Yahoo Finance Live anchors Julie Hyman and Brad Smith discuss news that Bed Bath & Beyond has filed for a $300 million stock offering.
Video Transcript
JULIE HYMAN: We're getting some Bed Bath & Beyond headlines right now from a filing, and they're not great. The company is filing to sell up to $300 million worth of stock. At the same time, its preliminary net sales in the fourth quarter, about $1.2 billion. Its comp sales-- are you ready for this-- down 40% to 50% in the fourth quarter, a 40% to 50% drop in the fourth quarter in those comp sales.
Now, analysts were looking for a drop of about 26%, but obviously this is worse than that. And the company's-- those fourth-quarter net sales, by the way, the preliminary number of $1.2 billion that I mentioned is versus estimates of about $1.43 billion. So, Brad, the struggles continue for this retailer.
BRAD SMITH: Yeah, struggling to move through inventory, struggling to keep stores open. The list of store closings just continues to climb as of right now. Based on the company's own kind of size-eight font, it's about four pages long, and it just continuously fills up or adds on. And it continues to get updated monthly almost. It's updated most recently as of February 7.
You imagine with enough of the kind of profit-margin squeeze that continues to ultimately impact this company and the recovery that they're trying to chart, it's just the larger question of, OK, for anybody who is looking at this stock and still trying to evaluate whether there's an opportunity in this, there's a miracle that's going to have to happen, quite frankly.
JULIE HYMAN: Yeah, I don't-- I mean, it takes retailers a long time to die, unfortunately. I mean, we saw that with--
BRAD SMITH: Yeah, with Sears.
JULIE HYMAN: --the likes of Kmart and Sears. Exactly. Those are the prime examples that I think of. And this seems to be another example of that, unfortunately for the folks working for that company.
