O’Reilly Automotive Earnings Call Insights: Expansion and Upper Midwest Markets

O’Reilly Automotive Inc (NASDAQ:ORLY) recently reported its fourth quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call.

Expansion

Colin McGranahan – Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.: First question just on the expansion. Moving into Florida, opening the Lakeland DC and pushing further south, that’s obviously a newer market for you and then moving into the Northeast as well, can you talk a little bit about what you’re seeing in Florida so far as you expand there and expectations for the Northeast just in terms of store performance, difference in the competitive environment, things like that?

Gregory L. Henslee – Co-President and CEO: It’s still early in central Florida, more into southern Florida yet, we are in the northern Florida and Panhandle and have been for a while. Our stores there do very well. It’s a pretty good real estate market for us. Our exploration so far has yielded good results from a location standpoint and we’ve got several stores going in down there and we expect to do really well in Orlando and Tampa markets and several small markets around that area, so we are excited about it. We think it’s a great opportunity for us and we look forward to having a facility in Lakeland and it will allow us to get further south into Florida. In the Northeast its way early, we have done a lot of looking around up there as we’ve contemplated acquiring a company or two up there and as you know we acquired VIP. Lot of cars, lot of traffic, the real estate market obviously is a little more difficult but for most part where we would locate the majority of our stores outside of the major, major metro areas, we would have part stores in Downtown Manhattan for instance. It looks pretty good. We are excited about the opportunity to expand up there and we will use the VIP acquisition as a means for us to expand South out to the far Northeast and then we will continue to use our existing store base to expand up into the Northeast. At some point in the future will be expanding our distribution capability in that area.

Colin McGranahan – Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.: Just a quick follow-up on CSK. Can you talk a little bit about the relative performance differential to stores in the middle of the country versus the West Coast and how that contributed to the overall comp?