Columbia Sportswear Company Q4 2008 Earnings Call Transcript

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2009-01-29 19:34:13.0

Tags: Marketing, Advertisement, Barclays Plc., Call Transcript, Earnings, Sales Strategy, Sales Force Management, Sales, Seeking Alpha, Columbia Sportswear Co.

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Bob Drbul of Barclays Capital.

Robert Drbul – Barclays Capital

Tim, the question that I have for you on the outlook for 2009, you talked about making these judgments with a reduced 2009 sales outlook. Can you just... how much of your order book for the Fall of 2009 is completed, and can you give us any sort of parameters about how to think about 2009 in aggregate?

Timothy Boyle

As you know, we’ve really been disciplined about talking about the balance of the second through fourth quarters of ’09 after we have a higher degree of visibility. We do have some orders and I would say that they’re probably consistent with the rate which we received orders in the past. We don’t have anything particular that we want to talk about as it relates to that book, however, when we look at the overall consumer demand, the impact of continued layoff announcements and just the general malaise within the economy, we feel it would be imprudent to be ebullient about 2009 from a top line basis, so we’re just being very cautious and we believe we’ll have a lot more to talk about at the next conference call.

Robert Drbul – Barclays Capital

Okay, and just some questions from the advertising, can you give us the 2008 total advertising expense in terms of a percentage of sales, and can you elaborate a little bit more on sort of how to think about that from an expense perspective on a percentage of sales or any targets or ways to think about that as we look to our 2009?

Timothy Boyle

Sure, I’m going to ask Tom to give the specifics on ’08 but let me tell you about ’09. We believe that because of the nature of the competitive environment or marketing resources, advertising costs, etc., or ’09, just based on the economy, that with a reduced marketing budget we’ll be able to nearly get the same amount of gross impressions that we had in ’08, and that’s certainly our plan, is to just be much more efficient and make a smaller ad budget, give us about the same general impact, but I’ll ask Tom to elaborate on the ’08 number.

Thomas B. Cusick

Our advertising expense as a percent of sales was up a little over 120 basis points from 2007.

 

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