poor retail execution, and mispositioning the OshKosh product value.
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