In its earnings report from the first quarter, Tractor Supply (TSCO 0.68%) posted very solid numbers. Fool.com contributor Toby Bordelon discusses the sizable growth and the record sales projected for the next quarter in this video clip from "3 Minute Stock Updates" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on July 6.
Toby Bordelon: Some highlights from the last quarter where we got average ticket up 6.7%, while transactions down 1.4% is what we've guys, maybe people shopping a little bit less than they were before, but still spending a decent amount more. The price increases were part of that.
E-commerce doing very well. It's their 39th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, that's really nice to see. Loyalty program doing well too up 24% year over year, almost 25 million members now. That's good to see a strong loyalty program should lead to those repeat purchases.
Now in slightly bad news, I think it's not that bad. We do see a little bit of drop in that gross margin down a little bit but 30 basis points. Not a huge issue there. SG&A expense dropped too, and this is good. When you're costs are increasing and those increase of cost of goods sold is what's driving that gross margin decrease a little bit.
When your costs are going up, you really need to rein in the growth of your operating expenses. You can keep those net margins, keep that net income solid. That's what we're seeing here. We're seeing them make it a little bit of improvement not much, but at least they're not getting worse on SG&A expense as a percent of net sales. That's good, that's why I like to see there.
Profitability, still strong guys, still solid net income, operating margin down a little bit but not too bad. It's still looking good here. Now, the second quarter ended two weeks ago. We don't have the full update yet for this current quarter but they did provide us a brief update and they said, hey, we look like we're on track for record Q2 sales in this quarter. This was after they gave at the beginning of last month, a little before the quarter ended.
We're thinking that we're going to see a little around 8% net sales growth comparable to what we saw in this quarter, 5% comp-store growth comparable to what we saw in this quarter. So, things are still looking steady at least what we know for now but we'll see when they report earnings in a couple of weeks, how things really held up.
