Dick’s Sporting Goods smashes same-store sales expectations for holiday quarter

Dick’s Sporting Goods on Tuesday reported holiday-quarter results that beat Wall Street’s expectations, citing a sales boost from the gift-giving season even with inflation-weary consumers.

Same-store sales increased 5.3% during the fiscal fourth quarter, more than double analysts’ estimates of 2.1%, according to StreetAccount. That metric measures sales online and in stores open for 14 months or more.

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Shares of the company were up roughly 10% in Tuesday trading.

The sporting good retailer’s performance has remained resilient in the face of an inflationary macroenvironment and industrywide inventory struggles. It said Tuesday that even amid shaky consumer demand across the sector, its shoppers continued buying.

CEO Lauren Hobart said on a call with analysts that the company has seen a “shift in consumer behavior” toward prioritizing fitness even more than they did pre-pandemic. Shoppers are now starting to see sports and fitness products “more as necessities than discretionary,” she said.

Footwear, athletic apparel and team sports products were the primary drivers of performance in the fourth quarter and the full year, the company said. It explained that its size and scale of reach remained appealing to vendors, even as they pare down their distribution partners. That means that Dick’s can price up popular products like Nike’s Jordan shoes, Hoka running shoes and Brooks sneakers.

Dick’s is going into its next fiscal year with continued confidence. It anticipates full-year earnings per share between $12.90 and $13.80, up from $10.78 per share for fiscal 2022. Analysts polled by Refinitiv had expected fiscal 2023 EPS of $12.

It expects same-store sales growth for the fiscal year to be flat to up 2%.

Here’s how the company did in the quarter ended Jan. 28 compared with what Wall Street was anticipating, based on a survey of analysts by Refinitiv:

• Earnings per share: $2.93, adjusted, vs. $2.88 cents expected
• Revenue: $3.60 billion vs. $3.45 billion expected

The company posted net income of $236 million, about 32% lower than the $346 million it reported a year earlier. It reported $3.6 billion in net sales compared with $3.4 billion in the same period last year.

Dick’s has not been completely immune to the industrywide retail pains like inventory headwinds. Supply chain disruptions led Dick’s to stock up on products to meet Covid pandemic-era demand, only for those products to be out of season by the time they arrived.

But the company feels confident it has resolved its supply chain and inventory woes as it heads into the 2023 fiscal year and said that will manifest in same-store sales growth, especially in the first half of the year.

“As planned, we continued to address targeted inventory overages, and as a result our inventory is in great shape as we start 2023,” said Hobart said in the earnings release.

Now that inventory is stable, the company is focused on expansion.

Most of its capital expenditures in the coming year will go toward expanding Dick’s “House of Sport,” its experiential chain of storefronts that feature rock-climbing walls, batting cages and golf putting greens, CFO Navdeep Gupta said on a call with analysts.

Dick’s launched the first three “House of Sport” stores in 2021 and is planning to expand that portfolio with nine new stores in 2023 and another 10 slated to open in 2024.