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求翻译：some people have very good memories and can easily learn quite long poems by heart. other people have poor memories and can only remember things when they have been said again and again.是什么意思？
some people have very good memories and can easily learn quite long poems by heart. other people have poor memories and can only remember things when they have been said again and again.
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有些人有很好的记忆力和可以很容易学习很长的诗心。 其他人穷记忆和只可以记住的东西在已再三说过。
某些人有非常好记忆，并且能容易地学会相当长的诗靠记意。 当他们再次时，说其他人有恶劣的记忆，并且能只记住事。
有些人有很好的记忆力，很容易学会很长的诗心。其他人有可怜的记忆，只记得的事情时，他们都又一次说。
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请输入您需要翻译的文本！Sears Holdings Investor Information
Investor Information
Sears Holdings Reports Fourth Quarter And Full Year 2014 ResultsFebruary 26, 2015
HOFFMAN ESTATES,
Ill. - Sears Holdings Corporation (NASDAQ: SHLD) today announced financial
results for its fourth quarter and full year ended January 31, 2015. As a
supplement to this announcement, a presentation, pre-recorded conference and
audio webcast are available at our website&.
In summary, we
Domestic Adjusted EBITDA of $125 million in the fourth
quarter, which was an increase of $217 million over the prior
Full year Domestic Adjusted EBITDA of $(647) million
compared to $(490) milli
Net loss attributable to Sears Holdings' shareholders
of $159 million ($1.50 loss per diluted share) for the fourth quarter compared
to a loss of $358 million ($3.37 loss per diluted share) for the prior
Net loss attributable to Sears Holdings' shareholders
of $1.7 billion ($15.82 loss per diluted share) for the full year of 2014
compared to a loss of $1.4 billion ($12.87 loss per diluted share)
Sales to Shop Your Way& members in Sears Full-line
and Kmart stores were 72% and 74% of eligible sales for the fourth quarter and
full year,
In the fourth quarter of 2014, Kmart comparable store
sales declined 2.0% and Sears Domestic declined 7.0%;
The Company continues to demonstrate that it has the
financial flexibility to fund its transformation and meet its obligations. As
of January 31, 2015, we had approximately $800 million in availability under
our credit facility and $250 and
During 2014, we closed approximately 234
underperforming Kmart and Sears Full-line stores, the majority of which were
Kmart stores. The Company, which has more than 1,700 Sears and Kmart stores,
expects to migrate the shopping activity of highly engaged members who
previously shopped closed stores to alternative channels. As a result, we hope
to retain a portion of the sales previously associated with these stores by
nurturing and maintaining our relationships with the members that shopped these
locations.
pleased to report $125 million in Adjusted EBITDA in the fourth quarter, a
significant improvement year over year,& said Edward S. Lampert, Sears
Holdings' Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. &While we clearly believe
that we can improve upon these results, we are pleased with the positive trend
that started in the third quarter, and we currently expect this level of
improvement to carry forward into our full year 2015 results. We believe that
the changes we are making to focus on our best stores, reward our best members
and pursue our best categories will help us continue to transform Sears
Holdings into a leading integrated membership-focused company.&
February 26, 2015
To our Shareholders, Associates and
The year 2014 was one of massive
transformation. One after another, major American institutions sought to
fundamentally change the way they interact with their customers, in most cases trying
to catch up to new ways that people choose to access products and services. In
most instances, these changes were puzzling to people who don't spend a lot of
time focusing on what change looks like up close.
For Sears and Kmart, after years of
work at becoming a fully integrated retailer that meets the needs of our
members wherever, whenever and however they want to shop, we didn't slow down - we sped up. We're anticipating and adapting to the way members and customers
shop, not by guessing what the next big thing might be, but by working to
better understand the members we serve through data that allows us to know not
only what but also why they buy and then creating experiences around that.
This isn't new for Sears. An
article in the October 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review, && detailed how Sears found its mail-order catalog business
falling into crisis in the 1920s as America changed from a predominantly rural
country and everything from cars to national radio advertising left Sears
rudderless. Then Sears started using census data to anticipate where potential
c few if any others did this. Using this information, the
first Sears store opened in Chicago in 1925. By the time suburbs started being
built after World War II, Sears had become the icon for big retail and an
anchor tenant in malls that were developed around the country.
Time and again, people have
proclaimed our company all but dead. As I , in
1988 our hometown business journal wrote a devastating 14,297-word eulogy for
Sears. Virtually all of the companies that Sears was allegedly trailing back
then are now gone and forgotten. Many others have merged or simply closed.
These old stories got it partially
right. Had we not embarke had we not, especially in recent
years, started to creative Sears and Kmart would probably
be no more than a treasured American memory.
Without the aggressive steps we
have already taken to transform Sears Holdings from the predominantly
brick-and-mortar retailer it once was to a best-in-class multi-channel
integrated shopping experience for our members, we would be stuck on the same
path that has claimed retailers like Circuit City, Borders, Radio Shack and
Instead, we're innovating and
moving forward. Readers of past
and my other
know all about
our efforts to transform not just turn around our business. The financial
results certainly are not where we want them to be yet but we did see our
performance trend improve in the third and fourth quarters of 2014. The
percentage of our sales coming from Shop Your Way members is high and staying
strong. Most importantly, in 2014 we gave ourselves the resources to dig deeper
and fuel our ongoing transformation.
2014 IN REVIEW
We ended 2014 on an upbeat note. Our fourth quarter results
improved materially from last year, continuing the pattern that we saw in the
third quarter and reversing the negative trends from the first half of the
year. We are primarily focused on profitability instead of revenues, market
share and other metrics which relate to but don&t necessarily drive profit.
This means we will be making material changes in some of the underlying
business models that have been challenged for many years, such as Consumer Electronics,
where we have experienced significant losses since 2010. We intend to continue
to operate in most of these businesses, but with a very different approach to
serving our members than in the past. This change in approach may dampen our
sales as we make the transition but it should also reduce the risk of material
profit declines.
We believe that our focus on profitability will contribute to a
meaningful improvement in performance in 2015 and beyond, and we are seeing
early signs of this progress as part of our most recent quarterly results. In the fourth quarter of fiscal
2014 we had domestic Adjusted&EBITDA&of
$125 million, which represents an improvement of $217 million versus the fourth
quarter of 2013. This improvement was largely driven by an increase of $71
million in comparable gross margin dollars combined with expense reductions of
$239 million.
will continue to take actions to increase our financial flexibility to meet all
of our obligations while funding our transformation. To this end, in fiscal
2014 we&raised approximately $2.3
billion from a variety of asset sale and financing activities, including
the spinoff of Lands' End, the sale of a significant portion of our stake in
Sears Canada and the issuance of Notes and Warrants in November.&
A closer look at some of the revenue figures illustrates why
we think it's more important to focus on profitability.&Revenue&for
the fourth quarter&was down approximately $2.5 billion year-over-year but
only a percentage of that was tied to declines in comp store performance ($313
million).&Most&of the decline in revenue, about $2.1
billion, comes from assets we sold, spun off or closed. In October, we
successfully completed a rights offering that means Sears Canada's revenue (and
operating expenses) will no longer appear on Sears Holdings& financial
statements.&In April, we successfully completed the spin-off of our Lands'
End business to shareholders. Throughout the year we closed underperforming
stores, many of which had been operating at significant losses for far too
My team and I wrote more about these moves&,&&and&, and many of
you reading this letter now own shares of Sears Canada and Lands' End that were
distributed through these actions. Making use of these assets in different ways
than we have in the past was, we think, the right way to allow us to focus on
and invest in Sears Holdings' transformation.
Sears Holdings borrowed $400 million in September to provide
additional liquidity through the holidays. This loan was secured by only 25 of
our approximately 1,700 properties. Much was made about the fact that it was a
secured loan (we
explained why ) but this enabled Sears Holdings to borrow
money at far cheaper rates than it otherwise could have. In fact, it allowed
Sears Holdings additional time to generate longer-term liquidity by monetizing
its Sears Canada stake and to put in place a longer-term debt offering (the Notes
and Warrants), proactively highlighting to our vendors that we were addressing
their concerns about liquidity through&the holidays.
EXPLORATION
We are continuing&our
efforts&to develop Sears Holdings as a membership company, without the
significant asset intensity of its traditional retail business. To this end, we
announced in November that we have been exploring the formation of a Real
Estate Investment Trust (REIT) to purchase&some of our properties and to
manage them as a pure real estate company. While not yet final, we are
proceeding towards its formation and separation which is projected to occur in
the first half of this year. We are currently targeting between 200 and 300
Sears stores to be sold to the REIT with expected proceeds to Sears Holdings in
excess of $2 billion.
We anticipate that the REIT will
continue and accelerate many of the activities that we have been pursuing over
the past several years. Specifically, we have been working to partner with
other retailers and mall owners to enable us to reduce the operating footprint
of our stores to smaller but still significant spaces, while leasing part of
the store to retailers who will bring increased foot traffic and relevance to
our locations.
A completion of a REIT transaction has
the potential to significantly transform our capital structure&toward one
that is&more flexible, long-term oriented and less dependent on inventory
and receivables. We would hope to maintain&a long-term presence in each
location while allowing Sears Holdings to&still have&the flexibility
to make strategic business decisions should those locations prove unprofitable
for Sears Holdings in the future. We believe that many locations&can be
repurposed with or without Sears Holdings as an anchor,
which&would&give the REIT the potential for value creation as well as
downside protection if Sears Holdings were&unable to continue to operate
certain stores profitably.
OTHER WAYS
WE'RE USING OUR STORES DIFFERENTLY
examples of how we are reconfiguring our stores so that observers will better
understand our plans. In fact, we have received positive feedback from
investors, local communities, members and our own associates as we upgrade our
sites with partners such as Whole Foods, Nordstrom Rack, DICK's Sporting Goods,
Forever 21 and Primark. Each of these retailers has its own attributes and
requirements, and we have demonstrated flexibility and creativity in working
with each of them to forge&deals that work for both of us. They form the
foundation for similar deals in the future and are part of how Sears Holdings
is driving the innovation and modernization of the U.S. mall industry.
OUR CONTINUAL
INNOVATION
As longtime readers of these
letters know, Sears Holdings has been a trailblazer for testing out new ideas
to both respond to and influence changes in the way customers are shopping in
light of new digital, mobile and social technologies. We continued to roll out
more industry-leading innovations in 2014.
Shop Your Way. The Shop Your Way program is unlocking value from our most engaged
members - those at the center of our transformation who make the most frequent
trips to our stores and web sites. Shop Your Way helps them save time
and money and rewards them for their loyalty.
While there remains much work to be done, there are encouraging signs that
indicate that we are increasing the value of our most loyal segment of members.
Our best members, those who visit our stores at least four times every 12
months, are increasing their business with us in terms of both sales and margin
Mobile Integration.&The
investments and proactive actions that we started making a decade ago to build
our Integrated Retail programs have allowed us to stay ahead of the curve and
better serve our members. The industry as a whole has seen tremendous growth in
the use of mobile in the shopping environment and we have strived to meet this
demand for our members. In 2014 alone, we saw large increases in the usage of
our mobile platforms, which makes our further development of these programs so
imperative.
Ship-to-Store & Buy Online/Pickup in
Store Expansion.&Some 14 years
ago, we were one of the first few retailers to offer buy online, pickup in store,
a capability that continues to be one of our members' favorites and accounts
for a significant portion of our online sales. This year, we expanded our
ship-to-store programs to include returns as well as in-vehicle pick-ups,
returns and exchanges. Members love having packages delivered right to their
cars in five minutes or less. We also expanded the buy online, pick-up in store
to allow pick-up across both our Sears and Kmart formats, so now our members
and pick up at a Kmart location or vice versa, which
gives our members more convenient pick up options.
Digital Kiosks, Signs and Check
Outs.&Our improvements aren&t just being seen online, they are also in
stores across the country as we continue to make technological investments to
provide more choices and convenience to our members. With our in-store kiosks,
members have access to over 120 million items, so if they can't find what
they're looking for in the store they can have it shipped to their home for
free. We have replaced paper signs with over 100,000 digital signs across 300
Sears stores. These signs provide our members with additional product information,
videos, consumer information and reviews, putting the information they need
literally right at their fingertips. In over 500 Sears stores, when shoppers
are ready to make a purchase, our associates can either complete the checkout
on their mobile device or if the member isn't ready to purchase, they can send them a digital recap of their store visit.&
OUR PEOPLE
Our associates continue to be a big
strength at Sears Holdings. Whether it is the user experience designers and
engineers inventing new ways for members to interact with us across our
integrated platforms or an in-store associate who greets a customer and helps
them find what they need, our associates are working every day to delight our
You don't have to take my word for
it. Our teams' innovative
strategies for moving Sears and Kmart forward are being recognized across a multitude of media.
For instance, Sears has one of the highest Digital IQs
of any department store (ranked in the ) due to our constantly
expanding site featuring product videos, sizing details, refined search options and even a geo-location enabled
store finder that provides details like whether or not a certain location has
in-store pickup. This report also found that Sears was ranked as one of the
most searched-for brands, even ahead of upmarket competitors like Nordstrom. Thanks to our team, Sears was also a Silver winner in the
achieving cross-channel success in today's challenging retail environment.
ALL OF THIS IS HAPPENING IN A
CONTEXT OF OTHER INDUSTRIES IN TRANSITION
As I noted at the beginning of this
letter, fundamental transformations aren't just affecting the retail sector. As
2015 began, we saw industries from media to banking to professional sports
struggling to engage audiences in deeply different ways than in the past.
For more than a decade, we've read story after story about the
explosive growth of bank branches pushing out small businesses that can't
compete with premium rents. Now, the rising tide is suddenly falling fast. U.S. banks shuttered a record number of branches last year. , in 2013.
Just this week, one of the nation's major banks announced plans to close .
It's easy to say the industry should have seen the changes coming.
However, it was the banks themselves that created the online and mobile options
Americans increasingly prefer for everything from paying rent to splitting a
restaurant bill to depositing checks - in the rare cases they still get paper
Still, the &Super Bowl& for
second-guessing was clearly, undeniably, this year's actual Super Bowl.
Millions of words and billions of pixels were electrified about how plays were
called, but even that didn't drown out the second-guessing about how people saw
the plays. The Super Bowl livestream, four years after its 2012 debut, is still
painfully slow - showing completions and interceptions .
TV sports in general succeed where
other kinds of broadcasts no longer do. Because people want to see the action
as it happens, viewers don't record the broadcast and fast-forward through ads.
Traditional brick-and-mortar retail would be in great shape if every day were
December 24. Broadcast television would be stronger than ever if every day were
Super Bowl Sunday. But it isn't.
NBC and the Super Bowl's producers
know that nothing lasts forever and eventually the way people watch live sports
will be upended by technology. They've made the right choice to plan for that
day now and maybe even learn some things from high-volume and high-profile
mistakes that they can use on the other 364 days of the year. They're playing
offense, not defense and I admire them for that.
What are the alternatives? You
can' you have to plan for a future that most people may not even
fully see yet. Leaders in other industries are diving deep into the same kind
of mission change in light of digital disruption that we at Sears Holdings have
been working on for years. The key for all of them, as for us, is to be able to
see beyond what&s always been.
CONCLUSION
Transforming from a series of
brick-and-mortar locations that sell products into an integrated retailer that
builds relationships with our members and delivers seamless experiences hasn't
been easy.
We've logged some successes and
experienced setbacks. We've come far and are seeing signs of progress, but have
a long way to go. Meanwhile, the actions we've taken to transform our balance
sheet have helped us fund the transformation of our business model.
Sentimentality or inaction are not
options anymore. Our only option is to become better equipped to support, anticipate and exceed our members'
As noted in my letter last year, our communications approach has
evolved this year with our
blog and my own
allowing us to explain our thinking and our actions in an
unfiltered manner. We have also expanded our quarterly reporting in an attempt
to clarify&some of the complexity around our financial results and to
better explain our performance. We remain focused on the long-term
transformation of Sears Holdings but we recognize that some observers of the
company have been confused by or have misunderstood certain aspects of our
financial results and our actions. This has led to incomplete or misleading
reports, which have had damaging consequences&from time to time with our
various constituencies. We have received numerous compliments for the
extent&of our disclosure and the helpfulness that our blog posts
have&given to those who are impacted by our operations.
Along with this letter, please take a few moments to review the
listen to the
we've posted
for the fourth quarter and
full year 2014 results.
Finally, I again want to thank our associates who work every day
to create products, services and experiences that our members love, and our
shareholders who have continued to support our transformation.
Respectfully,
Edward S. Lampert&
Cautionary Statement Regarding
Forward-Looking Statements:&Certain statements contained in this letter
contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities
Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Statements that use words and phrases such as
the company &anticipates,& &believes,&
&continue,& &expects,& &intends,&
&plans,& &transform,& &going to be& and similar
expressions or future or conditional verbs such as &will,&
&may,& and &could& are generally forward-looking in nature
and not historical facts and are intended to identify forward-looking statements.
Forward-looking statements are subject to risks, assumptions and uncertainties
that may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to be materially
different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or
implied by these forward-looking statements. In addition, the statements concerning the sale-leaseback/real estate
investment trust transaction regarding certain owned real estate also are
subject to risks and uncertainties, including our ability to enter into or complete
any such transaction on acceptable terms, on intended timetables or at all, the
form or terms and conditions of any such transaction, and the impact of the
evaluation and/or completion of any such transaction on our other businesses.
There can be no assurance that any of these efforts will be successful. The following additional factors, among
others, could cause actual results to differ from those set forth in the
forward-looking statements: our ability to offer merchandise and services that
our customers want, including our propri our ability to
successfully implement our integrated retail strategy to tra our ability to successfully manage
our ability
to successfully implement initiatives to improve our liquidity through
inventory manageme competitive conditions in the retail
and related worldwide economic conditions and business
uncertainty, including the availability of consumer and commercial credit,
changes in consumer confidence and spending, the impact of rising fuel prices,
and changes in
vendors& lack of willingness to provide
acceptable payment terms or otherwise restricting financing to purchase
i possible limits on our access to our domestic credit
facility, which is subject to a borrowing base limitation and a springing fixed
charge coverage ratio covenant, capital markets and other financing sources,
including additional second lien financings, with respect to which we do not
have comm our ability to successfully achieve our plans to
generate liquidity through potential trans potential
liabilities in connection with the separation of Lands& End, Inc. and
disposition of a portion of our ownership interest in Sears Canada, Inc.; our
extensive reliance on computer systems, including legacy systems, to implement
our integrated retail strategy, process transactions, summarize results,
maintain customer, member, associate and Company data, and otherwise manage our
business, which may be subject to disruptions
the impact
of seasonal buying patterns, including seasonal fluctuations due to weather
conditions, which are difficult to for our dependence on
sources outside the United States for significant amount
our reliance on third parties to provide us with services in connection with
the administration of certain aspects of our business and the transfer of
significant internal historical knowl impairment charges
for goodwill and intangible assets or fixed-asset impairment for long- our ability to attract, motivate and retain key executives a our ability to protect or preserve the the
outcome of pending and/or future legal proceedings, including product liability
and qui tam claims and proceedings with respect to which the parties have
reached a pr the timing and amount of required p and other risks, uncertainties and factors discussed in our most
recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and other filings with the Securities and
Exchange Commission. While we believe that our forecasts and assumptions are
reasonable, we caution that actual results may differ materially. We intend the
forward-looking statements to speak only as of the time made and do not
undertake to update or revise them as more information becomes available,
except as required by law.
For stock & account records
Computershare Trust Company, N.A.
Providence, RI
Tel: 1-800-732-7780