Academy Sports (ASO) Q4 2025 Earnings Transcript

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Tuesday, March 17, 2026 astatine 10 a.m. ET

• Chief Executive Officer — Steve Lawrence

• Chief Financial Officer — Carl Ford

Steve Lawrence: Thanks, Dan, and bully greeting to everyone connected the enactment today. On our telephone this morning, we program to screen our 4th fourth and afloat twelvemonth results for 2025, on with providing archetypal guidance for 2026. I volition punctual you that we besides person an Analyst Day planned for April 7 successful New York City, which volition besides beryllium webcast. We volition spell into much item connected our long-range program and however the investments we person been making successful 2025 and 2026 play into our multiyear strategy.

I volition commencement with the 4th quarter, which played retired mostly arsenic we forecast, with income coming successful astatine $1.7 billion, which is simply a 2.5% summation versus past twelvemonth and translated into a 1.6% comp decrease. These results were wrong our implied guidance scope for the quarter. As we shared connected our past call, income were beardown implicit the Thanksgiving and Cyber Week clip periods. Similar to anterior years, we saw lawsuit spending patterns soften successful December and past surge during the week starring into Christmas, which continued into the past week of the month.

January was softer than we anticipated, chiefly driven by the ample wintertime storms successful the past 10 days of the month, which caused astir fractional of our stores to beryllium partially oregon afloat unopen down for 2 to 3 days. We saw the concern rebound erstwhile our stores reopened. As we discussed connected anterior calls, the large chartless for america this vacation was however the lawsuit was going to respond to the inflationary pressures connected pricing for goods we imported from overseas. Our forecast was for mean portion retails to beryllium up debased treble digits for the quarter.

We delivered against that by raising our mean portion retails up 10% done a operation of promotional optimization, increasing income successful the better-best extremity of our assortment, and immoderate strategical AUR increases. All these efforts helped amended our gross borderline by 140 ground points versus past year. Pulling backmost to the afloat year, I americium arrogant of however our squad executed successful a choppy environment. We navigated done each the challenges successful 2025 portion inactive increasing top-line income to $6.05 billion, oregon up 2%, which resulted successful coagulated marketplace stock gains crossed our footprint.

We besides enactment successful spot galore foundational gathering blocks which should assistance thrust income successful 2026 and beyond, immoderate of which include: First, I americium arrogant of however the squad rallied midyear to mitigate the interaction of the incremental tariffs that were levied successful precocious Q1 and Q2 of past year. The squad had to respond midyear aft astir of the merchandise was already purchased and managed to offset the accrued disbursal done a operation of sourcing state diversification, inventory propulsion guardant astatine little costs, and pricing and promotional optimization work.