Target’s Earnings Beat, Marred by Cards & Economy (TGT)

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Target_logo_2Target Corp. (NYSE: TGT) has just come out with earnings at $0.82 EPS on $15.47 Billion in revenues versus First Call estimates of $0.76 EPS and $15.46 Billion in revenues.  The company’s retail segment revenues gained by 5.7% t $15 Billion.

The good news is that the company modestly beat street estimates andmodestly beat its own forecasts.  The bad news is the company iscontinuing to refer to a weak and soft sales environment.  To furtherillustrate this trend it saw gross margins drop 0.4% to 31.2%.  Theprofitability of its credit card operations also fell by 65% down to$74 million as consumers are paying fewer bills.

Also during the quarter, Target spent some $1.7 Billion to repurchase33.8 million shares. Shares are waffling pre-market as they were indicated up modestly at $50.30 and then down modestly at $49.90 on thin trading volume which couldeasily go either way today.

Jon C. Ogg
August 19, 2008

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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