The world’s biggest retailer by sales, Wal-Mart Stores Inc (NYSE:WMT), found the market hard to please with its second quarter results.
The shares were off 2.4% in pre-market trading, despite the retail giant reporting slightly better-than-expected earnings per share for the second quarter.
Stripping out one-off items, earnings per share (EPS) for the three months to the end of July came in at US$1.08, which was a penny higher than the consensus forecast among analysts.
As-reported EPS was 96 cents, versus US$1.21 in the same quarter of 2016.
Total revenues rose to US$123.36mln from US$120.85mln the year before, versus market expectations of US$122.71bn.
Like-for-like (LFL) sales in the US were up 1.8% year-on-year, with footfall increasing by 1.3%. Wal-Mart noted this was the 12th consecutive quarter of year-on-year LFL sales growth in the US.
Net sales from stores outside of the US fell 1% from a year earlier to US$28.3bn, but would have risen 2.5% to US$29.3bn had exchange rates remained unchanged.
Net income fell to US$2.90bn from US$3.77bn the previous year.
For the full-year, the company expects underlying EPS will be in the range of US$4.30 to US$4.40, while the current quarter’s EPS is seen falling somewhere in the 90 to 98 cents range.