Wal-Mart Stores reported higher second-quarter earnings and lifted its profit forecast Thursday after notching higher sales in the US.
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The world’s largest retailer has been spending heavily to entice consumers back to its stores with better stocked shelves, and improving its e-commerce business by investing in new warehouses that can deliver online shipments faster. Not based on the news in any given day, the rating may differ from Jim Cramer’s view or that of this articles’s author.
Wal-Mart’s shares traded up almost 1.5% in premarket trading Thursday morning, at $74.00, in a 52-week range of $56.30 to $74.80. Wal-Mart Stores makes up approx 1.04% of Meyer Handelman Co’s portfolio. And it’s pressing ahead with online grocery and pick-up services.
Walmart U.S.net sales grew 3.1 percent to $76.24 billion with positive comp sales for the eighth consecutive quarter, up 1.6 percent, driven by 1.2 percent increase in traffic. Last quarter Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.
Wal-Mart has also trimmed its free-shipping pilot program ShipingPass to two-day delivery from three and cut a dollar off the membership to $49 a year in an attempt to answer Amazon’s Prime program.
Shares of Wal-Mart jumped 3.5 percent to $75.50 in pre-market trade.
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. annual Divided is 2 while it’s Dividend Yield is 2.74%. The stock price is going above to its 52 week low with 33.46% and lagging behind from its 52 week high with -2.50%. That included that it focused too much marketing on its stylish merchandise and didn’t do enough to bring in customers looking for essentials like detergent. Quantitative Systematic Strategies added WMT to its portfolio by purchasing 9,628 company shares during the most recent quarter which is valued at $702,555. Target also saw a 20-percent drop in sales of Apple products.
Sales were up 0.5 percent at $120.9 billion. Worldwide sales were down 6.6% in the quarter – despite strong growth in Canada, Mexico and Brazil.
Earnings for the quarter ending July 31 were $3.8 billion, up 8.6 percent from the year-ago period. Wal-Mart increased its annual earnings forecast after second-quarter results topped estimates. Analysts had expected the company to earn $0.36 per share, according figures compiled by Thomson Reuters. Quarterly revenue of $120.854 billion also beat expectations. “Our strategy in the U.S.is working as we delivered an eighth consecutive quarter of positive comps, and global also performed well”. This is the first time in nine quarters that the retailer’s online sales growth has increased quarter-over-quarter. They were up 1.8 percent at US$74.23 in afternoon trade. The price-earnings ratio (P/E Ratio) is the ratio for valuing a company that measures its current share price relative to its per-share earnings.
It’s been a stunningly quick turnaround for Walmart, which only last year warned of slowing sales growth and also said that higher wages for its workers and investments in its e-commerce operations would put a lid on earnings growth for a few years.
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A bright spot for Target is that its online stores produced a 16 percent increase in sales, although the amount was not broken down in the financials.
