Cheesecake Factory Profit Up 20%
Cheesecake Factory Inc., a Calabasas-based restaurant and bakery chain, earned a first-quarter profit of $12.6 million, or 25 cents a share, up 20% from a year earlier, the company said Monday.
The boost came despite a slight dip in sales at restaurants open at least a year and a big drop in the sale of bakery items.
Profit for the chain, which operates more than 60 casual-dining restaurants known for their opulent desserts, rose from $10.5 million, or 21 cents a share, a year earlier, the company said after the markets closed. Much of the rise resulted from a 20% increase in store count; 65 units were open when the quarter ended April 1, compared with 54 in the year-earlier period.
Shares of Cheesecake Factory lost 48 cents to $34.06 on Nasdaq, and the stock lost additional steam in after-hours trading, falling to $32.50.
Same-store sales, a key measure of a chain’s health, fell by 2%, largely because of bad weather and bad timing: blizzards on the East Coast and in Colorado, ice storms in Texas and heavy rains in California, along with a shift in Easter and spring break from the first quarter last year to the second quarter this year.
Even with a slight dip, sales per square foot at the average Cheesecake Factory still are double the industry average, noted Bryan Elliott, who tracks the company for Florida-based Raymond James & Associates.
“They have truly spectacular per-store sales, and that makes it very difficult to raise same-store sales,” Elliott said. “They truly are victims of their own success.”
The combination of weather and the calendar pushed per-share profit down by at least 1 cent compared with what the company might otherwise have seen, said Jerry Deitchle, Cheesecake Factory’s president and chief financial officer.
That was just enough to keep the company from meeting analysts’ consensus estimate of 26 cents a share.
Elliott also noted that the company suffered a nearly 40% drop in the sale of bakery items to other retailers and wholesalers compared with the year-earlier period. Last year, sales were unusually high, the company said.
Despite those drops, revenue for the quarter rose 15% to $172.9 million.
Deitchle said the company would stick with plans to open up to 12 restaurants this year, spending up to $90 million on capital expenditures. Two opened earlier this year.
