Yahoo Finance The End Is Near for Sears Holding Corp (SHLD)
Struggling retailer Sears Holdings Corp (ticker: SHLD) admitted on Wednesday what the rest of Wall Street has known for a long time: it's quite likely Sears is doomed.
In a 10-K filed late Tuesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, toward the end of a section called "Uses and Sources of Liquidity," Sears's language became unusually dire.
"Our historical operating results indicate substantial doubt exists related to the company's ability to continue as a going concern," the filing says.
This was after it had gone through a long list of asset sales, loans and cost savings initiatives Sears has either previously engaged in, is currently engaged in, or is planning to engage in to shore up its balance sheets and stop the bleeding.
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"If we continue to experience operating losses, and we are not able to generate additional liquidity through the mechanisms described above or through some combination of other actions, while not expected, we may not be able to access additional funds under our amended domestic credit agreement and we might need to secure additional sources of funds, which may or may not be available to us," Sears's 10-K filing says.
Translated, Sears is essentially saying that even though it's taken a series of extreme steps to boost its liquidity -- including selling its Craftsman brand, spinning off stores into a real estate investment trust, and vowing to trim costs by $1 billion this year -- it's very possible those efforts leave Sears still cash-strapped and looking for a capital injection ... and it's possible no one will want to help Sears when that day comes.
Sears used to be one of the great American corporate success stories, and for many decades it was a reliable cash cow. However, the company's been woefully unable to adapt to the modern retail environment, and even big-box retailers like Wal-Mart Stores ( WMT) and Target Corp. ( TGT) became a competitive issue for Sears by the 1990s.
In the 2000s, with Amazon.com ( AMZN) now flexing its e-commerce muscles, Sears started to fall apart. In 2005, billionaire hedge fund guru and Kmart chairman Eddie Lampert, who had a huge stake in Kmart after leading it out of Chapter 11, arranged the Kmart-Sears merger.
Since then, Lampert has been shamelessly stripping Sears to its bones.
In November, Mark Cohen, a former chairman and CEO of Sears Canada and current Columbia Business School professor, described Lampert's actions as outright "asset stripping."
Many of Sears's most valuable real estate has been sold to Lampert's own hedge fund, ESL Investments, only to be leased back to Sears. And when Sears needs capital? It gets ESL on the phone and borrows from them.
In November, Cohen thought that Lampert would eventually strip Sears down to nothing, but he insisted that process could take many, many years, saying, "This is gonna be the longest-running death in the retail industry in its history. He's selling off the fingers, the toes, there's an arm that's come off, there's another one yet to be harvested. The corneas are gone, one of the kidneys is gone -- but it's still got a heartbeat."
[See: 10 of the Worst Performing Stocks of 2016.]
Still having a heartbeat is no consolation for investors in the struggling retailer who watched SHLD stock lose 13 percent of its value in the first hour of trading on Wednesday. Down 47 percent in the last year, 90 percent in the past five years, and 95 percent in the last 10 years, the stock chart has been trending the same direction as revenue and earnings: down.
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