Dick Fontaine, Chairman and CEO
Management
Thank you and welcome to GameStop’s First Quarter Conference Call. I am Dick Fontaine, the Chairman and CEO of GameStop. With me today are Dan DeMatteo, our Vice Chairman and Chief Operating Officer; Steven Morgan, our President; and David Carlson, GameStop’s Executive VP and Chief Financial Officer. This morning we released our first quarter numbers, which were outstanding. Entering the first quarter by the way ever as a combined company, we had some very real goals that were underlying the forecast that we shared with you last March, and I am happy to say that all of those goals have been achieved: Number one, we continued to bring the two companies together utilizing the best practices to drive sales, realize the synergies that we forecast, and improve our overall profitability. Two, we’ve made the necessary systems conversions to supply all stores from a single system with a single buying staff shipping from two distribution points, a very critical step in making this company as efficient as we know it can be. Three, we reorganized our field organizations. Steve will be talking about this in just a minute. We’ve got a closer partnership between our district and regional managers in the stores and we’re achieving economies of scale by doing so. Four, we had a goal of keeping the merger integration plans on schedule. We still have work to do but we are on schedule, we will keep it on schedule, and we’ll be in a position with again the synergies that we forecast are going to be achieved. Five, even in the midst of this very heavy workflow with a great many people accomplishing and doing a great many things, we continue to open new stores. We’ve defined ourselves as a rapid growth company and we’re not taking this year off even though we’ve got a tremendous amount to do in the integration. During the first quarter, we opened 102 stores worldwide and are well on our way to reaching our goal of adding 400 stores for the year. In addition to that, we will continue to work off the overlapping or the poor performing stores in the portfolio, and during the first quarter we did close 27 stores and we’ll probably close very close to the same amount in second quarter. Again, while these are closings, these are good news and they’re really shedding of assets that are less than productive. I’m going to keep my comments today relatively short because I want to leave ample time for David, Steve, and Dan. Particularly, I’m sure you all want to hear in more detail our observations from E3, which Dan will be taking you through. David is going to briefly go over the numbers in the forecast. Steve will highlight the key elements of our integration, and then as I said Dan will have quite a bit to share with you in terms of our observations at E3. And with that, I’ll turn it over to you, David.