Earnings Call Excerpt
Here’s the entire text of the prepared remarks from Costco Wholesale’s (ticker: COST) Q1 2006 conference call. The Q&A is here. We recognize that this transcript may contain inaccuracies - if you find any, please post a comment below and we’ll incorporate your corrections. And please note: this conference call transcript is a Seeking Alpha product, so feel free to link to it but reproduction is not permitted without the explicit permission of Seeking Alpha.
Executives:
Richard Galanti, Chief Financial Officer
Analysts:
Deborah Weinswig, Citigroup
Robert Drbul, Lehman Brothers
Mark Husson, HSBC Investment Bank
Maribeth Holland, Goldsmith & Harris
Adrianne Shapira, Goldman Sachs
Dan Geiman, McAdams, Wright & Ragen
Christine Kilton-Augustine, Bear, Stearns & Co.
Emme Kozloff, Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, Inc.,
Laurie Breidenbach, Ragen Mackenzie
Mitchell Kaiser, Piper Jaffray
David Schick, Stifel Nicolaus & Company, Inc.
Teresa Donahue, Neuberger Berman, LLC,Presentation
Operator
Good morning. My name is Whitney, and I will be your conference facilitator. At this time I would like to welcome everyone to the Costco wholesale Corporation's first quarter fiscal 2006 earnings announcement. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers’ remarks there will be a question and answer session.
Operator Instructions Now, I would like to turn the call over to Richard Galanti, Chief Financial Officer. Thank you. You may begin your conference.
Richard Galanti, Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, Whitney. Good morning to everyone. And as with every conference call I'll start by stating that the discussions we are having will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. And that these statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results, events and/or performance to differ materially from those indicated by such statements. The risks and uncertainties include but are not limited to those outlined in today's press releases as well as other risks identified from time to time in the Company's public statements and reports filed with the SEC.
This morning as usual I would like to review with you several items. To begin with, our 12 week first quarter fiscal 2006 operating results. We came in as you know, at $0.45 a share, up $0.05 over last year's first quarter of $0.40 a share. These results were $0.01 above the top end of the EPS guidance that I had provided you in early October on our fourth quarter year end earnings conference call. And even with this week's First Call estimate of $0.45. And as I will review with you later today, this quarter's $0.45 figure was negatively impacted with a charge of approximately $7.6 million pretax or $0.01 a share which, is our estimated retention cost of hurricane Wilma that impacted Florida this past fall. Needless to say that was not included in our assumption, to start with.
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