Foot Locker shares sank on Friday in trading after the retailer of athletic footwear and apparel posted mixed results and announced that sales would continue to drag starting 2018, which in turned spooked analysts and investors.
Sales at comparable stores, sales for stores opened a minimum of one year, which is a metric used by retailers that excludes the volatility of new as well as closed stores, dropped by 3.7% during the fourth quarter.
CFO and Executive Vice President Lauren Peters said that the 2018 first quarter would likely experience a continuation of both sales and margins being in line with trends from the second six months of 2017.
The footwear retailer said that its loss was $49 million equal to 40 cents a share, during the quarter that ended February 3, which reversed a profit from one year earlier of just over $189 million equal to $1.42 a share.
Quarterly earnings, after adjusting for expenses prior to taxes and other one-off costs, were $1.26 per share that surpassed expectations on Wall Street. The estimate by analysts was for earnings per share to be $1.25.
The retailers of shoes and athletic footwear, which has over 3,300 stores across the globe, ended the quarter with $2.21 billion in revenue, coming up just short of expectations on Wall Street of $2.22 billion.
The company, for its full year, ended with earnings of $284 million equal to $2.22 a shares, on a record for sales of $7.78 billion.
Shares of Foot Locker have dropped by nearly 50% in value during the last year. In trading on Friday afternoon shares were down over 15%.
Foot Locker announced that in 2018 it would be shuttering 110 stores. It will also be opening 40 stores during the year.
CFO Peters said the company keeps pruning its fleet of store that are under-productive and open select locations that are high profile.
In 2017, 147 stores were closed by Foot Locker, while the retailer opened 94 new stores.
CEO of Foot Locker, Richard Johnson on Friday said that the disruption characterizing the retail landscape recently has changed and will remain. Consumers want to have experiences, cool products, and want everything fast.
Foot Locker, said Johnson was working on reducing exposure to the deteriorating malls, as it works to rebuild business and win customers back.
