Will J.C. Penney Management Tell How Bad the First Quarter Is?

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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J.C. Penney Co. Inc. (NYSE: JCP) dove close to another 52-week low as any confidence that the market had in CEO Ron Johnson is now gone if it ever returned after the company lost 20% of its revenue in the last quarter of 2012.

Now there are even discussions the company may go into a strategic bankruptcy as a way to right size itself as economists like to say. This would mean almost certainly the shuttering of several hundred stores and layoffs of several thousand people. In the meantime it appears that Johnson will keep his job least as long as the larger shareholders in the company continue to support him or alternatively decided it is a poor idea try to find a replacement while the company is in such dire straits

The board already knows whether J.C. Penney’s first quarter has done better than it did late last year. Virtually all the sales figures from the stores are in as regional managers certainly provided whatever they may to allow for accurate sales information for the final weeks of March. In other words, the board knows whether Ron Johnson will have to face another Wall St. bloodbath as the company attempts to explain why it is not been able to reverse sharp drop in sales.

Only yesterday The New York Post reported that Johnson had changed his merchandising plans yet again and raised prices on most products. Should this be the case there is a clear indication that passing on price increases to the limited number of customers J.C. Penney has is the only way to dig out of the revenue nosedive. It will be interesting to see whether Penney makes the decision that it should alert investors to another disaster or face the consequences of having said nothing, allowing shareholders to hold the stock until the official earnings release date.

Class-action lawyers take note.

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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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