Yahoo Finance Wal-Mart Earnings Preview: What to Know About WMT Stock
For decades, Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) lived and breathed the motto "always low prices." But consider it a given that founder Sam Walton didn't coin that phrase with his company's stock in mind.
While Wal-Mart stock has nearly quadrupled in price since Walton's death in 1992, any gains since 1999 have been erased due to a deep plummet that began in January last year. With the stock off more than 22 percent since then, it remains to be seen whether Wall Street is ready to go on a bargain shopping spree.
The retail giant, which also operates Sam's Club, has much riding on its fourth-quarter report for 2015, which it expects to release before the market opens Thursday. A strong uptick in revenue could not only reverse the stock's slide, but also bolster flagging investor confidence.
But to gauge which way the stock will tilt, it pays to think like an everyday consumer making the shopping list. "The upcoming quarter is going to be very interesting as investors will get a glimpse into how the company's sales results were impacted by the holiday season, some huge winter storms and lower gas prices over the last two months," says Brian Hellmer, director of the Hawk Center for Applied Security Analysis at the Wisconsin School of Business.
"There are few sectors of the market with lower expectations than retail, and Wal-Mart in particular has had a rough ride," says Charles Sizemore, a portfolio manager on Covestor and chief investment officer of Sizemore Capital Management in Dallas. "But that said, Wal-Mart shares have been quietly rallying since November and have avoided a lot of the volatility this year."
Indeed, if you entered into WMT stock at the start of that month, you've seen it jump almost 15 percent. But if you invested just a month earlier, you've garnered gains worthy of the clearance rack, just 3 percent. And so an overwhelming number of analysts (15 out of 18) rate WMT a "hold," even as shareholders collectively hold their breath in anticipation of Thursday's report.
"The market is currently in a swoon and retail stocks are caught up in that," says Mark Cohen, director of retail studies at Columbia Business School. "I think the recent rise in Wal-Mart stock was in response to less-than-rational views that newly installed senior management would be able to quickly change the performance of the business -- which was not the case. This is not a company likely to demonstrate marked positive changes in its performance in any short-term sense, any time soon."
While Wal-Mart may fend off few threats so far as copycats to its model, the company faces stiff headwinds from other corners of the retail sphere. Amazon.com (AMZN) continues to dominate all things e-commerce, and passed Wal-Mart in July as the world's largest retailer. But that's not to say Wal-Mart has given up on the digital front -- in fact, far from it.
Wal-Mart expects to grow online sales around 20 to 30 percent for the foreseeable future, Hellmer says. "Importantly, the company has also seen solid profits from their current online business so far, which has led management to make major incremental investments to support this business. It makes sense Wal-Mart would try to leverage its tremendous distribution platform to support online sales growth."
Still that sets up a curious scenario where Wal-Mart could face an unlikely competitor: itself. "It's an open question as to how much more the company can grow its online business before it starts to cannibalize the brick-and-mortar store base," Hellmer says.
Meanwhile, the rise of dollar stores proves that some outlets can out-bargain a Wal-Mart bargain. Wall Street types are definitely noticing: Dollar General Corp. (DG) is rated a "strong buy" by nearly two-thirds of surveyed analysts, 12 out of 19.
For Wal-Mart, the drumbeat of negative investor news stems also in part from negative press. After getting drubbed for its draconian labor practices -- highlighted by widely covered worker protests -- Wal-Mart stores enacted reforms that began last year and will increase wages by a total of $2.7 billion. While that has made the worker bees happier, Wall Street observers consider it quite the buzzkill.
The latest pay hike for associates goes into effect Saturday, just two days after the fourth-quarter report, and will lift average pay to $13.38 per hour: "one of the largest single-day, private-sector pay increases ever," according to a company statement. Depending on how you look at it, it's either a play for positive press or a number to drown out any uplifting digits investors get Thursday.
Still, Wal-Mart isn't exactly broke. It boasts a market capitalization in excess of $210 billion, and easily remains the world's largest brick-and-mortar retailer.
So while some quarterly reports among retailers are writing the latest chapter of a long, ugly tumble, or giving investors more reasons to throw the confetti, Wal-Mart sits somewhere in the middle as Thursday looms: far from down and out but not exactly up and away, either.
And if for some reason Wal-Mart needs to pivot, a smarter bet is for a slow turnaround.
"Wal-Mart's biggest strength is its enormous size, scale and the frequency and recency with which it does business with its customers," Cohen says. "Unfortunately that size makes it difficult -- if not downright impossible -- to enact change in response to changes in the economy, competition and changes in consumer preferences."
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