Reporting preliminary annual results for the fiscal year ending August 31, the UK’s WH Smith said sales fell 5 percent at their High Street stores, at 892 million pounds. Same-store sales on books declined 4 percent, but their gross margin increased, with high street operating profit of 49 million pounds, up 4 percent. The company credited itself with “further progress implementing our strategy to build on our authority as a popular book specialist. We saw good market share performance versus the general retail market with strong market shares in kids books and celebrity autobiographies.”Smith statement Bloomsbury offered a brief “interim […]
Booksellers
Barnes & Noble's New Earnings Schedule Has Bookstore Comps Down 4.1 Percent
Barnes & Noble announced results for their new fiscal quarter, aligned to dovetail with the just-acquired BN College. Reporting sales for the past nine weeks of the new quarter, same-store sales at BN fell 4.1 percent at $665 million, while results at BN.com rose 8 percent to $91 million. The retailer said that for the full fiscal 2010 quarter, they expect that comp-store sales decline to range between 1 percent and 3 percent–meaning they see sales improving from here. Of course those forward-looking comparisons are set against a lower bar–October is when book sales started to plunge last year as […]
BN Completes BN College Acquisition
Barnes & Noble announced after the close of the market that they completed their acquisition of privately-held Barnes & Noble College Booksellers from Len Riggio. The purchase price was reduced from $596 million to $514 million, “reflect $82 million in cash bonuses paid by College to 192 members of its management team and employees” (not including Riggio.) The original purchase price acknowledged that BN College had about $136 million in cash on hand, making the effective price $460 million, which presumably has not changed materially. The company did say that the refinancing of their lightly-used $1 billion revolving credit facility […]
Borders Posts Larger-than-Expected Q2 Loss After After-Tax Charges
Analysts had exercised caution about second quarter results for Borders, pointing to increased stock prices and much shuffling among the management, but the released results point to Borders still losing money, even having more or less eliminated capital expenditures entirely this year. Consolidated sales were $616.8 million, down 17.7% from a year ago. On an operating basis, Borders Group generated a second quarter loss of $12.7 million, compared to a loss of $10.5 million for the same period last year. On a GAAP basis, the second quarter loss was $45.6 million, compared to $11.3 million a year ago. The second […]
Books-A-Million Sales Down, Profits Rise
For the second quarter ending August 1, Books-A-Million’s total sales decreased 0.7% to $122.4 million while comparable store sales were dropped 4.9%. But the retailer posted an increase in profits (as they did in Q1) with net income rising to $1.5 million, even factoring in a non-cash after-tax impairment charge of $0.2 million to reduce the asset carrying value of certain store locations. In the accompanying statement, Chairman and CEO Clyde Anderson attributed the quarter’s “challenging sales environment” to there being no comparable book to Stephenie Meyer’s Breaking Dawn, released at the same time last year. Nonetheless, Anderson pointed to […]
Analysts Remain Unimpressed with "Better Than Expected" B&N Earnings Report
Even though B&N’s second quarter profits fell 5 percent, which was better than initial predictions, some analysts remained unimpressed with the retailer’s report, not to mention share prices falling 84 cents (or 4%) to $20.11 in yesterday’s trading. Standard & Poor’s Equity Research Retail Analyst Michael Souers kept his $16 price target and “strong sell” recommendation on the shares: “Facing long-term challenges such as a secular decline in adult readership levels as well as an increasing shift toward eBooks, we think shares are overvalued,” he said in a note. B&N also delayed updating its annual forecast until approximately October 1, […]