RETAILING REPORTER
For Robert Sartor, 2009 was a year of wins and losses. Now the chief executive officer of the country's largest sporting goods retailer is counting on getting back on track with a better economy - and more co-operative weather - while appeasing a key dissident shareholder.
In June, Mr. Sartor and his team at Forzani Group Ltd. fought off New York activist shareholder Eric Rosenfeld, the founder of Crescendo Partners LP, who tried to shake up the sleepy chain by getting two of eight nominees on Forzani's board of directors.
Tomorrow , when Forzani releases its fourth-quarter results, Mr. Rosenfeld will be watching to see if the retailer is moving faster to resolve its key challenges.
"We continue to monitor the situation closely," Mr. Rosenfeld, whose firm owns about 5 per cent of Forzani's shares, said in an e-mail last week.
He'll be looking for signs that Mr. Sartor is winning a more underlying struggle at the retailer. Forzani's small franchise team in Quebec far outperforms the dominant company-owned stores, particularly the flagship Sport Chek chain.
The franchise business checks in with sales per square foot that are more than 40 per cent higher than those of the corporate stores.
Tomorrow's results are expected to be pinched by cash-strapped consumers who held back on spending in unseasonable weather during the crucial holiday season. In January, the company reported that during the 10-week period ended Jan. 10, sales at stores open a year or more fell 2.7 per cent.
The decline in corporate same-store stores was steeper - at 3.6 per cent - than the drop at franchise outlets, at 1.1 per cent. On a brighter note, sales rebounded at the end of the period with improved weather conditions. But it was "not quite enough to offset the weak start," Mr. Sartor said at the time.
"As we anticipated, sales were slightly lower than a year earlier because of consumer caution and unseasonably warm weather," he said.
"Even so, we managed our margins well by providing more current inventory and adopting less aggressive discounting."