On the Call: Home Depot CFO Carol Tome

Home Depot said Tuesday that its first-quarter net income rose 18 percent as the housing market slowly recovered. But a chilly, wet spring held back sales. Here CFO Carol Tome discusses how she thinks sales and traffic will rebound as the weather improves.

Question: How do you see average ticket being balanced with traffic in the year ahead?

Response: "We would expect the traffic to come back in the second quarter, of course, because the sales that we didn't get in the first quarter have not been lost. As we look at our garden sales, if you recall last year, we had a really warm first quarter, so we pull forward about $160 million of garden sales into the first quarter last year. This year, we estimate we lost about $188 million of garden sales. But it is not lost forever, maybe some of it is lost. But we're going to get the majority of that back in the second quarter and with that comes people."