Academy Sports and Outdoors, Inc. (ASO) Presents at Goldman Sachs Global Consumer and Retail Conference Transcript

SA Transcripts 162.21K Followers Follow Academy Sports and Outdoors, Inc. ( ASO ) Goldman Sachs Global Consumer and Retail Conference September 15, 2026 11:30 AM EDT Company Participants Steven Lawrence - CEO & Director Earl Ford - Executive VP & CFO Presentation Unknown Analyst Hi, everybody. It's my pleasure to introduce Academy Sports and Outdoors to moderate and -- to moderate our fireside chat today. Today, we have Steve Lawrence, Chief Executive Officer of Academy; and Carl Ford, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Academy. Thank you so much for joining us today. Unknown Executive Thanks for having us. Question-and-Answer Session Unknown Analyst We wanted to talk about maybe the consumer first because while I do think you cater to a slightly lower income consumer, you see a broad -- excuse me, a broad swath of consumer. And so with the higher gas prices weighing on discretionary spending, particularly for the low-income households, how would you characterize the health of the Academy customer today? Steven Lawrence CEO & Director Yes. I would say definitely, we saw it change as we progress through the first half of the year. So if you look at our first quarter results, we're pretty happy, ran almost a 3 comp. Definitely saw a slowdown as we got into the second quarter where we were in a negative 0.4% comp, grew the top line 3%. I think the difference was the consumer had probably some excess tax refund money in Q1 that helped kind of abate what was happening from an inflationary perspective. And I think as we got into Q2, that money was gone, right? And I think juxtapose that with gas prices going up at the same time, I think that definitely put pressure on the consumer. If you look at what happened with us specifically, we said in