Hibbett, Inc.

Thank you and good morning. Please note that we've prepared a slide deck that we will refer to during our prepared remarks. The slide deck is available on Hibbett.com via the investor relations link down at the bottom of the home page or at investors.hibbett.com and under the news and events section. These materials may help you follow along with our discussion this morning. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that some of the management's comments during this conference call are forward-looking statements. These statements, which reflect the company's current views with respect to future events and financial performance, are made in reliance on the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and are subject to uncertainties and risks. It should be noted that the company's future results may differ materially from those anticipated and discussed in the forward-looking statements. Some of the factors could cause or contribute to such differences have been described in the news release issued this morning and are noted on slide two of the earnings presentation and the company's annual report on Form 10-K and other filings with the Securities Exchange Commission. We refer you to those sources for more information. Also, to the extent non-GAAP financial measures are discussed on the call, you may find a reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP measures on our website. Lastly, I'd like to point out that management's remarks during the conference call are based on information and understandings believed accurate as of today's date, November 21st, 2023. Because of the time-sensitive nature of this information, It is the policy of Hibbett to limit the archive replay of this conference call webcast to a period of 30 days. The participants on this call are Mike Longo, President and Chief Executive Officer, Jared Briskin, Executive Vice President Merchandising, Bob Voelke, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Bill Quinn, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Digital, and Ben Knighton, Senior Vice President of Operations. I'll now turn the call over to Mike Longo.

Good morning and welcome to the Hibbett CityGear Q3 earnings call. For those of you following along in the slides, I'm on slide three entitled Overview. We're very pleased to report a strong financial and operating performance for the third quarter of fiscal 24. Our team did an outstanding job with consistent execution of our strategy as we continue to win market share. While the retail environment remains challenging as consumers are being more selective in their discretionary spending, we've worked very hard to offer a compelling product mix that meets this demand. Additionally, our superior customer service, a best-in-class omni-channel shopping experience, strong vendor relationships, and store placement in underserved markets are distinct competitive advantages that allowed us to continue to gain market share. Our sales were supported by a strong back-to-school season, which occurred in the first month of the third quarter. Footwear sales continue to be the key driver of our sales, especially for our premium brands. We are fortunate to have strong vendor relationships that support our ability to deliver the latest products that appeal to our fashion conscious consumers. During the quarter, we benefited from a more regular schedule of new product launches, which received a very positive response from our brand loyal customers. As announced earlier in the quarter, we launched our Nike Connected Partnership, which connects Hibbett and Nike's loyalty programs. We're very excited about this new benefit for our customers and what it means for our joint businesses. Bill will provide some additional detail in his remarks. In addition to our solid sales performance, we're pleased with the progress we've made with respect to improved expense management and disciplined inventory controls. Bob will cover this in greater detail in his remarks. We also continue to make the necessary investments in our business to enhance the customer experience, both in our stores and our expanding omnichannel platform. We believe our store expansion strategy will be a key driver to our continued growth, and we are still on track to meet our goal of adding approximately 40 net new stores this year. We're pleased with the trends in our business and look forward to the fourth quarter and a successful holiday sales season in line with our expectations. We're excited about additional new product launches around the holidays, which will boost sales and we're confident we have sufficient inventory to support these events and our premium footwear sales. I would like to emphasize, in short, we're investing in our business model for the long term and continue to take market share. Before turning the call over to Jared, I would like to thank our 11,000 team members across the organization for their dedication and hard work and support to our customers in a relatively challenging environment.

The changing world order. The times ahead will be radically different from those that we've experienced in our lifetimes, though similar to many times before. How do I know that? Because they always have been. Over my roughly 50 years of global macroeconomic investing, I've learned the hard way that the most important events that surprised me did so because they never happened in my lifetime. These painful surprises led me to study the last 500 years of history for similar situations where I saw that they had indeed happened many times before with the ups and the downs of the Dutch, British, and US empires. And every time they did, it was a sign of the changing world order. This study taught me valuable lessons that I'm going to pass along to you here in a distilled form. You can find the comprehensive version in my book, Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order. Let me begin with a story that brought me to this point about how I learned to anticipate the future by studying the past. In 1971, when I was a young clerk on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, the United States ran out of money and defaulted on its debts. That's right, the U.S. ran out of money. Well, back then, gold was the money used in transactions between countries. Paper money, like the dollar, was like checks in a checkbook in that it had no value other than it could be exchanged for gold, which was the real money. At the time, the United States was spending a lot more money than it was earning by writing a lot more of these paper money checks than it had gold in the bank to exchange for them. As people turned these checks into the bank for gold money, the amount of gold in the U.S. started to dwindle. It soon became obvious that the US couldn't keep its promises for all the existing paper money, so people holding dollars rushed to exchange them before the gold ran out. Recognizing that the U.S. was going to run out of real money, on Sunday evening, August 15th, President Nixon went on television to tell the world that the U.S. was breaking its promise to let people exchange their dollars for gold. Of course, he didn't say it that way. He said it more diplomatically, without making it clear that the United States was defaulting.