Ernie Herrman
Chief Executive Officer and President at TJX Companies
Thanks, John. Today, I'd like to highlight our confidence in our growth plans and why we are convinced that we are in a great position to capture additional market share in the U.S. and internationally.
First, we are confident that the appeal of our value proposition will continue to resonate with consumers. Over the past 46 plus years, our continued focus on value has served us extremely well through many kinds of economic environments, including periods of inflation and through recessionary times. In an ever-evolving retail landscape, we believe our commitment to offer great value every day will continue to attract shoppers to each of our retail banners.
Second, we see our differentiated treasure hunt shopping experience as a tremendous advantage. Our stores received multiple deliveries each week, a fresh branded merchandise to surprise and excite our customers. With our rapidly changing assortment, shoppers are inspired to visit us frequently to see what's new.
Third, we see ourselves as leaders in flexibility. The flexibility of our buying allows us to seek out the best opportunities and the hottest trends in the marketplace. Our store formats and fixtures allow us to flex our floor space to support our opportunistic buying. Further, our systems and the flexibility of our supply chain allow us to merchandise stores individually with a curated mix of good, better and best brands with a wide span of price points.
All of this allows us to attract consumers across wide income and age demographics in each of the countries that we operate in. Our broad demographic reach across income levels can open up even more opportunities for us in the product marketplace. Further, we continue to attract an outsized number of younger customers to our stores, including many Gen Z and Millennials shoppers, which we believe bodes well for the future. We believe our ability to flex our product offerings across a vast array of categories and brands helps us attract a wider shopping audience than many other retailers.
Next, we see the potential to grow our global store base by more than 1,400 additional stores over the long-term with just our current banners in our current countries. Giving us confidence are the opportunities we see for real estate and our disciplined approach to selecting locations.
Next, and I can't emphasize this enough. We are extremely confident that there will be more than enough inventory available in the marketplace to support our growth plans. Over the last year, our more than 1,200 global buyers have sourced merchandise from a universe of approximately 21,000 vendors, including many new ones.
Overall availability of quality branded merchandise has never been an issue for us throughout our history, as vendors and brands continue to produce goods from multiple channels, including in-store, online and direct-to-consumer. In fact, many vendors want to work with TJX due to our size, scale and buying power. As a growing global retailer with nearly 5,000 stores, we offer vendors a very attractive way to grow their business and clear their excess inventory quickly and discreetly.
Lastly, I truly believe that the depth of our off-price knowledge and expertise within TJX is unmatched. We have a highly differentiated global business and have developed a specialized talent and teams to support it. We have many leaders with decades of off-price experience and remain focused on developing newer associates and the next generation of leaders within our organization.
We take great pride in our TJX University and other training programs. Our deep bench allows us to deploy teams where needed and rotate talent between divisions and geographies, all of which strengthens our company as we continue to pursue our goals for growth. As I look at the retail industry today, I believe our best-in-class organization is a major advantage.
Moving to profitability. Again, we are extremely pleased with our well above planned first quarter performance and have increased our pre-tax profit margin expectations for fiscal 2024. We are confident about our ability to achieve our 10.6% pre-tax profit margin target by fiscal '25, and we'll continue to strive to exceed it over the long-term.
Turning to corporate responsibility. We continue to focus our global corporate responsibility reporting under four key pillars: workplace, communities, environmental sustainability and responsible business. We recently updated our corporate website tjx.com with our 2022 efforts across several of these areas. We encourage you to look more on our website, and we expect to release our updated global corporate responsibility report later this year.
I'm also proud to share that TJX was recently named to Newsweek's list of America's Greatest Workplaces for Diversity for 2023, as well as Forbes Magazine's list of America's Best Employers for Diversity. As always, I'm grateful to our teams around the globe for the work they do to support our global corporate responsibility efforts.
Summing up, our strong first quarter results highlight the continued appeal of our branded merchandise, terrific values and the excellent execution across the organization. I want to again recognize and thank all of our global associates whose collective efforts drove our strong performance. We feel great about our plans for the remainder of the year.
While our business is not immune to macro factors, I am convinced that the characteristics and flexibility of our off-price business model and the depth of our organization's expertise will remain important advantages. Looking ahead, I am convinced that we have a long runway for growth and are set up well to capitalize on the opportunities we see to drive sales and traffic, improved profitability and capture market share going forward.
Now, I will turn the call back to John to cover our full year and second quarter guidance, and then we'll open it up for questions.
