Ernie Herrman
Chief Executive Officer and President at TJX Companies
Thanks, Scott. Now, I'd like to highlight the opportunities that we see to drive sales in the fourth quarter.
First and most importantly, we will deliver great gifts and value for the holidays. We are in a terrific position to flow fresh product multiple times a week to all of our stores and online this holiday season. Since reopening our stores last year, we have been buying with longer lead times from many of our approximately 21,000 vendors to compensate for supply chain delays. Further, our vast vendor universe is by far the largest in off-price and, as always, allowed us to have quality branded merchandise for our shoppers. Importantly, most of the inventory we need for the holiday season has already been delivered to us or is scheduled to arrive in stores and online in time for the holidays.
This leads me to my second point, which is that we are set up extremely well as a gifting destination for consumers this holiday season. Our store shelves are full with great gifting selections today and we expect them to continue to be that way throughout the holiday shopping season. We expect to have something for everyone on consumers' shopping lists and to offer an exciting and inspiring treasure hunt shopping experience. We also believe that our great values will resonate with consumers as much as ever in an inflationary environment.
Third, our store locations are convenient for shoppers. Our stores are generally an easy to access strip centers and often near other high traffic retailers like grocery stores that consumers visit multiple times throughout the season, making for an efficient shopping trip.
Next, we believe our holiday marketing campaigns, which started earlier this month, will help drive new and existing customers to our banners. This year, each of our divisions will show case our differentiated shopping experience by reinforcing our value leadership, while also highlighting the fresh flow of merchandise throughout the holiday season with messaging such as endless selection, great prices all season long.
In the US and in Canada, we will leverage the strengths of our retail brands together in multi-banner campaigns. In Europe, we have a strong cross channel marketing plan, which includes TV for the first time ever across all of our European markets. At the e-commerce, we launched HomeGoods.com in September and are happy to offer consumers our exciting and eclectic home selections 24/7.
Looking ahead, we plan to bring more home categories to HomeGoods.com. On all of our e-commerce sites in the US and in the UK, we plan to offer exciting gift selections for the holidays that compliment our in-store assortments. Like our stores, new merchandise will be arriving frequently on our sites, making for an exciting online shopping experience.
Okay. Beyond this year, we believe we are set up extremely well to significantly grow our market share and improve our profitability. On the top line, we see tremendous opportunities with our sales in traffic driving initiatives and our global store growth plans. We have gained significant market share this year and we see excellent opportunities to keep attracting more consumers around the world. Giving us confidence is the appeal of our values, great brands and treasure hunt shopping experience. In all of the countries, we have brought our off-price concept around the world too, that has resonated with consumers seeking great brands and fashions at great value.
In terms of profitability, I want to reiterate that we remain highly focused on improving our pretax margin profile over the medium to long-term. We believe our top line initiatives can lead to outsized sales, which is our best opportunity to offset some of the persistent cost pressures we face. In addition, we're very optimistic about the margin opportunity from our strategy to surgically adjust retails, while maintaining our value proposition for consumers.
Turning to our ESG efforts. I'll start by saying that protecting the health and well-being of our associates and our customers remains a top priority as it has throughout the pandemic. I also am pleased to share with you that our 2021 Global Corporate Responsibility Report was published this past quarter and is available on tjx.com. The report summarizes our fiscal 2021 initiatives and progress within our four areas of focus: workplace, communities, environmental sustainability and responsible business.
In addition to our report, we have published an appendix of relative ESG data and frameworks, including our first disclosure that is aligned to select metrics from the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, or SASB. You can learn more about our efforts in our report, but I'd like to share a few highlights of our latest work with you now.
I spoke on our last call about our commitment to inclusion and diversity and our work to help support a more inclusive and diverse organization. Since that time, we are well on our way to launching a variety of new programs for our associates, including new mentoring programs, associate-led inclusion and diversity advisory boards and expanded partnerships with community-based organizations to support our recruitment efforts. We also recently completed our global associate inclusion and diversity survey, which will help inform our longer-term priorities. Looking ahead, we expect to publish our 2020 EEO-1 data by the end of the year.
In environmental sustainability, we've made progress in our global science-based emissions reduction target. We are pleased to report a 32% reduction at the end of fiscal 2021 in greenhouse gas emissions from our direct operations against fiscal 2017. Our global approach to reducing our climate impact includes emissions reductions actions focused on reducing our energy consumption and expense, also investing in energy-efficiency progress and sourcing low-carbon and renewable energy sources for our direct operations. I look forward to continuing to update you on our progress in this important area. And as always, there is a lot more information on tjx.com.
In closing, I want to again thank each of our associates around the globe who helped us achieve outstanding third quarter results. We feel terrific about our overall execution, very strong start to the fourth quarter and our initiatives this holiday season. We are in an excellent inventory position to flow goods to our stores and are confident our associates are in place to meet the sales demand.
I want to reiterate my comments in the future of TJX and our ability to grow our top line and profitability over the medium to long-term. As an off-price leader in every country we operate in, we believe we are in an excellent position to capture additional market share for many years to come and to become a $60 billion-plus revenue company.
Now, I'll turn the call back to Scott for a few additional comments and then we'll open it up for questions.