All right, good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. I'm Peter Benedict, Retail Consumer Products and Services Analyst at Baird. Really pleased to have the team from Tractor Supply with us. Once again, I was talking with Mary Winn last night. I think this could be their 17th, at least, consecutive time at the Baird Conference, so we love having you guys here. Appreciate you making it up. For those of you who do not know, Tractor Supply is a leading rural lifestyle retailer in the U.S. They have got more than 2,300 stores under the core Tractor Supply banner. They also have 200 or so PetSense locations. Their sales are expected to exceed $15 billion this year. Stock carries a market cap of just under $30 billion. To my far left, Hal Lawton, CEO since 2020.
He joined from Macy's, but spent much of his career at Home Depot and eBay. Kurt Barton, CFO, is directly to my left. As I mentioned, Mary Winn Pilkington is in the back there with some members of her team. She heads up the IR and public relations effort. I think we are going to turn over to Hal for some opening remarks here, and then we will get into the Q and A. Take it away.
Thanks, Peter. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for your interest in Tractor Supply and for being here today. As Peter said, 2,300 stores, about $15 billion in revenue. Over the last five years, we've basically doubled our revenues. The drivers of that have been our new store growth in combination with very strong comp store growth. On our comp store growth, it's been about half and half, half average ticket, half transaction. Very balanced in our growth. I think that's a differentiator for us in retail in terms of performance, the fact that over the last five years, we've had substantial comp transaction growth. Over the last 18 months or so, we're proud that we haven't given back any of those sales. There was much discussion, as you can imagine, in the early 2020s about kind of giving back a number of those sales.
That has not been the case. Our comp has been below our long-term guidance over the last 18 months because of deflation in the business. In our last earnings call, we talked about, as we look towards the back half of the year, we see that deflation turning to inflation. That is ex tariffs, which I am sure we will talk a little bit about. That is just in terms of the normal base run rate of the business. We feel very good about returning to more normalized growth rates as we turn into the back half of the year. More broadly, if we look towards the back half of the decade, we launched our new Life Out Here 2030 strategy in December of this past year.
It builds on our existing set of initiatives, which are very proven and have a track record of performance, initiatives like our Fusion remodel program, our garden center build-out, our Neighbors' Club program. We are adding to those set of initiatives some new initiatives that enhance and expand our total addressable market and also our revenue upside. That is a direct sales program, a pet and animal RX prescription program, and then combining that with our Final Mile initiative as well. Very excited about the future of Tractor Supply. We have got as much growth ahead of us as we have achieved in the history of our company. Like I said, we have got a great track record of performance, but excited about the future equally.
Great. That's a great overview. I think your position as a needs-based retailer, but one that also sells some big-ticket product, makes you a little bit unique. Maybe just talk about what you've seen with the consumer here. You said the last 18 months you've had some deflation. You actually had a pretty good big-ticket year last year. Maybe help folks understand, like, what is big ticket to Tractor Supply? How has the consumer been kind of spending on that and responding to that here of late?
Yeah. If I were to break our business into three buckets of categories just for the sake of discussion here, the first would be what we call Q, consumable, usable, and edible products. That is around 40%-45% of our business. Those are things like products like animal feed. Think a horse bagged feed, think cow bagged feed, livestock feed, poultry feed. These are our staples, much like the grocery store for our business. These drive transactions in our stores every single day. People have to feed their animals. People have to feed their dogs. We're also the fifth largest seller of dog food in the country. On the feed side, we're the largest seller of bagged animal feed in the United States, somewhere between a 20%-25% market share in the United States. That is our staples. Those are our footsteps drivers.
Those are what drive customers into our business every single day. We then add to that kind of a mass-type approach, mass merchandising approach, where we surround those consumable products with all the accessories and utility items that our customers need to live their lifestyle. That could be things like power tools and hardware. It also could be fencing for your property, or it could be a Carhartt hoodie that you're wearing while you're out on your property. All those sorts of other items we surround it with. We cap it all off, as Peter said, with big-ticket product that our customers need to maintain their property. Those would be things like riding lawnmowers, things like trailers, gun safes. In the wintertime, it would be things like log splitters and snow throwers.
In general, I'd say what we're seeing on the consumer is really not much difference than there's been the last two or three years. I think consumers continue to, in their rhetoric and in their qualitative comments, talk about being cautious and even some modest kind of confidence kind of variations we've seen over the last few months. I think in practice, in terms of their spending, consumers are holding up very well. For us, we saw a slight bit of pullback in big ticket in March and April. Dominantly, our assertion was due to weather, but we were a little cautious just because of the environment at the time. As the weather has come out and the sun has come out and spring has finally arrived, our seasonal products are selling very well. When the sun's out, the business has been very good.
Yeah. No, great. Let's maybe take a step back and talk about just the addressable market. Back in December, you hosted Investor Day. You raised your TAM to $225 billion. I want to focus first on just like the core market, $195 billion. Maybe talk about the rural population trends, secular trends like sustainability, and just what the competition looks like, both the existing competition and then you always seem to have someone else kind of trying to come in and play in the rural market. Maybe give us a sense of what you're seeing on that front.
Yeah. As Peter said, a couple hundred billion dollar total addressable market that we participate in. Sometimes folks are always trying to think about how to assess us because we do not have a large-scale national head-to-head competitor. If you think about most sectors in retail, that is the case. You have got two in mass, two in home improvement. Historically, we had two in electronics and appliances and those sorts of things. In farm and ranch, we are really the only large national player. The way we think about our market is as follows. If you call it just for sake of round numbers, $200 billion in total addressable market, about 40% of that is a historic farm and ranch channel. Call that $80-ish billion of the TAM. Those are 10,000 locations across the United States, little co-ops, mom-and-pops, some regional and local chains.
Really, our largest next competitor has 150-200 stores in size relative to our 2,300. Then you take the other 60% of the TAM that we do not have. It is really a litany of other competitors. You have pet specialty that we compete against in the pet category. You obviously have all kinds of apparel retailers that we compete with on our apparel product. We compete with home improvement on garden and tools and hardware. There is a variety of other competitors. Of course, mass we compete with as well. As Peter said, in terms of our total addressable market, it has been a growth market. It has been a market that has grown faster than overall GDP. One of the primary drivers of that has been rural migration. In 2021 and 2022, there was a significant exodus, as we all know, out of cities into rural America.
We benefited from that. We continue to benefit from that rural migration now, albeit at not the same pace of 2021 and 2022. The millennial population continues to kind of age. As they age into their early and mid-30s, they're embracing more historic generational norms, buying a house, getting married, getting animals, those sorts of things. When they do that, the only place to be able to buy an affordable home and to find one that's available for sale, as we know, availability and affordability is really out in exurban and in rural America. We really continue to benefit from that. If you look at new home sales and exist new home sales in particular, a much heavier percentage of that is from the millennial population. You see it's really out where our stores are. We really benefit from that.
It's a nice tailwind for our total addressable market.
Yeah. And so, like on the competitive front, I mean, we know Lowe's has been working on a rural initiative. Amazon's been talking more about it. Is this new to you guys, or is this kind of business as usual, always have someone kind of trying to come in and disremediate the business?
Yeah, Kurt's been with the business 26 years. I've been with the business now six years. I think almost every time we've been on stage the last six years, someone has been making a comment about initiative in rural America. That's probably been the case for all 26 years of Kurt's time. It's an attractive market, but it's also a very big market. Our focus is always just to compete in the market, earn our customers' spend, and stay focused on our strategy. There's been lots of folks that have kind of made entrées into our market. We just keep staying focused and just putting up the results we put up.
Yeah. No, absolutely. If anyone in the audience has a question, you want to get involved, session2@rwberg.com, and I'll do my best to get you involved here. Tariffs, let's just jump on it right away here. Perspective, playbook, how are you dealing with it?
Yeah, first off, I'll start with tariffs are not an existential crisis for Tractor Supply. Over 60% of our business is manufactured or produced in the U.S. You think about some of the categories that I've mentioned already, things like animal feed, pet food, those sorts of products. Those are manufactured in the U.S., produced in the U.S. Less than, as I said, 40% of our business is produced outside of the U.S. A little less than half of that is China, and then a little more than half of that is rest of world. For us, in terms of how to navigate it, we really are just dusting off our 2018, 2019 playbooks. We've gone out, we diversify our sourcing, we negotiate with our existing manufacturers, we're looking for efficiencies in the process. Certainly, we will adjust assortments as necessary as well.
We will look at cost first and foremost, look to create and maintain value in the market. Of course, always price is a lever of resort as well if necessary. We updated our guidance at the end of Q1, really broadened our range a bit just to allow for more scenarios of how the back half of the year might play out. Again, for us, this is not an existential crisis, one we're very comfortable that we can navigate and are doing so right now.
Got it. And one more few pounds , then I'll throw one over to Kurt. Just around pricing. You alluded earlier in your opening remarks, half of Tractor Supply's growth over the last five years has been ticket, half has been transactions. Part of your business is commodity. How do you see pricing today on the commodity front and then on the tariff impacted front? How does that kind of play out over the balance of years best as you can see?
Yeah. If I were to break our business into two fronts, the commodity and then the non-commodity, as you just did, Peter, on the commodity side, for the last 18 months or so, we've been operating in a deflationary environment. It's a little counter to what we've all seen in the national headlines where we, as a country, have been facing a significant amount of inflation. If you look at that data set, obviously it's been services inflation that's been driving inflation, whereas goods have really been flat or so over the last 18 months. That's really been the case with us. Things like animal feed, as I mentioned, we have a 20%-25% market share across those categories, are very heavily corn dependent. Back in 2022, corn was up as high as almost $600, now down in the $450s range.
We have been kind of trading down through that over the last 18 months. Corn has now been level really for the last 12 months or so. We are starting to cycle on top of that where we will see positive average unit retail and feed pricing in the second half of the year. The other big player for us on commodity pricing is dog food. I think the slowdown in dog in 2024 was well documented. We made a comment in our last earnings call that we thought we were past the trough of that and starting to see unit growth again in the category as well as average unit retail growth again in the category as we look towards the back half of the year.
Both of those businesses, which are, as I said earlier, 40%-45% of our total business, we're starting to see positive inflation in those businesses in the second half. That's inflation before we get into any impact tariffs could have.
Yep. Got it. No, that's great. To the extent that you've seen in the marketplace any movement in price based on tariffs, I know a lot of that's kind of on the com is what we're hearing as we get into back to school in the back half of the year. To the extent that you've seen any movement in pricing, any elasticities that you would call out that you've seen?
There's been some very subtle movements in pricing in the market right now, mostly in MAP-based products. These are branded products where the manufacturers have pricing guidelines out in the market. We've seen some modest steps in the step up in pricing in those categories. These are categories that either most of them are heavy steel and aluminum product. That's when those tariffs, as we know, started earlier in March. You are starting to see some of that already make its way through. There's really been we've not observed any sort of elasticity or unit reductions as those price step ups have occurred. As you said, the balance of potential pricing that may occur in the market is really more of a second half thing with the seasonal programs that will all be brought in.
Yep. Fair enough. Kurt, let's get you involved here. So, the financial algo that you guys have laid out, 6%-8% revenue growth, maybe break that down, comps versus new stores and how you kind of see that evolving. Hopefully we get back into that at some point here over the next year or two.
Yeah, sure. We unveiled our Life Out Here 2030 strategic plan back in December, which is where we laid out the changes to our long-term targets. Even before a lot of the changes with tariffs this year, we said 2025 likely to be a transition year. I think the activities on a macro over the last couple of months have only just confirmed that 2025 is a bit of a transition year. That said, we are still very convicted, as we were then, on our ability to get to the long-term algorithm. That basically breaks down as this, as you said, we see a 6%-8% net total sales growth. That breaks down to, one, one of the things that has been a consistent driver for Tractor Supply is new stores. We said we still see an opportunity now as high as 3,200 domestic locations.
We're at 2,300 today, roughly a decade worth of just known specific markets for a Tractor Supply store. We'll be growing 90 stores this year. Our target's moved to approximately 100 stores a year going forward. That 6%-8% includes roughly 2.5%, 2.5+% sales growth, percentage point sales growth just out of our new stores. Those new stores do contribute to comp as they have around a five-year maturation process. It is really the 3%-5% comp sales growth. Hal talked about the strategic initiatives. We've got both existing strategic initiatives that are still ongoing that were in that cycle of development, but then these new ones that we're beginning to invest in. We believe those are really going to be key to driving the 3%-5%.
That said, under normal, just routine macro where the rural economy and our lifestyle consumer base grows faster generally than the macro, some modest level of inflation from a macro standpoint, 1% or 2% growth just out of that we typically hold ourselves to in our comp sales. The remaining 2% or 3% coming from these strategic initiatives. We have great results from our fusion remodels. We're only halfway through the chain at this point, less than halfway through on live goods and garden centers. Our digital business continues to outperform. The excitement that we have on being able to capture some of this new TAM in pet RX and direct sales. We feel really strong and, like I said, convicted that we can get to that long-term algorithm.
That gives us an opportunity we see to be able to continue to modestly grow our operating margin where we've said we see us in a 10%-10.5% range. You put all that together, you got earnings per share growth of high single digits to 10%, 11%, total shareholder returns in the 10%-12% range. We still see great opportunities for growth and continue to see opportunities for us to give a good return to our shareholders with so much growth potential on the horizon.
Yep. No, that's great. That's a good segue. I want to dive into these next-gen initiatives. I think we've talked a lot in the past about fusion and garden center and loyalty. I'm not going to go into those too much here. The next-gen initiatives, I think let's start with direct sales.
Yeah,
really interesting opportunity for you guys. Started talking about it a little bit last year, a couple of more meat on the bone here of late. Talk about the direct sales opportunity, why that's important.
Yeah. Start out with maybe a foundational understanding of core Tractor Supply customers. So, our core Tractor Supply customer is a hobby farmer. They have five acres of land. They'll have somewhere between 5 and 10 animals on their property, maybe a couple of dogs. Over half of our customers have more than two dogs. 10% of our customers have horses. One in five of our customers raises chickens. So, you can imagine it's that five-acre hobby farmer, 5-10 animals that is our core customer. When a customer gets larger than that, they kind of graduate themselves out of Tractor Supply. We become a convenience location for them, but time becomes more of a valuable commodity. And so, that's where a more custom sales process and also delivery to their property becomes more important.
These sorts of customers are customers that have 20 acres, 50 acres, 100 acres of property. They're breeding animals on their property or they have a kennel or perhaps they have an equine facility or perhaps they have horse stables. Instead of maybe $1,000-$3,000 of spend on a weekly basis, they're spending $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 on a weekly basis. What we've done is we have the right infrastructure set up to serve these customers in terms of our supply chain. No one buys better than us in the marketplace. We have the lowest pricing in the marketplace. It's really about enabling that customized sale and that final mile to be able to deliver to this $10+ billion TAM that we've not previously addressed. What we've been rolling out over the last six months is a direct sales organization.
Over the next five years, that'll reach somewhere between 600-700-800 field sales reps that are out in the market calling on these larger customers. As I said, we'll leverage our existing supply chain, whether that's our 19 mixing centers that we have, whether that's our 11 distribution centers that we have, or whether that's the direct-to-property capabilities that we have with our vendors to serve these larger customers. We think this could be a billion dollars of additional sales for Tractor Supply by 2030 with this initiative. I was just out in a market last week doing some ride-alongs and customer deliveries. It was great to see the business come into life. We had one big flatbed truck that we had two pallets of horse feed on, a bunch of additional salt blocks and other types of minerals for the horses.
They had probably 40 or 50 horse panels plus about 500 T-posts all on one big truck going to a customer's property, $30,000-$40,000 order right there just for a week's time with that customer.
Yeah. No, that's a super interesting opportunity for you guys. Let's go to final mile, which is somewhat related, but you're talking about insourcing your home delivery operations. We've seen companies across our coverage do the same thing. Generally, with great success, customer service scores go up and the like. Talk about maybe how much of your order volume is, I guess, delivered by you today, where you're taking that, what are the aspirations there.
Yeah. We sell lots of big, heavy stuff. As a consequence, it's difficult for our customers many times to get those products home. Our final mile delivery initiative is a big unlock for us. Really, there are three ways it unlocks the business. The first is on our field sales team that we talked about, going out, calling on these large customers, then having the delivery capability behind it. The second is online. Right now, a large percentage of our online orders are delivered by a third party to a customer's home, say like a company like XPO. Those typically are lower satisfaction deliveries and also likely have a lot of customer SAT gives with them as well.
When we bring that in-house, we're able to support that business much better, get a much higher customer satisfaction, and also reduce a lot of those customer SAT dollars that we have to spend. The third thing is in stores. When customers come in to buy products in our stores, a lot of times, as I said, they don't have the means to get it home. You think about a 400 lbs gun safe, say, if you think about a large 100-gal stock tank or you think about fence panels, whatever the case may be, it could be five bags of horse feed on a pallet or something like that. Now we have the delivery capability in our stores to be able to get that back to a customer's home. We're in the process of rolling this out.
We have about 250,300 of our stores already with the delivery capability. We are over 10% of our store base. We have already turned this on this year. The plan over the next two to three years is to activate this across the vast majority of our store base. By the end of 2028, as we head in towards the back half of the decade, all of our stores are lit up with this delivery capability and being able to enable all three of those key pieces of revenue streams.
You mentioned pet RX kind of pharmacy earlier. You made an acquisition, Allivet. There's a number of players in this space. Why does Tractor Supply have a right to win in this place? What's your strategy?
Yeah. All right. So, first off, on pet, we're the fifth largest player in pet in the U.S. And that's moving from a position of really doing $0 in the category 15, 20 years ago. It's been quite a growth engine for us, pet has. Over the last five, six, seven years, as we've grown that business, we've started to surround it with a variety of services that our customers need. As an example, 1,200 of our stores now have a pet wash in their store. We're doing over 40 pet washes a week per store, just to give you a sense of the foot traffic and our customers' use of a key service and key feature. We also offer pet vet clinics in our stores.
We have mobile clinics that go around to all of our stores once a week, twice a week for four hours or eight hours at a time and allow our customers to get low-cost vaccinations and other low-cost vet services, chips, and those sorts of things in their animals. We also have historically offered RX. We've done that, and we did that through a third party called Allivet. At the beginning of this year, we purchased Allivet. It was just over a $100 million transaction. It does a little over $100 million in revenue. It's a profitable business.
For us, the big unlock is to take all the capabilities and the infrastructure that Allivet has around pet and animal RX and combine that with our 40+ million Neighbors Club members, 80% of which have a dog, 50% of which have more than two dogs, and kind of integrate those together and drive an affordable RX solution for our customers. We are four months into the acquisition now, five months in. It is off to an excellent start. We have already launched RX on tractorsupply.com in a full custom way, leveraging all the APIs off of Allivet. A little bit of background on Allivet. They have their license in all 50 states in the United States to sell pet and animal RX. They have three distribution centers in the United States, one in Ohio, one in Florida, one in Las Vegas.
They will, 90% of the time, your RX is confirmed same day. 95% of the time, the RX is delivered to the customer within two days after confirmation. It is a well-oiled machine. They do an excellent job of operating, and they make money. We are excited to incorporate them into the business and just bring a great new feature to our customers. We have also said that this has the potential to be a billion-dollar business by 2030 as well.
Incredible. We're coming up on time, but it wouldn't be a retail fireside if we didn't bring up retail media. Everyone's doing it. What's Tractor Supply's approach to retail media?
We do over $1 billion in sales on our website. We have a, and in our digital properties more broadly. We have a nice, large, robust website. In fact, our digital business is larger than any of our farm and ranch competitors' total sales, with the exception of one, just to give you a sense of our scale and size that we have in the industry. Beginning of this year, we started to really ramp up our retail media efforts. We now have a full suite of offerings, including onsite product listing ads, onsite banner targeting ads, as well as offsite third-party media where we plus up the intelligence around it and are able to provide that to our vendors. We've seen great adoption of the retail media.
We talked about on our Q1 earnings call that we did more in Q1 in retail media sales than all of 2024. We expect that with the hyperbolic ramp-up in this capability. It is a service that a lot of our more CPG-like vendors are really embracing quickly, say, in pet and in tools and hardware. Of course, we are educating some of our vendors who are a little less adept in this category, in this area of marketing. We are off to a great start there and really, really pleased with our progress.
Terrific. Hal, Kurt, thanks so much for your time.
Thanks, Peter. Appreciate it.