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Transcript
OP
Operator
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to Best Buy's conference call for the first quarter of fiscal 2009. (Operator Instructions) I would now like to turn the conference over to Jennifer Driscoll, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
JD
Jennifer Driscoll
Management
Thank you, Brittany. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for participating in our fiscal first quarter conference call. We have five speakers for you today. First up is Brian Dunn, our President and Chief Operating Officer; second, Chris [Geigle], General Manager of Store Number 22 in Davenport, Iowa; third we have Mike Vitelli, Executive Vice President of Customer Operating Group calling in; fourth, Bob Willett, CEO of International and Chief Information Officer; and we will wrap up with Jim Muehlbauer, Executive Vice President of Finance and our CFO. As usual, we have a broad management group here with me, including our CEO, available to answer your questions after our formal remarks. We would like to request that our callers limit themselves to a single question so we can include more people in our Q&A session, and consistent with our approach on prior calls, we will move to the end of the queue those who asked a question on last quarter’s conference call. We’d like to remind you that our comments made either by me or by others representing Best Buy may contain forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties. Our SEC filings contain additional information about factors that could cause actual results to differ from management’s expectations. May we also remind you that as usual, the media are participating in this call in a listen-only mode. And with that, let’s turn the call over to Brian Dunn, who will begin our prepared remarks.
BD
Brian J. Dunn
Management
Thanks, Jennifer. Good morning, everyone. We are very pleased to be reporting a great start to our new fiscal year, with a 3.7% comparable store sales gain and $0.43 in diluted earnings per share, I am pleased for our customers, our shareholders, and most importantly our employees. Our employees see the results of their individual efforts every day but it is awesome to see the results of their combined efforts on the main stage like they are today. On top of the financial results, we continue to see positive strategic results. First, we continue to grow our market share and we are confident that our value proposition is working. We picked up share across the board -- in TVs, gaming, computing, and mobile phones, while delivering sold gross profit rate performance in the quarter. Second, our customer satisfaction scores hit a record high during the quarter, and finally, we have made record improvements in our employee turnover. In short, these results suggest that we are growing our business in the right ways and that should fuel our continued growth. With those highlights as the backdrop, I want to give some examples where we see our strategy playing out very well. My first example is our continued success in the computing space. We have the complete product lineup, outstanding employees, and the service brand in the marketplace. Nobody else can match that today, and we believe this market position puts us at main and main of the connected world. Our trend has continued in this fiscal year as we gained another 3.5 points of computing market share in the first quarter. This quarter marked the 22nd consecutive quarter with double-digit comparable store sales gains in notebooks, and it is more than just the products. Our Geek Squad services grew at twice…
CG
Chris Geigle
Management
Thanks, Brian. Good morning, everyone. As Brian said, I became the general manager of the Davenport, Iowa location just about three years ago, after spending my first two years as a general manager of the Dubuque, Iowa location. Our story really started about six months ago when Brian and Shari challenged our team and every store in the company to really figure out new ways to grow at a local level. So we began thinking about who shops in our store and what could we do to serve them better, what did they need that we could probably provide them better than anybody else? In case you haven’t been to Davenport -- and really, most people haven’t -- I’ll give you a little background on our town. Davenport’s your typical Midwestern small city. We’ve got a population of around 100,000 people with a total of about 400,000 people in our trade area. We call it the [Cross] Cities. We are located right on the Mississippi River on the border with Illinois. Agriculture is a big part of our economy and John Deere is on of the largest employers in our area. Our team did a deep dive into the customer segment shopping in our stores using a tool that we didn’t even have when I first became a GM. We found that the empty nesters, we kind of think of them as baby boomers who are retired or just about to retire, call them Charlie and Helen, were the largest customer demographic in the [Cross] Cities. The problem we saw was that these customers didn’t shop with us and they made up the smaller percentage of our revenue of any customer segment. Our strategy was simple -- we had to figure out a way to get this huge customer segment…
BD
Brian J. Dunn
Management
Thanks, Chris, and congratulations to your entire team on outstanding work and rest assured you didn’t mess it up and I am sure your team is very proud, just as we are. Chris is probably too humble to point it out himself, but he has fostered a culture of growth in his store and that is the long-term power of his story -- really awesome. We’ve covered a lot of ground so I want to wrap up our section and at the risk of trying to describe our company in a couple of sentences, I’ll try. Our strategy includes three inter-connected elements, all of which were woven throughout our examples. First, a zealous focus on unmet customer needs and customer insights, both at the macro level and at the local level; second, building a network of people, companies, partnerships, and capabilities, all aimed at addressing those needs; third, and maybe most important of all, an engaged customer focused and growth oriented culture that aims to connect those first two elements and serve customers. It’s hard putting all three together but it’s also hard to copy. We also think that it yields exponential growth options. Consider the possible pairings of a unique employee, one of 140,000, with a unique insight with a network of capabilities supporting her. The number of combinations is staggering. That is why we feel so confident. We are getting very sharp about the brand promise we are making to customers. We are playing offense in the market place and we are very excited about the future. With that, I’ll turn it over to Mike Vitelli. He has a couple of more great illustrations of customer value propositions from this past quarter, and at the risk of embarrassing Mike, I want to tell you a quick story. When we asked Mike to lead the U.S. Operating Groups, he said he would on one condition, and that condition was that he would go and work in a store in a blue shirt for a few weeks before he took on his new role. He did just that and I think it showed us a lot about who Mike is. It also showed us that while Mike can sell a lot of TVs in the macro, he can’t sell a TV face-to-face with a customer if his life depends on it. Mike, you have the floor.
MV
Mike Vitelli
Management
Well, thanks, Brian. Good morning. Brian talks about what customer-centricity means to us, focusing on customers’ unmet needs, utilizing customer insights and employee insights, and doing so both at the macro level and at the local level, so here’s my view. Generally, local independent retailers in any industry tend to excel at customer care, having committed employees who really know their customers, who their best customers are, and then bending over backwards to meet their needs. In contrast, larger, national retailers often excel at the benefits of scale, offering broader and deeper assortments of products and services, pricing power, brand awareness, and vendor relationships that give them a window into seeing upcoming trends and cycles. I believe that the company that can do both, exploit the economies of scale and deliver that hometown customer experience like Chris described earlier through inspired employees, we will indeed be the winning company, and that’s precisely what we are building here at Best Buy every day, one customer and one employee at a time, both in the stores and here at the corporate campus. I would like to give you some local examples and examples from headquarters of how we are doing that, offering the benefits of scale plus local service to drive growth, so let’s start local. And I’ve been at Best Buy about four years and really never had significant retail experience, so as Brian mentioned, as a prelude to my new assignment, I decided to work for a few weeks in a Best Buy store. My intent was to see first-hand how the work we do here at the corporate campus shows up in the stores and how we are helping or hurting our store employees and their ability to create memorable customer experiences. So I worked in our Apple Valley,…
RW
Robert A. Willett
Management
Thanks, Mike. Good morning, everyone. I am here today to share with you an overview of our international results by country from the first quarter, plus what we see ahead for the balance of the year. We talked last quarter about how we believe no other retailer in the world is attempting to accomplish customer-centricity the Best Buy way. We also said this strategy, coupled with our faith in our employees, quality of execution are the reasons we believe we can expand internationally carefully and less risk. So let me give you an update on how we are performing in this increasingly large segment of our business. Like the domestic segment, we are very much focused on customer insights and analytics using our [Dunholm] relationship, combined with an energized employee population to build customer relationships. We are also learning from our operations in the U.S. and Canada, applying those insights in the other countries where we operate. Overall, we are comfortable with our progress. However, we need to keep our operating model simply and continue to raise the quality of our execution so it’s steady as she goes. Our international business unit delivered top line growth of 26%, driven by foreign currency fluctuations, new store openings, and solid comparable store sales gains. International results continued to lead the chain in comparable store sales, finishing the quarter with a comp of 4.7%. Consumers are responding well to our offers, including the choice of two unique brands in both Canada and China. Canada with 184 stores had a comparable store sales gain of 4.3%, including improvement at both FutureShop and Best Buy stores there. Canada’s solid results came on top of 12.8% comp in the prior year’s period, thanks to a steadily improving average selling price and solid in-store execution. China had…
JM
James L. Muehlbauer
Management
Thanks, Bob and good morning, everyone. As Brian mentioned up-front, we are very pleased with both our strategic indicators and our financial results in the first quarter, particularly considering the continued uncertainty of the underlying economic environment. Our $0.43 of diluted EPS was better than we expected and we continue to grow our market share. The results in the quarter continued to support our confidence that our core strategy is working. I want to walk you through the highlights of our performance in the quarter, update you on our investment spending and capital structure, and briefly review our thinking on guidance for fiscal 2009. Our top line grew 13% as we continued to grow our market share in key categories like TV, gaming, notebooks, and mobile phones. Overall, we added more than a point-and-a-half to our already industry leading market share position in the quarter. Our 3.7% comparable store sales gain was modestly above our expectations, as both gaming and flat panel TVs were above plan. The domestic segments comparable store sales gain of 3.5% was certainly above the trends exiting the fourth quarter, and included continued mix into higher ASP products, plus an online comp of over 30%. Canada’s 4.3% comp was on plan and impressive, considering its near 13% comparable store sales gain in the prior year. Similarly, China posted a 6.3% comp, which included our sole Best Buy store in China for the first time. Total international revenue grew 26%, or roughly 13% excluding the impact of foreign currency. We had a solid performance around the globe across our largest brands. Candidly, there were a lot of factors in play in the first quarter in the U.S., including the team’s ability to add to their own growth with local insights and solutions, which they did. We believe…
OP
Operator
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question is from Jack Murphy with William Blair. Please go ahead.
JB
Jack Murphy - William Blair
Analyst
Thank you. Good morning. I wonder if you could give us a little bit of color around the regional comp or the regional trends, particularly different areas of impact on the economy and housing, that or maybe even -- and possibly competitive closings and what impact they may have on different regions.
JD
Jennifer Driscoll
Management
We normally don’t comment on our comp by geography, so we’ll talk about them domestically and internationally but not by state or territory. Do you have another question you’d like to ask?
JB
Jack Murphy - William Blair
Analyst
Let me try another one -- could you talk a little bit about the international fit here -- pardon me, your Internet sales -- you do mention a growth rate so could you talk a little bit about acceleration from the fourth quarter and what type of contribution that’s making to the comp? And also if you could, related to that, give -- contrast to what you are seeing in online sales versus offline sales from a mix perspective.
JM
James L. Muehlbauer
Management
Certainly, Jack. If you look at our comp sales performance over the last number of quarters, we have certainly seen consumer interest continue to develop into the online space. I’d say our trend in the back-half of last year continued to accelerate in the online space and that’s really what drove our strategy this year to continue to invest more in the infrastructure. So we recognize that the multi-channel experience that we offer consumers today has an opportunity honestly to get much better, based on the feedback that they’ve given us. The trend of the business and certainly the mix of the business is a little different online than it’s been in our stores, and I think one of the most impressive things about how consumers are reacting that even when we saw a slowdown in our core business at the back-half of last year, our online business continued to explode. So it’s clearly something that they continue to favor, and I think as Bob and the international team have learned in Europe, we certainly think we have opportunities to leverage our infrastructure from a dot.com standpoint as we build our new venture plans internationally as well.
BJ
Barry Judge
Analyst
You know, if you were trying to get underneath our comp, at least in the U.S., online continued to grow strongly, as Jim mentioned. However, the comp store in the U.S. is really around comp store sales increasing and not just PCs and gaming but in home theater and in mobile phones. And really all those categories, they kind of connect to the -- sort of the core idea that we’ve got, which is when there’s complexity in the category, how do we build a dominant position in consumers’ minds and then deliver it locally? So all those categories, really what it is is a great help in the store, really industry leading assortment, the ability to connect all those things through Geek Squad and services, and then at the local level, the ability to see, to take that dominant value proposition that we call it and kind of tailor it to the opportunities that exist. So some of the examples that I’ve heard just recently around that idea are just the incredible success we are having with digital TV converters. I mean, you wouldn’t -- at the national level, we never would have seen that but in middle America, places where empty nesters are strong, middle American consumers are strong, we’ve been able to take that value proposition and really drive what we think is a 5X improvement in sales on that particular item. So I think that that -- you know, when Mike and the others were talking about how we connect the strategy, so what tools can we develop that can help drive our business macroly, but then how do we take them locally? And there’s stories like that and we talked about them earlier that help us do that, which then drives that comp and that share performance in those complex categories.
BD
Brian J. Dunn
Management
One last comment I’d make about our dot.com business in particular, while we are very pleased with the tremendous growth the team has connected with our customers on, I think we are most pleased with the job the team has done in starting to make the experience more and more personalized for each of our customers, allowing them to drill down in areas that are of interest to them. So one size doesn’t fit all on our site, and I think the team, if they were here, would tell you there’s an awful lot of work to do there. But from where I’m sitting, I’m very pleased with the progress they are making in terms of how they are making it easier and easier for the customer to connect with the Best Buy brand.
RW
Robert A. Willett
Management
Just talking a little bit about online Canada, the online business in Canada is tracking a little below our overall comp. But I think the point to point out is that we are promoting more and more, if you like, buy online, pick up at the store, and we are also promoting the online capability as a part of the catalog. And people are definitely visiting online. They are doing a lot of research and then coming in to shop. So we are looking more and more at the customer experience overall across all channels as opposed to just what one gets online. And certainly as we enter Europe, we’re looking at this to become a major part of our marketing. The propensity to spend online in Europe in our product categories is higher than it is here now in the U.S., a phenomena that’s taken place over the last three years. So we are already looking at infrastructure to do just that and if you like, start to look much more at direct marketing through the web, et cetera, as opposed to indirect, reducing indirect.
JD
Jennifer Driscoll
Management
Thank you. That was Jim, then Barry, Brian, and Bob. Next question, please, Operator.
OP
Operator
Operator
Thank you. Our next question is from Brian Nagel with UBS.
BU
Brian Nagel - UBS
Analyst
Good morning. I wanted to ask a question; there was other news out this morning talking about your expansion of your used game test in Canada. I just wanted to maybe elaborate a little bit on that, what you’ve seen -- saw in the test stores to give you confidence to expand in Canada and what does that potentially mean for any type of test or expansion in the United States in the category? Thanks.
RW
Robert A. Willett
Management
I think it would be too soon to make any comment about the success of this. We are confident from consumer research and as you know, in Europe this is massive. There are a couple of chains over there, Game Store, Gamestop, who do nothing other than this sort of exchange club. And it’s a phenomenal way of getting to a younger consumer, 12 to 14 years, who really are the drivers of this. We’ve seen this and we are starting the pilot in Canada, but it’s too soon to really give you any hard results because -- as they were just started, but we are very, very hopeful that this is going to be another avenue of increasing our relationship with the consumer generally.
JD
Jennifer Driscoll
Management
Thank you, Bob. Next question, please.
OP
Operator
Operator
Thank you. Our next question is from Michael Lasser with Lehman Brothers.
MB
Michael Lasser - Lehman Brothers
Analyst
Good morning. Thank you for taking my question. I appreciate it. When you originally set forth your guidance for the fiscal year back in April, the macroeconomic environment was difficult and it continues to be difficult today, yet you guys exceeded your own internal expectations for the quarter and it sounds like some of that strength is carrying through to June. So are there specific data points within your business that you look at that are giving you caution? And then secondly, on the financing, it sounds like some of the benefit of the financing was -- impacted the basket size, such that perhaps if folks were buying an $899 TV, they added a $130 ESP plan. Does that influence how you think about offering financing promotions moving forward? Because even in light of lapping the renegotiation of the HSBC deal and perhaps rising interest rates, the benefit from a profitability perspective could be greater given what’s happening in the trend. Thank you.
BD
Brian J. Dunn
Management
Michael, why don’t I start with that and then I’ll turn it over to some of my partners in the room here to maybe provide some color, but your first question was what do we see in the environment that’s different than what we started the year from a guidance standpoint. And I can give you a couple of examples. Certainly when we provided guidance early in the year, we saw a market that was going to be very choppy from a customer perspective. We saw the same headwinds that we experienced in the back half of last year and certainly we, like many others, found it difficult to predict exactly what consumer behavior was going to be. The other thing that we determined was looking at history and how things like stimulus checks have impacted us in the past. We have typically gotten a benefit from those in the past but honestly if we thought about that at the beginning of the year, given the other pressures on the consumer, particularly driven by the housing environment and energy costs, we did not expect a major lift in our business coming from rebates at the beginning of the year. And we actually don’t know how that’s going to play out this year, so I’d say one of the factors that we continue to look at is we know the consumer environment on spending is going to be choppy. Our outlook on that has not changed since the beginning of the year. But we are also more confident on our -- the things that we can control, specifically around our strategies from a local growth standpoint. And I’ll let Shari give some examples of that, but I’ll tell you what’s building our confidence is in one part, the performance in the quarter but how we perform. We know we drafted some good news but more importantly from a long-term standpoint, we know it’s the customer insights an the local growth engine that’s going to drive our growth long-term. We see opportunities to continue to build that muscle. We’re in the very early days of that.
SB
Shari L. Ballard
Analyst
Good morning. I think the first part of your question was whether there’s anything that gives us caution and then I think there was a part of your question around what indicators do we look at. There’s nothing from my perspective that we can see today inside the company that gives me caution. In fact, I feel quite strongly the other way -- there’s a lot of stuff I see inside the company at the store level in the dot.com space, at the call centers, at the corporate office, that make me as optimistic as I was on the first quarter call. The things that we look at, you know, we look at the indicators that everybody else looks at in terms of how the business is performing, what’s driving top line and bottom line, what’s our traffic look like, what’s our close rate look like, average selling price. So we look at those indicators and the trends look terrific. But more than anything else, to be frank I listen to what the store teams are saying they see in terms of opportunity. We listen to what they are trying to actually take advantage of the opportunity they can see, and then we look at whether it’s working or not and what we think it’s worth if it continues to work. And I’m extraordinarily optimistic based on that. We just finished, as an example, yesterday in Chicago with that team listening to the first quarter check-in on their local growth plan and I left that discussion extraordinarily optimistic about what they see in terms of our opportunities with the customer, what they are learning, and the performance that’s coming with it. So that’s I guess a view from the inside.
JM
James L. Muehlbauer
Management
Michael, I’ll come back to your second question around financing and how we view that going forward, but I also want to take an opportunity to provide a little additional perspective about how we are thinking about guidance based on the first part of your question. To be clear, our guidance expectations for the year have not changed from our original guidance. So the $3.25 to $3.40 that we reiterated today still includes a base assumption that we are going to buy back shares. What we’ve chosen to do, honestly, just to try to keep it as clean and straightforward for both internal folks and external folks, is to consolidate the impact of both the CPW transaction and our turning off the share repurchase lever into the what we’ve now said is modestly below the $0.05 to $0.07 of accretion that we talked about earlier in the year when we announced the CPW deal. So we’ve kept our guidance clean for both CPW and for the expected change in share repurchases. We will roll that net impact in on the second quarter call after we close the transactions. Honestly, I didn’t want to take you through a process where we started with our annual guidance, take it down because of share repurchase, and then take it back up because of the CPW accretion. We’ve decided to net all that together post-closing when we do our Q2 call. Your question also then on how does our learnings around financing in the quarter influence how we think about some of the levers we have to meet customer demands in the back half of the year. One of the advantages that we have with our reward zone program and the strong partnership relationships we’ve put together with our financing partners, as well as…
BJ
Barry Judge
Analyst
And just the last point on that, when you look at it then at the customer viewpoint and figure out how we are going to compete with Wal-Mart and other big box players out there, you can see -- in our data, you can see that this financing offer really connected with middle American empty nesters. They were our fastest growing segments in May, faster than the other segments that we have out there. And as we are thinking about how to compete with them again at the local level, here’s some tools that we can then use to figure out what the customer need might be. And so I think that’s how it plays out in the macro and in the micro.
JD
Jennifer Driscoll
Management
Thanks, Barry, and thanks, Jim. Next question, please.
JD
Jennifer Driscoll
Management
Thank you, Bob. Next question, please.
OP
Operator
Operator
Thank you. Our next question is from Gregory Melich with Morgan Stanley.
GS
Gregory Melich - Morgan Stanley
Analyst
I just have a quick follow-up, and then my question, and also congrats to everyone on executing in a pretty choppy environment. Traffic versus ticket, ASP was up a lot. Was comp traffic up in the quarter?
BD
Brian J. Dunn
Management
You know, we actually saw traffic improve a little bit in the quarter versus the trends that we were experiencing coming out of Q4.
GS
Gregory Melich - Morgan Stanley
Analyst
So it improved, but was it positive?
BD
Brian J. Dunn
Management
Yeah, it was not positive. It continued to be negative.
BJ
Barry Judge
Analyst
And part of that again is our high frequency categories -- music, movies, particularly are declining at a pretty significant rate. And when you look at our complex categories, home theater, mobile, PC, et cetera, traffic in those businesses was up, so you have to look at -- you have to get underneath the macro trend.
GS
Gregory Melich - Morgan Stanley
Analyst
Okay, great. And then on the financing, just to follow-up on that, how much of your sales were financed versus a year ago, or however you can -- you want to give us that number would be super helpful. And also the strategy going forward -- if interest rates start to go back up, do you feel like you guys are committed to this program now with your customer or was it something that you could look to change again in a couple of quarter?
JM
James L. Muehlbauer
Management
Greg, we don’t talk about how much of our business is attached via financing, but I would tell you our percentage of branded payments, and we consider branded payments both payments that are done on our private label card and our reward zone MasterCard, actually increased year over year. So not surprising, given the strength of the financing offers we put in place but as we get more of those reward zone MasterCards out there and customers see the benefit of being part of that program, that is lowering our payment costs. Also with strong credit offers, our private label card increases so we saw an increase, a meaningful increase quarter over quarter in that space. As we look forward, as we think about interest rates moving, we obviously have a couple of dynamics. We have a program through our third-party bank that we renegotiated last year. That’s providing us year-over-year benefits, irregardless of the magnitude of the shift in the external interest rates. So as interest rates, if they move up going forward, certainly that’s going to impact our profitability but biggest lever right now is we actually have favorable benefits from our renegotiated rates with our third party last year that will continue to provide value to us through the balance of the year. So we are going to continuously adjust those offers based on a number of factors; based on what customers are telling us, where we have the greatest opportunity to grow and what the cost of those offers are. But we really look at those components not unlike the entire solution that we are trying to provide for customers. So financing is just one piece of the equation. We certainly have many other levers to drive behavior, whether it’s reward zone points, whether it’s all on sale events, things of that nature. So we are constantly monitoring that mix of promotion activity to get the best outcome.
GS
Gregory Melich - Morgan Stanley
Analyst
And just to be clear on that, when exactly did you sign and was the deal effective?
JM
James L. Muehlbauer
Management
I think we will start to lap that, if I recall it’s in the second or third quarter. I want to say the second quarter.
JD
Jennifer Driscoll
Management
All right. We have time for a final question. If you’ll bear with us, we’re about our hour here.
JD
Jennifer Driscoll
Management
Thank you, Bob. Next question, please.
OP
Operator
Operator
Thank you. Our next question is from Colin McGranahan with Bernstein.
CB
Colin McGranahan - Sanford Bernstein
Analyst
Good morning. Actually, two quick ones; a painful third follow-up on financing, I think you signed that relationship on July 10th, so it looks like you start to anniversary it here next month. But it sounds like, Jim, from what you are talking about, you continue to see benefits through the year. And it also sounded like you, in this current quarter, financing was a year-over-year positive, even though you had more promotional financing go on. So one, can you confirm that and help me understand why you are going to get more benefits when you start to anniversary this in the next month, and any comment on what underlying delinquencies look like or what you would anticipate as well? The second question is more just a broad one on the PC business; obviously very impressive comp there. I would hope you could give us a little bit more color on what kind of contribution you thought got from the Apple product, the Dell product, and then Geek Squad as well. I think you said it grew twice the rate of the overall company, so am I correct in assuming it grew 26%, which sounds like it would be one of the better growth rates for Geek Squad in quite some time?
JD
Jennifer Driscoll
Management
Mike, would you like to take the first part and then Jim will handle the financing?
MV
Mike Vitelli
Management
Well in the first part, I think what you are seeing is our consumers’ enthusiastic response to literally carrying virtually every PC solution option that there is in the country. And in fact, that’s what we are trying to do in every one of our categories, whether it was Best Buy Mobile or carrying all the carriers and all the phones there, and the PC space. So there’s no doubt that having a broad assortment and the Geek Squad has presented to customers a solution in the notebook space that they can’t get any place else. So whether their option is at the lowest end or the highest end, everything we have is available and it’s that breadth of solutions that we can provide, both in products and in services, that the customer is responding to and the employees can get enthusiastic about.
CB
Colin McGranahan - Sanford Bernstein
Analyst
Okay, Mike, so let me just jump in there -- so would you say then you had positive comp transactions in the PC category?
MV
Mike Vitelli
Management
Absolutely.
CB
Colin McGranahan - Sanford Bernstein
Analyst
Okay. So it wasn’t really a ticket driven comp; it was transaction driven?
MV
Mike Vitelli
Management
Yes, no question it was transactions. In fact, with ASPs generally dropping in SKUs, we are constantly increasing transactions just to get the revenue growth that we have.
CB
Colin McGranahan - Sanford Bernstein
Analyst
Okay.
JM
James L. Muehlbauer
Management
So then Colin, the second part of your question, back to financing again, a couple of different elements going on, is that why we expect to continue to see benefits even as we anniversary the agreement -- clearly after signing the agreement last year, we just started to build traction on how we want to use both our private label card and our reward zone MasterCard, so we didn’t see those account balances from a number of members increase dramatically until we got later in the year. And secondly, the overall interest rates in the marketplace are still going to be lower than they were last year at this time, so I think the combination of both of those, plus we can also impact the types of financing programs that we use, so the cost of financing across different programs, whether it’s nine months, 12 months, 18 months, 24 months, are dramatically different. So we also get benefit depending upon the mix that we deploy in the back half of the year versus what we did last year. So the good news is there’s a number of different levers we can pull in that space and having 30 million members in our reward zone program also gives us a lot of insight of, to Barry’s point earlier, what customers are most interested in that value prop and how do we target that use of financing to get the overall solution. Your last question was really on the delinquency rates, and just to remind the audience on the call that Best Buy does not maintain the receivables for our credit card balances. We actually have our financing partner manage those, so we have no exposure to the existing business that’s booked on the card. But clearly, as we look at the credit card industry and the cascading impacts of the housing market across credit card portfolios, there is pressure being put on banks and credit card lenders to improve the rate of delinquencies and I would expect that we’ll continue to see tightening approval rates in certain parts of the market where it’s warranted by our third parties, but it’s something that we’ve managed in the past and we’ll continue to manage with our good partnership network.
CB
Colin McGranahan - Sanford Bernstein
Analyst
Great. Thank you very much.
JD
Jennifer Driscoll
Management
Thanks, and Wade to wrap up.
WB
Wade Bronson
Analyst
So thank you and thanks to our audience for participating in our first quarter earnings conference call. As a reminder, a replay will be available in the U.S. by dialing 800-405-2236, or 303-590-3000 internationally. The personal identification number is 11115132. The replay will be available from 11:00 a.m. Central Time today until noon Central Time next Tuesday, June 24th. You can also hear the replay on our website under For Our Investors. If you have additional questions, please call Jennifer Driscoll at 612-291-6110, Charles Marentette at 612-291-6184, or me, Wade Bronson, at 612-291-5693. Reporters please contact Sue Busch at 612-291-6114. That concludes our call.
OP
Operator
Operator
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude the Best Buy conference call for the first quarter of fiscal 2009. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.