Retail

CORRECT: Nordstrom March same-store sales down 13.5%

By Nick Godt

Last update: 8:44 a.m. EDT April 9, 2009

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Nordstrom Inc. on Thursday said March sales at stores open at least one year fell 13.5%. Analysts, on average, had expected same-store sales to fall 16%, according to Thomson Reuters. Sales for the five weeks ended April 4 fell to $674 million, down 10.1% compared with $750 million for the five week ended April 5, 2008.

Kohl's same-store sales down 4.3%

KSS 45.40, +0.28, +0.6%) said Thursday that sales at stores open more than a year fell 4.3% in March. Total sales for the five weeks ending April 4 rose 0.5% to $1.43 billion. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters estimated same-store sale would fall 4.7% in the period.

Abercrombie & Fitch March same-store sales down 34%

By Moming Zhou

Last update: 8:17 a.m. EDT April 9, 2009

Comments: 3

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Abercrombie & Fitch Thursday reported its March sales at stores open at least one year fell 34% from a year ago. Analysts had expected a decline of 24%, according to Thomson Reuters. Net sales for the five-week period ended April 4 dropped 29% to $235.1 million from $330.2 million. The company reported a net sales decrease of 27% to $409.7 million so far this year, from $559.1 million last year.


Wal-Mart

April 9 (Bloomberg) -- Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer, reported comparable-store sales in March that rose less than some analysts estimated, pushing the shares down the most in three months in New York trading.

Revenue from U.S. stores open at least a year advanced 1.4 percent in the five weeks ended April 3, the Bentonville, Arkansas-based company said today in a statement. That missed the 3.2 percent average estimate compiled by Retail Metrics Inc., a Swampscott, Massachusetts-based consulting firm. In February, same-store sales gained 5.1 percent.

“They didn’t come close to beating the comp-stores expectations,” Howard Davidowitz, chairman of New York-based retail consulting and investment banking firm Davidowitz & Associates Inc. in New York, said today in a telephone interview. “They’re not immune to this huge downturn in the economy.”

The highest U.S. unemployment since 1983 forced consumers to restrain spending. Lower prices on groceries and household items and $4 prescriptions helped Wal-Mart lure more consumers, the retailer said. They spent less per transaction compared with the year-ago period, which included Easter purchases, it said. Easter is April 12 this year. In 2008, it was March 23.

Wal-Mart fell $1.95, or 3.7 percent, to $50.66 at 4:15 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading, the steepest drop since Jan. 8. The shares have slumped 9.6 percent this year.

Wal-Mart said sales will be at the high end of its 1 percent to 3 percent projection in the quarter ending May 1. In the first nine weeks of the quarter, U.S. same-store sales advanced 3.1 percent.

First-Quarter Forecast

The retailer said it expects first-quarter earnings to be near the top of its February projection of 72 cents a share to 77 cents a share. Analysts expected 76 cents, the average of 20 estimates in a Bloomberg survey.

Offering groceries at lower prices than neighborhood stores in the global recession is helping Wal-Mart grab market share in Japan, China and the U.K., said Brian Sozzi, an analyst at Wall Street Strategies Inc. in New York, said today in an e-mail.

Citing food sales, Wal-Mart said its U.K.-based ASDA unit increased comparable-store sales and gained market share in March. Same-store sales also advanced in Mexico and Japan, the company said.

Improvements in merchandising and marketing are also helping drive gains, said Richard Hastings, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based consumer strategist for Global Hunter Securities LLC, said today in an e-mail.

Leveraging Economic Weakness

“There is evidence from management comments in the sales release today that Wal-Mart is capable of leveraging global economic weakness to its benefit,” said Hastings.

Wal-Mart’s total U.S. sales advanced 2.6 percent in March and it increased comparable-store traffic for a sixth straight month. Its U.S. stores, which generated 49 percent of revenue from groceries in the year through Jan. 31, grabbed shoppers from Target Corp., according to Sozzi. He recommends buying Wal- Mart and selling Target shares.

Wal-Mart “was first to market, in terms of when the downturn started, in conveying its value message to consumers,” Sozzi said. “Simply put, it’s resonating.”

Target, the second-largest U.S. discount chain, reported March comparable-store sales dropped 6.3 percent while total revenue slipped 2.3 percent. It gets a smaller percentage of revenue from groceries than Wal-Mart and a larger share from apparel and home furnishings, two categories hurt by consumers’ focus on food and other necessities in the recession.

Target Market Share

Target is “gaining share in the markets in which it competes,” Eric Hausman, a spokesman for the Minneapolis-based company, said today by telephone. He declined to comment on the company’s market-share performance against Wal-Mart. “It’s not as simple as a zero-sum game between the two companies.”

Wal-Mart stopped giving a monthly sales forecast in February, citing difficulty in predicting consumer behavior in the deepening U.S. recession. It switched to quarterly forecasts starting with the period from Jan. 31 to May 1.

The U.S. unemployment rate reached 8.5 percent in March, the highest since 1983. It may surpass 10 percent by yearend, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Richard Fisher said in a speech yesterday in Tokyo.