The Children's Place Retail Stores, Inc. at 2007 FBR Growth Conference - Final.

Original Source: FD (FAIR DISCLOSURE) WIRE

OPERATOR: Thank you very much. The next presentation is the Children's Place. And we have with us the Chief Financial Officer, Sue Riley, and she will take over from here. Thank you.

SUE RILEY, SVP, CFO, THE CHILDREN'S PLACE RETAIL STORES, INC.: Thanks. Good afternoon, everyone. With me here today is Sue LaBar and I'm going to walk you through a brief presentation describing our company. So first, of course, we have our forward-looking statements. Would ask that you refer to our public filings for any additional information.

So who are we? We have two great brands with significant growth opportunity. First, we're the Children's Place Brand, and under that brand we run 868 stores in the U.S., Canada, and Puerto Rico. We're a specialty retailer of apparel and accessories and for those of you with a don't know us, we're high quality but value-priced merchandise. And we operate the Disney Store Brand under a license agreement with the Walt Disney Company. There we have 328 stores in the U.S. and Canada. Of course, you know the Disney Company, character-based merchandise, apparel, toys, plush, and souvenirs. And that's exclusive, we sell unique, exclusive products.

So turning to the Children's Place Brand for a minute, some highlights. We have broad consumer appeal, very favorable demographic trends. People who need to save money on children's clothing save money at our stores and people who don't need to save money on children's clothing like to save money, kids generally grow and they shop at our store, so very very favorable demographic trends. You'll see in a minute, we've been increasing our market share in the growing children's apparel market. We have real unique growth opportunities. I'm also going to walk you through our first quarter results, which we just released last week, and then also talk about some focus areas for 2007 that we're focusing on as a company.

So just starting with -- I mentioned a minute ago we have very prod consumer appeal. Only 26% of our sales are generated in A malls, we have about 30% in B malls, 12% in C malls, 10% in outlets, 10% in strip centers, 4% in street centers and then Canada represents about 7% of our business and growing. Importantly, we're not concentrated and our growth opportunities are not limited to one type of outlet or center. We have positive demographic trends. This a chart to comes from the U.S. Census Bureau and importantly here, 4 to 6-year-olds are expected to grow at about 6% from the years 2004 to 2010. 4 to 6 happens to be our sweet spot in terms of the ages that shop in our stores.

We've primarily -- as we look forward into the future, we're selling to the echo boomer. The echo boomer, they're the children of baby boomers and generation X. Echo boomers spend a lot of money, they outspend their parents by about 2 to 1. They are very brand conscious, they are very socially civic-minded. They tend to be in the age groups of -- they're about 12 to 29 years old right now, so as our business grows and time moves on, we'll be selling more and more to the echo boomers.

Our market share has been growing. If you just look at children's apparel, children's apparel has gone from $30.7 billion in 2005, has grown to $33.3 billion in 2006 and within that growing children's apparel market, we have grown. Our market share has increased from 3.8% in 2005 to 4.2% in 2006. Then if you just look at specialty apparel, specialty apparel has grown as well from $7.2 billion in '05 to $7.7 billion in 2006, and our share has increased by about 200 basis points within that time frame from 16.2% to 18.2%. Importantly, we've been increasing our store productivity. In 2003 we were generating about $262 per square foot. In 2006 we generated $356 per foot. Our new goal over time is to achieve $400 a foot. Disney Store has also increased store productivity. We've proved from $329 a foot in 2005 to $395 a foot in 2006, and our goal for the Disney store is to grow to $450 a foot.

Then as you look at the potential for growth in the future, as I mentioned earlier, we're not overly penetrated …