Whole Foods Dismal Report Masked By Investment (WFMI)
This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.
Whole Foods Market Inc. (NASDAQ: WFMI) posted dismal earnings of $0.01 EPS on revenues of $1.79 billion. Thomson Reuters (First Call) had estimates pegged at $0.13 EPS and $1.81 billion. While this also marked its fiscal year-end, what was more important was the outlook and an investment it received.
Green Equity Investors is putting $425 million into Whole Foods viapreferred stock which gives it roughly a 17% interest in the company. This investment is keeping the pressure coming on the company.
The company now sees fiscal-2009 at $0.95 to $1.00 EPS and revenue of$8.3 billion versus estimates for Fiscal September-2008 of $1.02 EPS on$8.48 billion in revenues. It did not give same store sales guidance,but said this assumes a flat spending environment.
This report would be very lackluster if this was anything resembling normaltimes. But times are not normal. Despite shareholders getting jumped overhere with a big investment after a huge drop in the shares and soft earnings, Whole Foods is up by more than$2.00 to $12.35 in after-hours trading. Its 52-week trading range is $9.91 to $50.00.
Jon C. Ogg
November 5, 2008
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
