Earnings Labs

Best Buy Co., Inc. (BBY)

Q4 2007 Earnings Call· Wed, Apr 4, 2007

$59.06

-0.35%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Welcome to Best Buy's conference call for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007. (Operator Instructions) I would now like to turn the call over to Jennifer Driscoll, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Jennifer Driscoll: Thank you, Eric. Good morning, everyone. We hope you enjoyed the on hold from the Police, whose concert tour Best Buy is sponsoring. We appreciate your participation in our fiscal fourth quarter conference call. This morning, we have five speakers on the call: Brad Anderson, our CEO, will start us off with our overall strategy for growing our business. Brian Dunn, President and CEO ,will give you an update on our progress of building customer relationships last quarter and how we plan to deepen those relationships in the coming year. Bob Willett, CEO of International, will touch on our International business results for the fourth quarter and share our international plans for the next 12 to 24 months. Darren Jackson, our Chief Financial Officer, who also heads up our growth groups, will describe how he thinks about Best Buy Mobile, Best Buy for Business, and other emerging areas. Last, Jim Muehlbauer, CFO of our domestic segment will elaborate on our fourth quarter results and add color to our annual guidance for fiscal 2008. As is our custom, we'll extend our year end call to 75 minutes so that we can have extra time for answering your questions about the company. We request that you ask only one question per person and we will keep you on the line in case clarification is need. If you do have a second question, we respectfully request that you return to the queue after your first question has been answered so that more callers have a chance to participate. We would like to remind you that comments made by me or by others representing Best Buy may contain forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties. Our SEC filings contain further information about factors that could cause actual results to differ from management's expectations. Please be aware that as usual, the media are participating in this call in a listen-only mode. With that I give you Brad Anderson, Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. Did the analysts get it right?: Wall Street hires some smart cookies. But it’s not always in their best interest to put the hard questions to management. Are YOU even their top priority?: Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner is still bullish on Best Buy. It’s up 23% since he recommended it to his Motley Fool Stock Advisor subscribers back in December 2003. Now, discover the companies Tom and his brother David recommend in their free research report “The Motley Fool's 2 Top Picks - Plus Wall Street's Dirtiest Secret.”:

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Analyst

* Returns as of 6/12/2007 : To sponsor a Seeking Alpha transcript click here.

Brad Anderson

Analyst

Thank you, Jennifer. This morning we reported fiscal 2007 earnings of $2.79 per diluted share. That's up 23% from the $2.27 per share in our prior fiscal year. Our fourth quarter top line results were better than we expected. Comparable store sales rose by 6% in the quarter. This gain reflected stronger than expected results in December and in February. For the year, our earnings were at the high end of our original range with margin pressures more than offset by expense leverage. We are proud of these results, which we achieved amid a tough competitive environment and we thank our employees for doing their best to serve the needs of our consumers. Our focus for the last few years has been on putting the customer at the center of everything we do and we realize that we may not have been completely clear on where we are in this journey. My focus today is going to be on sharing more about our journey with you, as well as the implication that it has on our growth plans. Customer centricity is the core of our strategy globally; that has not changed. What is changing, however, is that we're realizing that customer centricity requires us to think differently about our business, even as we differentiate ourselves more from our competition. I would like to compare customer centricity with the conventional wisdom in our industry, a wisdom that we had adopted as recently as five years ago. The conventional wisdom in our industry is that success begins with an insight on a growing market, like flat panel televisions. Then the retailer puts all of the resources behind that point of view. If you do a better job than your competitors at selling the products to as many customers as possible, you will…

Darren Jackson

Analyst

Nice job, Bob. Okay, we're about halfway home. Growth has always been an integral part of the Best Buy story and our culture. Fiscal 2007 was no exception. We were pleased with the investments we made in the talents, the capabilities, the markets, and probably most importantly the options for future growth that came with them. We thought it would be helpful to summarize our capital investment decisions in fiscal 2007. We generated $1.8 billion in cash from operations and we reinvested all of it. We invested more than $700 million in our core business. We added 96 new stores, we remodeled 300 plus home entertainment departments, enhanced our supply chain and completed other capital investments. We invested nearly $600 million in acquisitions to gain access to new customers and markets. That total includes $200 million for our entry into China via the Five Star purchase and $400 million for our Pacific Sales acquisition. Finally, we returned in excess of $750 million to our shareholders in the form of share repurchases and dividends. We are pleased to be in a position to make all of these investments. Our investment priority is ensuring that the core Best Buy business continues to grow with attractive returns. We expect acquisitions to provide access to material growth markets and accretive capabilities that allow us to capitalize on unmet customer needs while generating acceptable returns. Finally, returning cash to our shareholders is key at opportunistic times. The future growth agenda of Best Buy touches every corner of our enterprise. Bob highlighted our entry into China, which is a $100 billion consumer electronics retail market and growing; our interest in Mexico and Turkey; a core growth engine in the United States has been new stores, services, and full solutions. Like Geek Squad, we are now augmenting…

Operator

Operator

Our first question comes from Matt Fassler with Goldman Sachs. Matt Fassler - Goldman Sachs: I just want to dig a little bit deeper into your capital allocation discussion. You talked about opportunistic buybacks. How do you think about those opportunities in terms of stock price, times of year and outlook? If you could also give us some color related to that as to the amount of cash that you like to keep on the balance sheet, just from an operating perspective.

Darren Jackson

Analyst

So maybe a different way of asking that question, we didn't buy a lot of stock back in the fourth quarter. It may have been lower than expectations, and we understand that. I think a way to think about it and the way that we've thought about it is that when we look at our capital allocation, I'd tell you one thing hasn't changed: our priority continues to be to be out there looking for investment ideas that will return from a cost of capital something well north of what our cost of capital is today which is, call it 10.5%, 11%. We continue to invest in the core business, we see very attractive returns, surprisingly coming out of some of the new stores that we're investing in today. That continues to be a focus for us in terms of how do you keep investing in the core business and keep the ROICs up? You can see from our behaviors that we have a heightened sense of looking around for accretive acquisitions that both add opportunities with new customers and capabilities. This year was more pronounced than prior years in the form of our investments in China, our investment in Pacific Sales, and more recently our investment in Speakeasy. Underneath that, we bought a small company called AVI that added to our service capabilities that were relatively small. So we have allocated more capital, per se, into how do we grow the business by recognizing that in order to collapse time, acquisitions have been a bigger part of the capital allocation this year. We continue to see opportunities to repurchase our stock. In hindsight, there could have been more opportunity in the fourth quarter and we acknowledge that. We'll be spending more time as we go into FY08 looking at more pronounced stock repurchases and acquisition activity. I would suspect when you peer out into the future and look at our capital allocation, that this year we spent in excess of $1.8 billion. That number will ratchet up considerably across all three of those dimensions in terms of core business, in terms of acquisitions and in terms of stock repurchases. Matt Fassler - Goldman Sachs: So you would say that we should assume some level of acquisition, perhaps similar to what you did in calendar '06 on a go-forward basis? That should be less the exception and more the base case?

Darren Jackson

Analyst

Matt. I would love to tell you it's linear, but it's not. I'd tell you, as we highlighted in our release today, we're strategically and surgically looking for places in the market where we see unmet customer needs, and candidly where our capabilities matched with the acquisition candidate capabilities or something that provides something unique and special for the customers. That's what we saw in Pacific Sales, that's what we in Speakeasy. Candidly, that's what we saw as we went into China because clearly, Five Star's capabilities in China were a little bit better than ours.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from David Strasser - Banc of America. David Strasser - Banc of America: I wanted to talk a little bit about the TV category. A couple of questions, but it's all coming down to one answer from you. The percentage of 1080P today and the trend where you think that's going, and in general what the difference in price is between 1080P and say 720 or your non-1080P? If you take that altogether and assume a 20% or 25% decline or so in like for like product year over year, where do you think ASPs come out in the TV category for next year relative to this year? Mike Vitelli: Thanks for the question, but you did point out a number of things that are happening that are going to help the category as we move into next year: the increase in technologies coming from our manufacturers, both 1080P and 127 hertz in LCD to help with the movement. All of those are increasing the average ASP of television. LCD is also increasing its ability to build larger sets and that's increasing the ASP of television. Both of those start to offset the decline in cost per inch of large screen TVs and flat panel TVs, and they do start to moderate the acceleration that we saw in this year. So we think the situation is going to be because of all of those factors, that we're still going to have a decline in flat panel TV prices but it will be more modest than last year. David Strasser - Banc of America: Any sense of the magnitude of that, though? Are we talking 10%, are we talking 5%, 20%? Mike Vitelli: What we believe is, and for us to speculate on the actual percent change is not in the best interest of the industry, our shareholders or actually anyone because it starts to become a self-fulfilling prophecy as everyone wants to react to something we might speculate on. We think that's not a positive thing to do. We know it's going to decline, but speculating on the exact rate is not helpful.

Darren Jackson

Analyst

In the last two years we've been wrong in terms of it was much better two years ago, it was a little tougher this past year. David Strasser - Banc of America: Let me ask you this last question and I'll let you go, but the difference in 1080P pricewise versus non1080P sets, how significant is that difference? Mike Vitelli: There's always a premium for new technology and it changes based upon the customer's reaction to it and what the manufacturers can do in their pricing. But there's a premium for 1080P. There was a premium for 127 hertz. There was a premium for cable card slots, that changes. So it moderates and modulates during the course of a lifecycle of a product. David Strasser - Banc of America: I'm not going to get a number. Thanks again, thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Gary Balter with Credit Suisse. Please go ahead. Gary Balter - Credit Suisse: I'm going to focus my question on Geek Squad. This was an area where a few years ago some of the analysts were writing about how 50% operating margin was going to have a huge impact. Jim in his comments mentioned for the first time it will positively impact gross margin. Could you talk about what's going on in Geek Squad in terms of turnover employees, utilization, what's happening with the margins? Anything that you want to share with us in that area would be helpful. Thank you. Jim Muehlbauer: Gary, I did comment that we do expect growth in our Geek Squad business will help us improve some of the gross margin rate headwinds we're going to see next year. I think we've talked consistently over the last few years that Geek has been a predominant story not only from a customer standpoint, but also in the improvements in our margins. When our margins in fiscal 2006 were up over 100 basis points, we talked a lot about the performance of Geek Squad. We may not have been as out loud about that during the last fiscal year, but we certainly continue to see growth in that space next year and we'll continue to see it mixed favorably into our business.

Brad Anderson

Analyst

That's consistent, Jim, the last three years, Geek has been part of the gross margin expansion story. It's not just coming into play this coming year. Jim Muehlbauer: That's correct. Sean Skelley: On the question specifically about employee and turnover and the relationship with our employees. We have seen relatively flat head count, a little bit down year over year. Mainly that's focused on productivity and tools and competencies and capabilities. We're still satisfied with our turnover rate, but we're actually naturally trying to make sure that those employees are highly engaged as they are the face to our customers. We expect that number to be relatively flat in head count and we continue to grow the quality of our employees and the engagements with our customers.

Brad Anderson

Analyst

I think there's an important lens to look at, as you look at Geek Squad or all of these in terms of our overall strategy of identifying a customer need and then providing a holistic solution to the consumer, we think is working for us in total in the marketplace. As you try to break it off and look at each of these as free-standing increments, that actually doesn't hold up. The consumer is choosing a value proposition, our value proposition versus another and each of these things are components to that value proposition. So when you look at the overall consumer, the overall performance of the company, it's driven by how well our value propositions are holding up against our competition. Gary Balter - Credit Suisse: Okay. Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Colin McGranahan - Sanford Bernstein. Colin McGranahan - Sanford Bernstein: I wanted to focus my question on the operating margin outlook. First on the expense line, 60, 70 basis points is fairly impressive given a comp environment that looks like it's going to be in the 3 to 5 range. And given that you don't really have the headcount reductions this year that you had last year, can you give us a little bit more detail on where some of the drivers of that very strong leverage, any detail you can give us there? And then in terms of gross margin, given the fourth quarter performance down 105 and the results versus the guidance at the beginning of the year, what's your confidence interval around the 30 to 40 basis points and what could go right and what would you think would be a bad scenario taking into account that gross margin has deteriorated every quarter for the last four quarters? Jim Muehlbauer: Colin, I'll try to pull apart those four different questions and maybe round them all into how we're thinking about next year in total. Let's start with SG&A. We continue to see opportunities next year to leverage the capabilities that we've built around improving our productivity both in our stores with our labor management, whether it's Geek Squad or whether it’s our blue shirt labor in the stores and leverage that base on the 3% to 5% comp sales. We also expect to continue to leverage our advertising spend year-over-year. Consistently, we are looking at the IT capabilities that we built in the organization from a supply chain standpoint and leveraging the infrastructure we have in our warehousing. A combination of those things across the board is what gives us confidence in that our SG&A leverage will continue next year. We're also getting much sharper on where we spend our money against a focus set of priorities that we think will have the most impact from a customer standpoint. Some of the headwinds that we'll see in SG&A, as Bob mentioned, as we continue to expand internationally, we'll be building infrastructure for those businesses and we'll be investing in businesses like our Best Buy Mobile and our Best Buy for business portfolio. So we have things going in different directions, but I think we're getting much sharper overall in our spending, which is what gives us confidence around the SG&A rate for next year. Colin McGranahan - Sanford Bernstein: Jim, is the order you talked about those relative to the magnitude? So would you say that labor management, dollar per hour productivity is the largest source of the 60 to 70? Jim Muehlbauer: Productivity leverage on our labor dollars across the board, both corporate and in the field would be the largest. Advertising would be the second.

Darren Jackson

Analyst

Colin, I'd also build on that. We're still in the middle of our outsourcing journey, so what we see coming up for next year, both in terms of things we were doing, in terms of progress we're making in IT, which was part of our original 50 basis point roadmap and we recently extended our partnership with Accenture to look at our GNFR outsourcing relationship and we see new opportunities as we look down the road. Jennifer Driscoll: Goods not for resale.

Darren Jackson

Analyst

Goods not for resale, thank you, Jennifer. To further take out costs over the next couple of years. Jim Muehlbauer: I would be happy to comment of gross profit rate outlook become and some of the opportunities we see. Clearly, Colin, as we look at the back half of the year, we will be anniversarying significant mix changes in our business that included things like Five Star, included the promotional environment we saw in Q3 and Q4, included mixing more heavily into lower margin items like gaming systems and notebook computers. So we're going to have a little bit easier compares in the back half of the year. Our op income rate in the first half of this year grew 70 basis points. It's our good fortune to have to lap that in the first half of this year, which is why we're looking at the phasing of operating income growth being more skewed to the second half of FY08 than we experienced this year. We're just flipping both ends of the performance. Colin McGranahan - Sanford Bernstein: Okay. But even Five Star should be a drag even in the back half, because it's growing faster at a lower gross margin rate, right? Jim Muehlbauer: Yes, but it won't be nearly as much as it is in the front. Colin McGranahan - Sanford Bernstein: Mix will probably still be negative, too. Gaming is going to be bigger in the fiscal fourth quarter of fiscal ‘08 than it was in the fourth quarter of fiscal '07, right?

Darren Jackson

Analyst

It depends on the availability of systems and what customer uptake is. I think the key thing is the change year-over-year won't be as material as we experienced in the fourth quarter this year versus the fourth quarter of last year.

Brad Anderson

Analyst

Actually, also in gaming, you're beginning to get more software into the mix because in both the last two years, we've been at the very early stages of launches of new products that had very little software in the mix.

Operator

Operator

Next question comes from Gregory Melich - Morgan Stanley. Gregory Melich - Morgan Stanley: I wanted to get back on the cash flow and what to really expect the investment this year. Could you just give us the breakdown on CapEx that $800 million, $850 million, what percentage is actually in stores, in IT, and in those different buckets you mentioned? Basically where it's going internationally versus domestic? Jim Muehlbauer: We typically don't give out the details of where specifically we're applying our spending, but maybe it would help if I contextualize how we see the growth in CapEx FY07 versus FY08. We expect it to roughly go up about $110 million year over year. A predominant amount of that increase is really going to fuel higher levels of new store growth, both in the U.S. and internationally, as Bob mentioned. We have been on a hiatus of new store growth in Canada in FY07 and we are getting back on the new store growth engine in Canada next year, so that's eating up a part of our capital. The other thing that we anticipate investing in is continuing our journey from an IT capability standpoint with our POS systems both in the U.S. and in Canada and accelerating our investments in the supply chain space as we begin to redesign and optimize our supply chain network. Those will be the key areas of increased investment. We anticipate also having investments in areas such as services as we continue to build capability and productivity tools around these new growth businesses. Gregory Melich - Morgan Stanley: Did I hear you mention that of those three buckets that you're spending the cash flow investing in the core acquisitions and buybacks, dividends, that they should all be rising? Did I hear that right?

Darren Jackson

Analyst

You did.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Mitch Kaiser - Piper Jaffray. Mitch Kaiser - Piper Jaffray: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the competitive environment. It sounded like, Brad, in your initial comments, maybe you smelled blood in the water a little bit. You see Tweeter closing stores, Comp USA closing stores, just your thoughts there. Then if you could just comment about what you're hearing from vendors, particularly on the TV side?

Brad Anderson

Analyst

I wouldn't want to use the phrase blood in the water, but we did refer to basically two things that we're probably at the zenith of the capability to get done in the marketplace with partners what the company's ever had in experience, maybe times five, because our position is as strong as it is in the marketplace and suppliers see what we can bring to the marketplace is very much in their vested interest. One of the things that I think often gets missed by a relatively short horizon look at Best Buy is, what does a difficult ecosystem enable Best Buy to do? Historically, a difficult ecosystem has always been wonderful for us because if we've got more talent than our competition does, we can deploy that talent and increase our leverage in the marketplace. We think that the current environment that our strategy is extraordinarily strong and the assets we bring are very valuable to both our suppliers and other strategic partners that we can see on the horizon. That's part of the message of this call is essentially, we intend to seize the day. So we've got a lot of capital, we've got a lot of talent, we've got a lot of alliances, we have a global point of view instead of a regional point of view and we have a competitive of market share gains in every market that we're in that are historically unprecedented for Best Buy. We intend to leverage all of that in this upcoming year. You don't see all of it, necessarily, in the budget because future potential acquisitions in terms of potential strategy and those kinds of things can't be placed, but we expect to fully exploit that.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Brian Nagel - UBS. Brian Nagel - UBS: You made a comment in your prepared remarks that you expect comp store sales growth to moderate from the levels we saw recently, and your guidance for 2007 reflects that as well. Was that more of a comment here on Q1 or throughout the whole year and then any specific category comments to back that up? Thank you.

Brad Anderson

Analyst

That comment was really more towards what we see in the first half of the year, clearly. We feel very comfortable with 3% to 5% comps for the year, but not unlike last area where we finished the fourth quarter with a 7.3% comp and then moved into the first quarter with a 4.8% comp, we would not expect the same level of performance from a comp sales standpoint in Q4 to move into Q1 for a couple of really good reasons. Number one, we know that a vast majority of our gift cards that get sold and redeem kind of come to fruition in Q4. Plus, some of the strength we saw in our business around MP3s around the holiday, given the fact that they're a great gift-giving item. The other things that we also see in the comp sales is that I would love to ask Kevin and team up in Canada to deliver another 14% comp in Q1 like they did Q4, but as we lap strong numbers in Canada, that's probably not going to be realistic either. I think the other thing that we don't have a lot of visibility to in the marketplace tying back to some of Brad's comments is that we do have a number of competitors that will be closing stores over a period of time. We certainly think that there will be a short-term impact on our business as those inventory positions are rationalized in the marketplace, but those clearly will provide us opportunities as we get later into the year to build share in some of those businesses. So a little bit lack of visibility as to what specifically is going to happen on that also.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from Scot Ciccarelli - RBC Capital. Scot Ciccarelli - RBC Capital: You guys have made a bunch of references regarding acquisitions and obviously we've moved into China and it sounds like we're going to be moving into Mexico and Turkey. What is the appetite for a near-term earnings hit? In other words, if you guys thought you had a big future opportunity, would you be willing to move into a market or get into a business which may be dilutive for a while? Can you give us a way to think about that?

Brad Anderson

Analyst

I would just say that we don't see that on the horizon immediately, or don't see that on the horizon, but I hope we continue to operate this business in the long-term interest in the shareholders. And if we saw something we believe was a clear long-term benefit we would seize that. Bob Willett: I think you said it and I think Darren actually covered it as well. We are at a point in our development where we are not going to miss an opportunity to enhance our unique proposition around customer centricity. We're not going to miss an opportunity. Scot Ciccarelli - RBC Capital: Obviously we're doing the Best Buy Mobile, some of these other things. Is it fair to assume we shouldn't expect that to be significantly dilutive by any measure?

Brad Anderson

Analyst

Well, that's all factored into the guidance we gave you today. We can't reflect anything that may transpire in the future. We gave you the best picture we have today of where we think our expense structure goes.

Darren Jackson

Analyst

Scot, here's the way I would frame it. When we're peering out and looking at acquisitions, is it possible we could acquire something and take a near-term earning hit? The short answer is yes. As a matter of fact, in certain situations as we build capabilities and new businesses, we have taken an earnings hit to build those capabilities. We've been able to manage it within the context of the larger Best Buy business and we think that as we look at different places for growth, what we found is that when we add these capabilities and have to invest in them over time that we take a point of view of what would be the long-term value creation for the enterprise? I think unless we take that point of view, what we'll do is we'll both pass on things that quite frankly we get scared, because the near-term earnings hit is kind of missing the point of the long-term potential. I don't want you to read anything into that that we're ready to jump into something big and sustain a long-term hit to earnings, but I think we'd be misleading you if we said if we saw a big opportunity to grow the capabilities and the long-term value of the enterprise because of the fit within the principles of where we see we can create value, we would do it. But to date we have been fortunate to be able to buy a number of companies where we've been able to essentially absorb the near term as we build capabilities to get to a better place long term.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Danielle Fox - Merrill Lynch. Danielle Fox - Merrill Lynch: Could you talk a little bit about how you're evaluating the returns on your investment in China? So for example, do you look at the financial impact from your overall presence meaning both sourcing and stores, or do they each have to meet their own criteria?

Darren Jackson

Analyst

I'll tee it up and then I'll have Bob talk about China specifically. When we thought about our investment in China, we actually saw three opportunities to increase value for the enterprise. One is the most obvious in terms of the purchase of Five Star allowed to us acquire a management team and a team that has an understanding of the customer and the market and quite frankly was growing fast and already was modestly profitable. It's not unlike our Future Shop acquisition, where how do we leverage those existing capabilities, recognizing it was already profitable at the time that we bought it to grow the business over time? I think that's in some ways more conventional in terms of how do we grow stores? The other thing that we saw was the opportunity to enhance our relationship with some of the Chinese vendors. If you could think about it, there are many sourcing capabilities and opportunities in China where exposure to the North American market would be very valuable. So we're trying to understand on a global scale how to build those relationships and that access that will be worth value long-term. Then three, one that we don't talk a lot about but that Bob talks quite a bit about is that we are going to bump into capabilities that they have that we don't have. Those capabilities will be able to be transplanted back into the U.S. and in other markets that will allow to us grow our enterprise. Candidly, that has been a pleasant surprise when we think about our Geek Squad acquisition. That has been a pleasant surprise as we look at Pacific Sales and their vendor relationships in terms of growing our high end business. But that's a third piece that gets missed a lot…

Darren Jackson

Analyst

Yes. So the short answer, we absolutely look at the returns on these investments. The easy one is and the most predictable one is when we make capital investments locally in our stores, and we've said this before, have seen returns upwards of 19% ROIC in terms of those stores. When we look internationally and look at different growth businesses that are not consistent with our model, we'll adjust the cost of capital to reflect the risks in the market and the type of investments to ensure that we are getting a return and we haven't given out a stated international return. If you look at Speakeasy, that has more of a telco type of return hurdle. What we do is back up using our cost of capital as an enterprise to understand and the local cost of capital how much value creation is in each one of these acquisition candidates. As Bob said in China, it is early days but we are both in terms of how we're traveling in China to both top line and bottom line, ahead of our expectations. I would tell you in our other acquisitions that we were at or slightly above our expectations to date.

Brad Anderson

Analyst

If you look at this from a lens of customer centricity, it means that you've got two enormous assets that you can bring back to your customers in every market that you serve. One of which is, you've got whatever you spot as a particular need in a marketplace, it increases the menu of potential solutions. So if we can't find the right solution from a supplier, we can create our own solution because of the work we've done in China. Second, it allows the folks who are doing our acquisition in China to experiment with their own marketplace to help us spot things we miss in terms of customer solutions in North America. So there's another major strategic umbrella that this thing is accomplishing for us and we're at the very early stages of. Bob Willett: Just a bit more context to what Darren talked about. In the business here in the U.S. we have this great process, yellowbook/bluebook process of assessing stores on an individual basis in terms of return. We've taken that same process to Canada, taken that same process to China. We've had to harmonize the data somewhat but the principles and process are exactly the same and the analytics are just as exacting using different weighted average costs of capital.

Operator

Operator

Our final question comes from David Schick - Stifel Nicolaus. David Schick - Stifel Nicolaus: I just wanted to hear more on the attachment rates for installation, in particular, and how you guys feel about the Pledge ad campaign. Mike Vitelli: So I think first and foremost, it really is a solution for the customer, so as you think about the whole product need, we saw in home theater installation triple-digit growth for Q4 and we saw in Geek Squad specifically double-digit growth and actually the biggest month ever in the month of February for that business. I think that campaign, the HD Done Right and the I Pledge campaign are almost iconic in reaching out to what Brian said earlier is what we believe is our greatest asset of connecting our employees with our customers. That campaign was all about the blue shirt and what they're going to do for the customer, which is what their needs and wants is, which is to get HD Done Right. I thought it was one of the best campaigns in capturing the spirit of what Best Buy is trying to do in the marketplace and what we were successful with last year. Sean Skelley: It's fair to say, Mike, what we saw is a extraordinary pickup in the attachment rates for the whole solution that was above our expectations and maybe more importantly, return rates coming down significantly, which if you think about customer satisfaction, the ability to get the TV installed and stay in home without having to bring it back to our store is enormous win all around. David Schick - Stifel Nicolaus: So do you think Done Right, that campaign and focus in the stores was part of what drove that customer satisfaction index improvement? Mike Vitelli: I think…