Home Depot Off to Slow Start in 2014
Home Depot reported mixed first-quarter 2014 results before markets opened Tuesday morning, citing a slow start to the spring selling season. Shares were down in premarket trading.
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The Home Depot Inc. (NYSE: HD) reported first-quarter 2014 results before markets opened Tuesday. The home improvement retailer posted diluted earnings per share (EPS) of $1.00 and $19.69 billion in revenues. In the same period a year ago, Home Depot reported EPS of $0.83 on revenue of $19.12 billion. First-quarter results also compare to the Thomson Reuters consensus estimates for EPS of $0.99 and $19.95 billion in revenue.
The company’s earnings include a $0.04 per share gain on the sale of a portion of the company’s equity in HD Supply Holdings. Without that one-time gain, Home Depot’s earnings would have come in short of the consensus estimate, and revenues were short as well. This will not make investors happy.
First-quarter same-store sales at all Home Depot locations rose 2.6% year over year and 3.3% in the United States.
The company reaffirmed 2014 guidance for sales growth of 4.8% and raised its EPS estimate from $4.38 to $4.42, which includes the $0.04 benefit the firm received in the first quarter. Home Depot said it intends to repurchase $3.75 billion in common stock in the next three quarters, which is in line with the full-year expectation to repurchase $5 billion in shares. The company did not indicate its repurchase total for the first quarter.
Competitor Lowe’s Inc. (NYSE: LOW) reports results Wednesday morning and is expected to post EPS of $0.60 on revenues of $13.86 billion for the quarter. Lowe’s stock has outperformed Home Depot’s over the past 12 months, up nearly 7%, compared with a slide of about 0.5% for Home Depot. Year to date, however, Lowe’s is down 8% and Home Depot is down 7%.
We noted in our earnings preview on the two stocks that the numbers for both stores are so close that it is essentially a coin toss picking one over the other. So look for Lowe’s shares to take a bit of a hit today as well.
Home Depot’s CEO said:
The first quarter was impacted by a slow start to the spring selling season. But we had solid results in non-weather impacted markets and expect our sales for the year to grow in line with the guidance we previously provided.
Shares were down about 2.7% in premarket trading, at $75.26 in a 52-week range of $72.21 to $83.20. Thomson Reuters had a consensus analyst price target of around $89.70 before the results were announced.
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Paul Ausick has been writing for 247Wallst.com for more than a decade. He has written extensively on investing in the energy, defense, and technology sectors. In a previous life, he wrote technical documentation and managed a marketing communications group in Silicon Valley.
He has a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Chicago and now lives in Montana, where he fishes for trout in the summer and stays inside during the winter.
