Shares in Barnes & Noble touched all-time lows in Tuesday’s trading with the company’s market cap below $800 million after dropping almost 6 percent–and the decline has continued in early trading today. On Thursday the retailer will report quarterly earnings. Their guidance forecast a loss of 10 cents to 15 cents a share, but analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expect a loss of 16 cents per share, on sales of $1.17 billion. BAMM reports on Friday, and Borders releases results on Tuesday, November 25 after the market closes. At current prices, the market value of Barnes & Noble, Borders, Books-a-Million […]
Earnings Reports
Hastings: "The Most Difficult Retail Environment We Have Ever Seen"
Hastings reported third quarter sales of $114 million, down six percent from a year ago. Leaving aside rental revenues, sales of merchandise were down 5.1 percent on a same-store sales basis. But books outperformed many of their other media categories, as “books comps increased 1 percent for the quarter, due to strong sales of new trade paperback as well as used trade paperback and used hardbacks, partially offset by lower sales of periodicals.” The company swung from a slim profit this time last year to a net loss of $3.7 million for the quarter. (That loss includes a special $400,000 […]
Quercus Raising More Capital; Cheetham Steps Down
Shut out of traditional credit markets, Quercus is planning to raise 1.75 million pounds “in additional working capital and to strengthen its balance sheet,” nearly all of which will come from Pentland Group, which currently holds almost 20 percent of the company’s stock. Shareholders must approve a waiver from the takeover code, however, to allow Pentland to increase their stake to more than 30 percent. The thinly-traded company currently has a market cap of 3.1 million pounds, with the stock having fallen over 71 percent in a year. The immediate need is to refinance 775,000 pounds in loans that have […]
WH Smith Sales Slide
British-based retailer WH Smith issued a short trading update for September 1 through November, when same-store High Street sales fell 4 percent. They added: “Whilst we remain cautious about the consumer environment and anticipate competitive trading in our markets over the key Christmas period, we have planned accordingly, and the current financial year has started as we expected.” In other UK financials, sales at Canongate for calendar 2007 declined almost 4 percent, down to 7.8 million pounds from 8.1 million the year before, while pre-tax profits fell sharply to 271,000 pounds, 60 percent decline from the year before. The company’s […]
Bertelsmann "Well Positioned"
After a weak first half for their fiscal year, Bertelsmann has issued the briefest of Q3 trading updates. Sales for the first nine months fell by 0.7 percent to 11.4 billion euros; they don’t break out third quarter sales, which were approximately 3.765 billion euros. Net profit rose to 387 million euros for those nine months, a low margin that still benefits from comparison to last year when they took a 245-million euro charge to settle lawsuits related to Napster. (Operating EBIT so far this year is down more than 10 percent at 926 million euros, though the company offers […]
Harper's Profit Way Down
News Corp. reported results for their fiscal first quarter, ending September, in which operating income all but vanished at HarperCollins, down to $3 million from $36 million, “due to a higher returns provision in North America combined with lower third-party distribution income” according to the release. (This quarter a year ago they profited from distributing Harry Potter for Scholastic.) CEO Brian Murray explained to us that the returns provision was related to their accounting (and reserves against sales of new titles) rather than associated with any particular set of titles or accounts. Sales of $315 million were 4.5 percent lower […]