Cheesecake Factory does not report earnings until July 20th but a data point published this morning gives an idea of how the company’s top line may have shaped up during the second quarter.
Cheesecake Factory reports on July 20th and we will be publishing a comprehensive preview in advance of that print. The stock has traded strongly over the past week but we believe that the ICSC data published this morning rounds out a quarter where CAKE’s comps may have come in lower than the Street is expecting.
Cheesecake Factory traffic depends partly on traffic in malls across the U.S. The two lines in the chart below represent Cheesecake Factory comps and the ICSC Chain Store Sales Index year-over-year change. The aforementioned ICSC dataset details the weekly change but, clearly, for comparability purposes it is necessary to monitor quarterly Cheesecake Factory comps versus the corresponding year-over-year move in the ICSC data. The 2Q12 data point for Cheesecake Factory represents current consensus expectation of +1.95%. The correlation for the data represented in this chart for 1Q02 through 1Q12 is 0.8.
We like to monitor Google Trends (search “Cheesecake Factory”) versus the comps of many of the companies in our space, depending on how strong the relationship has been historically. For CAKE, the correlation between the Google Trends data and the company’s blended same-store sales growth over the last four years has been 0.75, which means that we do not ascribe too much importance to the chart below but it is worth highlighting.
Howard Penney
Managing Director
Rory Green
Analyst
