Lee Scott Year Quotations

We are confident our earnings momentum will continue and look forward to reporting another record year in sales and earnings,

We're pleased our trend of year-over-year increases in sales and net income continues. We added more than seven billion dollars in sales in the quarter and ended the year strong.

The planned square footage growth for the coming year represents approximately 46 million square feet of new retail space, which will be the largest square footage increase in the company's history and a 9 percent increase over the fiscal 2002 total,

Our goal for the second half of the year remains double-digit earnings growth,. However, given the current economic environment this will be difficult to achieve, ... We expect earnings growth in the second half will show improvement over the first half of this year as we leverage our sales and market share gains, but the growth may not meet our original goals.

In a challenging retail environment, I am pleased to report our first year with net earnings in excess of $6 billion and our first-ever quarter with earnings over $2 billion,