Walmart is expected to ring in its fiscal 2024 first quarter results before the market opens on Thursday with a chance to beat earnings expectations for the fourth consecutive period.
Earnings are expected to be $1.31 per share for the February-April quarter, compared to $1.30 per share a year earlier, on revenue of $148.5 billion, up about 5% year-over-year from $141.6 billion.
Investors will be watching for progress toward Walmart’s three- to five-year revenue and operating income guidance of 4% growth, which the company released in early April.
At the time, Walmart said its goal was to have 65% of its store base serviced by automation and have 55% of its fulfillment volume flow through fully-automated facilities. Walmart expects this to improve unit-cost volume by 20%.
That means investors should watch for what the retailer says about its supply chains, according to Brian Gilmartin, a portfolio manager at Trinity Asset Management.
“Basically what WMT is saying is that ‘look, given our annual revenue of $550 billion per year (and more) it's going to be quite difficult to get that growth rate materially higher, so we're going to focus on the middle of the income statement and the costs in the supply chain (i.e. margins) since that is where the opportunity has always been,’” Gilmartin wrote in a report for Seeking Alpha.
Investors are also hoping Walmart shares perform better than they did in the aftermath of the company’s fiscal 2023 fourth-quarter results.
“When Walmart reported its 4Q numbers back in February, the shares fell sharply in the days after,” analysts at CMC Markets said. “...The reaction was surprising given that the retailer saw a record quarter, with revenues coming in at $164.05 billion, although the weaker outlook may have had a part to play in that.”
“Since those five-month lows in March Walmart shares have risen sharply, rising to 11-month highs in April,” they added.
Contact Andrew Kessel at andrew.kessel@proactiveinvestors.com
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