車美仕 (KMX) 2010 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Good morning.

My name is Valerie, and I will be your conference operator today.

At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the first quarter FY 2010 conference call.

All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise.

After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session.

(Operator Instructions).

Thank you.

Ms.

Kenny, you may begin your conference.

Thank you.

Good morning.

Thanks for joining our fiscal 2010 first quarter earnings conference call.

On the call with me today are Tom Folliard, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Keith Browning, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer.

Before we begin, let me remind you that our statements today regarding the company's future business plans, prospects, and financial performance are forward-looking statements that we make pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

These statements are based on management's current knowledge and assumptions about future events that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations.

In providing protections and other forward-looking statements, the company disclaims any intent or obligation to update them.

For additional information on important factors that could affect these expectations, please see the company's annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended February 2009 filed with the SEC.

Tom?

Thank you, Katharine.

Good morning and welcome to our first quarter conference call.

Despite the difficult economic conditions, we are pleased to report some signs of improvement in our fiscal 2010 first quarter results.

While it's difficult for me to call negative 17% used unit comps an improvement, it was certainly a sequential step in the right direction after negative 26% in the fourth quarter fiscal 2009.

The majority of this improvement was due to better sales execution although traffic did increase modestly during the quarter.

Given the weak environment and the fact that we have temporarily suspended store growth, we are focused even more on enhancing our execution, both within the store and with leads generated on line.

Regarding cash, we completed a $1 billion securitization in April.

As projected, we took a cash adjustment this quarter related to higher funding.

This was partially offset by a positive movement in market valuations on our sub bonds.

We had no material adjustments related to any of our loss assumptions.

Keith will give you some more details in a few minutes on CAF.

Now let me review some of our key financial results.

First, sales.

In the first quarter, total sales decreased 17% to $1.83 billion compared with $2.21 billion in the first quarter of fiscal 2009.

Used vehicle revenues decreased 15% for the quarter due to the combination of a 13% decrease in unit sales and a 2% decrease in average selling price.

Year-over-year we saw recovery in SUVs as a percentage of sales.

SUVs increased by approximately 7% where as compact and mid-size cars and trucks decreased by about 5%.

Wholesale revenues decreased by about 29% as units fell by 25% and average selling price declined by 6%.

While our appraisal traffic remained low, our buy rate did improve compared to the first quarter of last year, partially due to improved industry wholesale prices which allowed us to make more attractive offers to customers.

Onto gross profit, in the first quarter, our total gross profit per unit increased by $347 to $2,911, compared with $2,564 in the first quarter last year.

Used vehicle gross profit per unit increased by $259 to $2,001 from $1,742 in the first quarter of fiscal 2009.

This was partially a reflection of the abnormally low gross profit recorded last year, but other contributors included this year's more favorable wholesale marketplace and the early success of our efforts to shrink reconditioning costs.

We estimate the cost reduction in reconditioning was approximately $100 per car.

Wholesale gross profit per unit grew to $904 from $784 last year, also due to the improved wholesale environment and the continuation of strong dealer to car ratios at our auctions.

On the CarMax Auto Finance, I will ask Keith to add some confusion to the results to the results that we reported this morning.

Keith?

Thanks, Tom.

Good morning.

We previously announced that first quarter earnings at CAF would be negatively impacted by higher funding costs of between $60 million and $85 million related to the $1.2 billion outstanding in the warehouse facility at fiscal year end.

However, due to significantly improved credit spreads recently evidenced in the market for sub bonds, the adjustment totaled approximately $58 million, slightly below the bottom of this previously estimated range.

In addition, we recorded a favorable mark to market adjustment on the bonds we held from securitizations completed in calendar 2008 of approximately $12 million.

This adjustment, combined with others, principally a decrease in prepayment speed assumptions, result in an overall favorable adjustment of over $17 million.

Current period CAF income decreased from last year, due to a variety of factors, including higher estimated warehouse credit enhancement levels and facility funding costs that we will expect will be required when we renew or replace this facility in July.

CarMax's lower sales, CAF's lower penetration, and a higher discount rate assumption.

During the quarter, we continued to slow the overall rate of CAF originations by routing more credit applications to our third-party lenders, as well as tightening credit standards for some consumer segments.

Although the strategy had a modestly negative impact on comparable store sales, we believe it is imprudent to operate at a lower origination rate until we have more clarity into the credit market trends.

At May 31st, we had $636 million of capacity utilized in the warehouse facility.

Now I will turn the call back over to Tom.

Tom?

Thank you, Keith.

SG&A, net of the impact of litigation adjustments, first quarter expenses fell by approximately $22 million compared to the first quarter of last year.

SG&A expenses fell as a result of a number of factors, including the elimination of costs related to growth such as relocation and preopening, a reduction in advertising expense and a decrease in variable selling expenses.

Net income decreased slightly to $28.7 million from $29.6 million in last year's first quarter.

Diluted EPS was $0.13 for both quarters.

Let me just summarize by saying that we're pleased with the progress we've made on our key initiatives, including increasing operational effectiveness and reducing waste.

We are also pleased with our overall performance during the worst environment our company has ever experienced.

During this time, we've been able to maintain our gross profit while still offering great values to our customers.

We've reduced advertising expense while still developing some new well received campaigns focused on CarMax's superior consumer offer.

We have utilized our unique inventory management and car buying systems to respond quickly to changes in wholesale values and customer demand and aggressively manage our inventory levels accordingly.

We've also continued to reduce overhead to adapt to our temporarily reduced sales level.

We are intensely focused on continuing improvement in all of these areas and on making permanent business enhancements that will serve us well in all economic environments.

In closing, let me thank all of you for your interest and support of CarMax, but most importantly, I would like to thank our over 13,000 CarMax associates for all that they do every day.

Now we'd be happy to take your questions.

Operator?

(Operator Instructions).

Your first question comes from the line of Rod Lache.

Hello.

Good morning, Rod.

Good morning.

First, a couple questions on CAF.

Can you just roughly go through the math on this 0.7% gain what kind of provisions and what kind of warehouse cost of funds you're assuming now, and also, you had a 16.5% credit enhancement on the last securitization.

Talk about the capital required to support the business going forward, whether you see any opportunities to sell subordinated tranches.

Lastly, any thoughts, preliminary thoughts on the impact of a financial overhaul on CAF?

That was one question, right, Rod?

It's a test.

As far as current period originations, we did have to make an estimate.

We looked at what our last public securitization was, and incorporated that as part of the estimate, as well as looking at our current stat instruments negotiations on renewing or replacing the conduit.

So it was really split into almost 50/50, an increase in impact on the gain percent from the higher enhancement levels that we think we'll have to pay.

We don't know what those are yet so we're not comfortable in disclosing how much they are.

We also estimate that the cost of the facility itself will be up about 150 bips.

So it's really the combination of those two pieces that drove the gain percentage down.

And as far as outlook, I guess what I would say is there's positive outlook in the fact that the spreads did come down on sub bonds.

We don't know whether they'll continue to decline or not, but it does give us some out that there may be a market in the future for those.

But it's the same reason why we slowed down originations, is that we're allowing ourselves time for the market to continue to correct itself and try to make sure that we can sustain CAF because it's critical to our operations.

We'll see what the market brings to us, but right now, we are kind of cautiously optimistic, I guess.

Government regulations.

I have taken a quick look at it.

Quite honestly, CAF is a finance company, and currently is governed by all the states.

That will continue.

I think that there's likely to be some spill-over effect on CAF from just the overall regulations that are going to impact the banks and the non banks.

Also, CAF will fall under the purview of the new consumer protection agency.

The impact of all of this remains to be seen.

It's just a proposal right now, and we'll have to wait and see.

That's my current top level view.

If you were unable to record gain on sale, would you think that from accounting perspective you would restate history and bring everything back on balance sheet or would that sort of be a clean break?

Do you have any preliminary thoughts on that?

Well, just so you know, the FASB has already issued 166 and 167, which are restatements for the old gain on sale proposals of 140 FIN 46.

So there's already a requirement that's going to be imposed on CarMax to change its accounting starting next fiscal year.

So regardless of this agency, it looks like we will most likely not be able to do gain on sale accounting beginning next fiscal year.

Whether we can restate or not and what the impact is, those are two very big documents and we're currently waiting.

It's a very recent pronouncement that came out earlier this month.

So when we're ready we'll try to help people understand.

But in all likelihood, all of the receivables will go on the balance sheet and that will earn income over the life of the loan.

Okay.

And just one last one.

Any thoughts on the Conkers bill and sustainability of the grosses?

We saw the bill pass yesterday, and it's gone through various changes, but the bill that looks like it will go through is down to a billion dollars.

It ends at the end of September.

The average incentive is around $4,000.

So I think the amount of potential impact at sales has come down pretty significantly.

But in our history, when there have been incentives that have driven consumer demand and brought people out into the marketplace, we have historically benefited.

You go back to the 0-0-0 promotion after 9/11, it drew a bunch of people into the market.

Some of those people found out that the incentives didn't work quite right for them.

We ended up having the best positive comp we've ever had in the history of the company, a positive 29%.

The next big incentive that worked was the employee pricing a couple summers later and I think many folks thought that we would suffer because of that incentive, but when consumers are driven into the marketplace, I think many are driven out there that think this incentive might work for them, but then they get excited about buying a car, and our history has been we've benefited from any incentive that has driven consumers into the marketplace.

Thank you.

Congratulations on the quarter.

Your next question comes from the line of Brian Nagel.

Good morning.

Tom, one strategic question as we start off, but as we look at what's happening in your industry, an obviously very fluid situation, with potential dealer closings, how do you think those impact CarMax intermediate and longer term?

Well, until we really see where the closures are and what ultimately becomes of those dealers, it's difficult to say what the impact will be on us.

I will tell you that I'm very confident in our consumer offer.

I think it has proven to be superior.

I think we have proven to be the market share winner in every market that we operate in, and we have always said that our biggest competition, are new car dealers who also sell used cars, and you would to have believe that there will be less of those when this is all said and done.

So I think there's a case to be made that could it potentially be a positive for us.

But either way I have a lot of confidence in our consumer offer and our ability to navigate through it.

A couple of quick follow-ups.

We did see a sequential improvement in Q4 to Q1 sales.

Could you give us indication of how sales in the quarter tracked?

We're not going to talk about sales through the quarter, but obviously as the quarter finished up and we were going against a positive comp, we ended up better than we did in the fourth quarter.

Okay, fair enough.

Then you mentioned -- and in the press release and prepared comments about the benefits of some of the cost initiatives in the reconditioning process.

This is something you talked about for awhile.

I want to see how far along are we in this, essentially realizing the benefits of this?

It's a long-term initiative for us.

We expect to get benefits over a very long period of time.

We're pleased that over the last year we've been able to pull out approximately $100 in costs on a cost per car basis, and our quality scores have actually gone up during that same time.

So we're pleased so far with the results, but it's a big deal for us.

There's a lot of process, a lot of people, a lot of labor involved.

And I just think it's more of a marathon than it is a sprint.

And I couldn't really give you an estimate of what the long-term benefits are, but I feel really good about what we've done so far.

$100 on a base of how much you typically spend on a car for reconditioning.

Well, it's $100 on around $1500.

Thanks a lot.

Thank you, Brian.

Your next question comes from the line of Rex Henderson.

Hello, Rex.

First, the -- Keith, can you give me a little color on the carrying value of the subordinated tranches on the balance sheet now and kind of how much discount is built into that now?

We're trying to find it, Rex.

We'll get back to you.

Give us a call, we'll follow up.

Okay.

The other question is Tom, in the past you talked a little bit about market share, and I was just wondering whether or not -- kind of what you saw in terms of market share this quarter.

I know last quarter you said you thought you lost a little bit.

How did that track this quarter?

One of the difficulties that he we've talked about is how kind of sketchy the data is around market share.

We actually only have data through April, so we don't even have data yet through the quarter.

The reason we have that at the end of the first quarter is because there's a big delay for our year-end announcement, so therefore we had it through February.

In this case, we only have it through April.

And it's so volatile, we're going to move towards talking about market share on an annual basis.

I will tell you, however, that we have seen some positive signs in the data with an indication that we grew some share in April, but I hesitate to put a lot of reliance on this because the period it covers is just too short.

And so there's just a lot of inherent volatility around short-term data.

Going forward we're going to talk about market share on an annual basis.

These are positive signs.

Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Sharon Zackfia.

Good morning.

Hi, Sharon.

On execution, Tom, is that really just a function of slowing the growth and having moved some of your managers in training to salespeople and so on, or is there something more going on there with systems?

Can you give us some idea on if the conversion has picked up some?

I can tell you that it's a difficult thing for us to put one explanation for our conversion going up.

We're obviously very pleased that we are getting some execution improvement.

We have some increased focus on new training programs that we have out there for our sales consultants and our sales managers.

We feel like we're getting some early nice results from that.

There's also some theory that in this economy, we're really not seeing the shoppers, tire kickers.

If customers show up at the store, they're a little bit more serious about buying cars than in the past.

That could help some.

We have been able to build our inventory, which we said at the end of the fourth quarter, we had gotten a little behind.

We've made quite a bit of progress.

So I think that also helped conversion.

We still have great availability of credit at CarMax, and I think that message has gotten out there a little bit better.

We've had some nice pickup from our advertising campaign that have really focused on the economy and the recession and why CarMax is a a smart place to buy.

I don't think it's one thing, I think it's a number of different things.

On the advertising spend which you have curtailed, is that a timing issue or should we expect a curtailment all year, and how is that affecting your impressions?

I think you get more bang for your buck these days.

I guess I'm asking how much less visible are you out there for the public?

One thing we have been able to measure in the past is what's called share of voice.

Despite the fact that we're down, our competitors are down as well.

We don't have the data for the first quarter.

I hope we spend more money on advertising through the year.

I hope that sales come back in a way that allows us to spend more money on advertising.

If that doesn't happen, however, the savings that we saw in the first quarter are absolutely sustainable.

We are going to continue to measure that share of voice and make sure that we are being heard in a scale that's bigger than the competition.

And from the fourth quarter, we felt like that was true.

And then on the warehouse renewal, are you going to have the same size warehouse, or is that in flux as well?

We're in the midst of still working on that.

As soon as we have that answer we will let everybody know.

I will tell you that we probably don't need as big a warehouse as we had before with lower sales and no growth, so we want to size the warehouse accordingly with our needs.

A bigger warehouse costs us more money.

So we'll take that into account.

Okay.

Then lastly, any chance you want to comment on June?

No.

But thank you for asking.

You're welcome.

Bye.

Your next question comes from the line of Matthew Fassler.

This is Mark [Sofier] filling in for Matt.

Just a quick question.

First, conceptually, what is the capacity to fund -- what would be the capacity to find sub bonds on bank sheet longer term if you had to do it, and also could you be using the proceeds from loans to do so?

The other thing is, could you give us more on a separate note, could you give us more color around the increase in service revenues and why there was higher service related customer traffic?

That would be great, thank you.

The capacity, as we've indicated, at the current -- at the enhancement levels of our last public deal is something that's not sustainable for the long term.

We could certainly continue to originate for the next year.

It's one of the reasons why we have dialed back our originations and why we have made adjustments in our overall origination strategy and done some credit tightening.

Like I said earlier, we're optimistic that the market is moving favorably, but we're pulling back just to make sure that we can ride it out and that we can continue to keep CAF running.

I'll comment on service revenue.

It's really largely consumer driven.

We haven't been running an aggressive campaign to drive additional service revenue.

The fact that our service revenue is up I think is a combination of people keeping cars a little longer and the fact that we have more capacity in our stores because of our lower sales volume.

So that makes a difference in getting people in for an appointment.

If somebody calls for an appointment and you can't see them for five days, or somebody calls in and you can see them right away, that makes a difference in your revenues.

Got it.

Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Ryan Brinkman.

Hi, it's Himanshu Patel with JPMorgan.

Number two, the spread between used retail volume and new car sales, I know new is pretty small for you, but it's gotten pretty wide in the last couple quarters.

I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts on what that sort of implies.

Do you think there's a general trade down happening where consumers are leaving the used car market and moving towards used, or would you actually say this is perhaps indicative of kind of a broader recovery and what's happening in the used car market now is sort of eventually going to show up on the new car market as well?

I didn't really get that question.

Are you asking about the spread in pricing between our average retails?

Just volumes.

If you look this quarter, your volumes on used, retail were down 13%.

Industry new car sales in the comparable months were down about 42%.

Last quarter your volumes on used retail were down 21%, the industry spread -- industry new volumes were down again about 38% during that period.

So clearly used is outperforming new, and it's outperforming by even a greater degree this quarter, and I was just wondering if you had some color.

Yeah, I really couldn't say on that.

It doesn't feel like outperformance to us when we continue to run negative comps.

So I think the fact that used cars are performing less bad than new cars, I guess a plus, but there's a lot more used cars sold.

It's a lower price range.

I think there are some indications that some people who maybe would have bought a new car are buying a used car, but when new car run rates are 9.5 million there's just not as many customers out there buying cars to begin with.

Maybe there is a little bit of a shift, but again, both used and new are negative.

Okay.

And then on the first question, I mean, any thoughts on wholesale volumes on the outlook through?

It's really difficult to project volumes.

You saw our volumes in wholesale were down more than our volumes in retail, and that's driven by not only do we have less -- the improvement in conversion of our customer traffic, the traffic was still down a little bit more, so that kind of translates into our appraisal traffic, but we've also seen our appraisal traffic not really pick up like our retail traffic has.

So I think that's another indication that consumers are keeping their cars longer.

When you step back and think about the timing of resuming store growth longer term what are kind of the things you guys are looking for?

Do you firmly need to get into positive volume territory to be able to restart that?

Right now we're focused on execution, we're focused on expense, we're focused on eliminating waste, we're focused on taking costs out of our reconditioning process.

We're intensely focused on improving the customer experience to make some positive movement on our competitive advantages.

In terms of restarting growth, we really want to see a trend that we can believe in over a longer period of time.

I couldn't give you an estimate of what that time is, but we want to see sales pick up, and we want to see them stay up and we want to be confident in that trend.

And I think we want to see some more clarity around the credit markets as well.

It's a number of different factors.

We don't have a line in the sand that says when we cross this we're going start growing stores again.

Coming back to one of your earlier questions on the warehouse facility renegotiation, is it fair to say that the commitment size will be cut and you just don't know how much, or is it possible that it could actually be retained at its current level?

We're in the middle of negotiating that.

We'll let you know as soon as it's done.

Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Bill Armstrong.

Good morning.

Just a couple points of clarification, I guess.

It sounds like the prospects for the renewal of the warehouse is not a matter of if, it's really just a matter of how big it's going to be and how much you'll have to pay.

Is that fair?

We're highly confident we'll get it renewed.

Okay.

Advertising spend, could you tell us by how much it was actually reduced, and in what areas of media?

Types of media.

We don't that have here, and I don't think we've talked about that in that level of detail, but I can tell you that it's kind of across the board in terms of the reduction.

It's not like we picked one particular avenue and dropped it there.

It's a pretty strategic methodology, the way we approached it in terms of where we would cut and how.

And we're continuing to run markets at a higher advertising rate in some markets to hopefully see some traffic changes there, and if it works, we'd go back and spend that money.

I can tell that you we've spent $0 on newspaper.

Last year we didn't have have very much spend on newspaper, but the spend that we did have was only in our grand opening markets, which we didn't have have any this quarter, so we've spent nothing on newspapers and the cuts have been across where we spend most of our money, which is TV and search engine advertising.

Can you tell us the dollar amounts of the reduction, year-over-year?

Hold on a sec.

Down about 30% on advertising.

One final question.

Pontiac is being eliminated at some point sounds like over the next year or so.

What do you think the impact will be on your business of the elimination of a major brand, and maybe if you step back, I think Oldsmobile was eliminated a few years ago.

What was your experience then?

I don't know if you consider Pontiac a major brand, for us it's a tiny, tiny percentage of sales, and I think it will be picked up by other stuff, so we won't notice.

Just the fact that the brand is eliminated doesn't mean that there's still not used cars out there to be bought and sold.

We're going to buy and sell whatever the consumer wants to buy.

I don't think the elimination of Pontiac is going to have any impact on us whatsoever.

Okay, great, thanks.

All right.

Your next question comes from the line of Craig Kennison.

Congratulations on the quarter.

The $2,000 gross profit per used car, is that a sustainable number?

That's the second straight quarter above $2,000.

Remember I said some of it was because we had kind of a bad quarter last year.

It's actually sequentially down slightly from the fourth quarter, and we're always going to manage our margins and kind of in the -- what we think is in the overall best interest of the shareholders.

I can't tell you if that's really sustainable for the year because we'd move it if we felt like it would drive sales.

We've been in a pretty challenging environment in terms of depreciation, and then appreciation we've seen over the course of this year, and we've felt like we had the opportunity to make some margin and not have to drive margin down to drive sales coming out of the fourth quarter.

So in terms of its sustainability, we'll manage it as we go, like we always do.

Thanks.

Could you talk about trends and origination fees?

Do you anticipate any pressure on the prime or subprime origination fees that you earn?

We're not getting any indications of that at this point.

Great, thank you.

Thanks.

Your next question comes from the line of Sam Yake.

Question, kind of like the last guy had about the gross margin.

This is the second quarter in a row that it's been real healthy, and I wondered if there's any change in strategy, or as you pull more costs out of the reconditioning process, are you going to give that back to consumers or are you going to retain it?

Well, like I said, we're going to manage it on the go.

If you are keeping score at home it's the third quarter in a row of good margins.

I just think it's a testament to our ability to manage our inventory and our superior car buying process and analytical models and our ability to really gauge consumer demand and manage our inventory turns.

It's the third consecutive quarter that we've improved our turns year-over-year.

Obviously if you turn your inventory faster it gives you the opportunity to make a little bit more margin.

Not only did we raise our inventory during the quarter but we improved our turns.

I think in the highest, the most volatile market we've ever seen over the last three quarters, each of those quarters we've improved our margins year-over-year and we've improved our turns year-over-year.

So I think it's a testament to the inventory management model and how aggressively focused we are on that.

I guess what I'm looking at, generally you've said in the past if you pull costs out and get more efficient you have a bias to give that back to the consumer.

Are you still standing behind that type of statement?

Yeah, I am, as long as we believe that that will help us drive incremental sales, and we have felt over the last few quarters that our ability to maintain -- that our ability to maintain margin has not hurt our sales is and we've passed on great prices to our consumers as well.

But another way to think of it is that some of the savings we got has allowed us to maintain some of that margin, but I feel like the consumers have still benefited, because we turn our inventory so quickly.

Thanks so much.

It was a really fantastic quarter.

Thanks a lot.

Your next question comes from the line of Scot Ciccarelli.

Another question on the gross profit, Tom.

Did you guys benefit from improved vehicle pricing during the quarter to benefit, let's call it the timing delta from when you buy something to when you sold it, or is it really more related to the reconditioning side?

It's probably some of both, Scot.

In an appreciating environment, you can hold your prices a little bit better, because after you sell something, the acquisition, the replacement value is going up.

We saw it very steep in the fourth quarter, and we felt like it benefited us there.

We've seen kind of a steadier appreciation during the first quarter, and that helps.

And then the reconditioning savings helps as well.

The reconditioning savings, is that labor related or is there something else in there?

It's a combination of things.

So it's not just labor.

It's labor, supplies, some of it is -- that we were overprocessing some of the repairs.

So I'm not exactly sure the percentage of it that was labor, but some is labor, some is supplies.

Okay.

I guess one of my questions, related to that, you've had headcount reductions in the reconditioning group, if sales started to improve, is it fair to assume you have to add labor back into that model, or is it just the process better and so we really shouldn't see that?

Hopefully we have to add.

Hopefully sales are going in a way that we have to add back.

We'd be thrilled.

We've got a staffing position that we're pretty comfortable with and now we're hiring in our stores to replace turnover.

So when we're staffed appropriately, we're pretty much always hiring, because we're hiring to replace turnover.

So once we get back that in hiring mode, which we're kind of in now, we're pretty good at adding and then coming back down on staffing through attrition.

You you have seen our seasonality over the years and we've historically been able to move our staffing accordingly.

If sales come back we feel very confident in our ability to move staffing with it.

Very helpful.

Last question is, any kind of regional or geography comments you want to provide us in terms of color on the trends?

Nope.

Okay.

Had to ask.

Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Rich Kwas.

Good morning.

On the other line, gross profit, gross margin was up meaningfully year-over-year.

What's driving that?

Are you talking about wholesale?

No, I'm talking about the "other" line item.

I know it's pretty small, but margins are going up there.

Just curious what's going on.

The warranty line, et cetera.

Part of it is that we did adjust pricing over last year, and we're getting the benefit of a little bit better margin on some of our warranties.

We have initiated a product that started late in the quarter, just adding a little bit of value there.

Then service revenues as we talked about are up, and that's a stronger gross profit margin.

Did you say that you're not really spending any advertising on service, right?

That's correct.

This is coming through.

We have a really big customer base, especially in our older stores, we probably do more service on a per-store basis than people realize, and I do think that folks are tending to hold their car a little bit longer.

Remember, more than half of what we sell we sell an extended warranty on, which they can get those cars serviced in our store.

Just with the extra capacity I think it is showing up in our revenues.

Keith, just moving back to the gain on sales, I know it's a bit fluid, but as we think about it with the 0.7% this quarter, going forward, what really -- wouldn't really drive that significantly from where you were in the first quarter.

I know that negotiation is fluid but as we think about is there a really high probability that's going to deviate much?

Quite honestly, we hope it does.

We hope that we can get the enhancements down and that the market continues to improve by the time we actually lock in something.

But as I indicated, the enhancements are as much of that as the increase in costs.

And so we'll tell you when we get it done, but right now I don't know.

But given that it's a few weeks away, seemingly, a month away or so, assuming that not much is going to change, would it seem that that spread should --

My only response to that is the market on sub bonds moved dramatically over just a few weeks, so really timing can make a difference on this.

But we'll see.

All right, thanks.

thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of [Deidrich Klein].

Hi, can you talk a little bit about the residual values of used Chrysler vehicles, given their bankruptcy?

Sure.

We were a little nervous about the bankruptcy, both on Chrysler and General Motors, and we had made some movements in our inventory during the end of the fourth quarter, beginning of the first quarter, in anticipation for perhaps a consumer -- where consumers decided they want to buy Chryslers, but since's happened we have seen zero impact on residual values or sales for us.

Chrysler was about 20% of sales of our total sales is and it's still about 20% of our total sales.

And we've seen very little impact at all in the residual values.

Got it.

And it's also my understanding that some of the rental companies, which you are buying the vehicles from, like Hertz and Avis, are running their vehicles longer.

Is this having any impact on the residual values given that they probably are a bit older than what you're used to saying?

It probably would, but that's a tiny percentage of our sales.

It's not as impactful as you might think.

And given that they're running these cars for longer, and they may not be selling you as many cars right now, when they do go to the market in volume, which I'm guessing is at the end of the year is this going to have any major impact on you guys at all?

It's a very small percentage of our sales to begin with, so no.

And they always -- it doesn't matter when the turn in time does, they always go to auction in volume.

So it would be nothing new for them to go to the auction in volume.

The only difference would be they would have higher mileage, which would drive the price down, and if we were to buy them, it is more of a commodity than other product and we have historically made less margin on those cars, but it's a very small percentage of our sales.

Good quarter.

Thank you.

And there are no further questions at this time.

All right, thank you very much.

Thanks for joining us, and one more thanks to all of our CarMax associates who have allowed us to not only survive in this environment but to outperform the competition as well.

So thank you very much, and we'll talk to you on next call.

This concludes today's conference call.

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