Barnes & Noble’s stock started falling from the opening bell on Wednesday morning after the company reported bigger than expected losses (while management acted like everything was wonderful). But the selloff turned into a stampede late in the afternoon, with significant volume in final hour of trading pushing shares down $4.51 for the day, a decline of 27.7 percent, to close at $11.79 a share. The market as a whole turned negative in the afternoon as well, also trading down in the last hour, but the market movement was nothing like the bookseller’s falloff. In total, 9.45 million shares of […]
Booksellers
Barnes & Noble Has Soft Sales, Bigger Loss, and Sharply Falling Stock
Barnes & Noble reported fiscal 2016 first quarter sales, through August 1, on Wednesday morning. Even with the high-profile summer releases, sales at the retail bookstores declined $16 million (or 1.7 percent) to $939 million for the quarter. “Core” Nook-free sales inched up 1 percent, and same-store sales rose 1.1 percent. But don’t infer that means they sold more books. “Comparable sales in books slightly declined,” the company said in their investor conference call, with toys and games still the growth star for the company, up 17.5 percent in the quarter. In the release, the company blamed the modest decline on “store closures, […]
WATCHMAN and GREY Can’t Save Books A Million From Another Tepid Second Quarter
Books-A-Million said sales for the second quarter ending August 1 dipped 0.4 percent to $107.9 million. Same-store sales dropped 0.3 percent, while their net loss of $5.8 million, or 41 cents per share, nearly doubled compared to a $3 million net loss a year ago. The quarterly results also include “higher income tax expense due to the recording of a non-cash valuation allowance and the reversal of previously recorded income tax benefits.” President and ceo Terrance Finley admitted in the release that the “phenomenal sales” of Harper Lee’s GO SET A WATCHMAN — which he had earlier categorized as the fastest-selling […]
For Now, Profits Rise On Lower Sales for Mondadori’s Publishing
As Italy’s Mondadori waits on today’s board review of their offer to buy the book publishing operations of rival RCS, the company reported results for the first half of 2015. Book division sales of 123 million euros were down 4.3 percent compared to 128.5 million euros a year ago, but EBITDA increased significantly, to 8.5 million euros (up 3.4 million euros), attributed to their “radical restructuring process” as they continued their “actions aimed at reducing fixed costs and cost of personnel.” They took 3.2 million euros in restructuring costs during the period. eBook sales rose 18.6 percent in the first […]
Amazon Stock Soars On Second Quarter Profit
Amazon reported second quarter results after the close of the market Thursday afternoon. Total sales grew 20 percent to $23.18 billion, while operating income was $464 million (compared to a loss of $15 million a year ago) and net profits were $92 million (compared to last year’s net loss of $126 million). Amazon’s stock has spiked as a result, up over 16 percent to around $560 a share Friday morning, an all-time high. A big chunk of that profit looks to be attributable to the fast-growing, high-margin AWS cloud services business rather than their retail operations. AWS operating income this quarter was $391 million, […]
Back to the Basics At Barnes: What’s Been Lost In the eBook Era?
On or about September 1 Barnes & Noble Inc. will return to its roots as a chain of retail bookstores, following the spinoff of Barnes & Noble Education and the nearly-complete winding down of the Nook experiment. So we thought it would be interesting to turn back the reporting clock and see what’s happened to BN Retail — and other major book chains — since the beginning of the modern eBook Era, as a lens for how to view Barnes & Noble’s prospects going forward. Barnes & Noble first became a different company in 2009, when they bought the privately-held BN College. […]