“As we move further into the year, we expect to see higher profitability than a year ago and continue to benefit from the inventory efficiency reflected in this quarter's cash flow.”

In context

“ress in strengthening our balance sheet. Even as profitability remains well below our long-term potential, we've already seen an encouraging improvement in our operating cash flows. More specifically, our operations generated $1.3 billion of cash in Q1 in stark comparison to a year ago when our operations absorbed $1.4 billion. This dramatic year-over-year improvement was driven almost entirely by changes in our inventory investment compared with last year. And finally, I want to end my review of the quarter with our after-tax returned on invested capital. For the trailing 12 months through the first quarter of this year, our after-tax ROIC was 11.4% compared with 25.3% a year ago, reflecting both the change in profitability and the increase in working capital we began to see a year ago. As we move further into the year, we expect to see higher profitability than a year ago and continue to benefit from the inventory efficiency reflected in this quarter's cash flow. Based on these expectations, we anticipate a recovery in the ROIC metric this year and expect to continue building back toward our longer-term potential in 2024 and beyond. So now let me turn to our expectations for Q2 and the full year. As I mentioned, on the sales line, we experienced notably softer comp trends as we exited the first quarter and moved into May. As a result, we're anticipating second quarter sales in a wide range centered around a low single-digit decline, consistent with those recent trends. In terms of profitability, we're expecting a range of possibilities as well. On the gross margin line, we believe that many of the same trends that emerged in Q1 will continue in the second quarter, including a meaningful tailwind from freight and transportation costs, and a signi”