Citi Trends, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the City Trends fourth quarter and full year 2018 earnings conference call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Afterwards, we will conduct a question and answer session. At that time, if you have a question, please press the 1 followed by the 4 on your telephone. If at any time during the conference you need to reach an operator, please press star 0. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded Friday, March 15, 2019. I would now like to turn the conference over to Tom Philandro, Managing Director, ICR. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Alicia. Our earnings release was sent out this morning at 6.45 a.m. Eastern Time. If you have not received the copy of the release, it is available on the company's website under the Investor Relations section at www.citytrends.com. You should be aware that prepared remarks made during this call may contain forward-looking statements We refer you to the Company's most recent report on Form 10-K and other subsequent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a more detailed discussion of the factors that can cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. I will now turn the call over to our president and chief executive officer, Bruce Smith. Bruce?

Thanks, Tom. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us today. Also on the call is our chief financial officer, Stuart Clifford, and our two merchandising senior vice presidents, Christina Short and Brian Lappman. In the fourth quarter, comparable store sales increased 0.2% on top of a 5.6% increase in last year's fourth quarter. Continued strength in home and accessories was almost completely offset by declines in the ladies' business and, to a much lesser extent, children's and men's. The comparisons to 2017 were challenging for all three major apparel areas, as each of them was up six to seven percent in comparable store sales in last year's fourth quarter. Ladies was impacted more so than the other areas as there continued to be fashion misses in the fourth quarter that we first started to see in the third quarter. We did a very good job of managing expenses during the fourth quarter, actually achieving 30 basis points of expense leverage on sales that were below our plan. From an earnings standpoint, Deluded earnings per share increased 55% in this year's fourth quarter, or 18% on an adjusted basis, driven by a much lower tax rate this year and fewer outstanding shares as a result of our stock repurchase program. Now I will turn the call over to Stuart to provide additional details on the results before I discuss future expectations.