Thomas Stemberg Strong Quotations

Really, it's entirely the very strong investment we made to build up an industry-leading dot.com position. Our normal retail profits are up materially from the prior year. This decline simply reflects the very significant investment we've made over a six-quarter period to build up our dot.com business. And as we announced, we're already seeing terrific rewards from that.

Our core business has been really strong. That's to say, just our retail stores grew at 6 percent year over year. And again, this was a depressed quarter. We've actually been 7 percent or more in most quarters and we expect it to be that way during the fall period. That's one of the strongest performances in all of retailing. So our core retailing business remains exceptionally strong.

We will do about $350 million or more this year on staples.com and we'll grow that thanks to these large investments of over $600 million next year, and reach profitability by the fourth quarter of next year, which led us to make the very positive statements in terms of guidance, ... Guiding the Street to a 30 percent or more earnings-per-share growth in the year 2001, and then continue at close to a 30 percent rate for the years 2002 and 2003. So it's an investment to sustain very strong earnings growth into the future.