Macy’s Inc. (NYSE: M) is scheduled to report its second-quarter financial results before the markets open on Wednesday. The consensus estimates from Thomson Reuters call for $0.77 in earnings per share (EPS) on $6.23 billion in revenue. In the same period of the previous year, the retailer posted $0.80 in EPS on $6.27 billion in revenue.
One firm has real money behind its bet that Macy’s could be worth as much as close to a double from current prices. The activist investor fund Starboard came out with a projection that Macy’s could be worth almost twice its current price. Of course, it involves some key asset sales that might leave the company with less of a future, but many activists care about the now and the next year rather than the next decade.
Macy’s was given a theoretical value of $125 per share by Starboard, if it could sell off or unlock the value in some of its prime real estate assets. With its current prices, investors should consider that the consensus analyst price target is $69.39 and the highest analyst price target is up at $82.00. In short, this is far more aggressive than Wall Street analysts will go. Activist math is sometimes very different from the math the rest of the planet uses.
Jeff Smith of Starboard spoke at CNBC’s Delivering Alpha conference in New York. While this might not pertain to every single piece of land the company owns, Starboard’s public commentary pointed toward the real estate being worth about $21 billion. That may raise some eyebrows due to Macy’s having a $22.5 billion market cap before its stock ran in July.
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Where this gets interesting is that Macy’s “Property Plant & Equipment” was carried most recently as $7.71 billion on its balance sheet. That may of course not be the current replacement cost or full market value. The year-end balance on that was $7.8 billion in January 2015, and it was $7.93 billion a year earlier and almost $8.2 billion two years ago.
What will be interesting to see is how the balance sheet in this coming earnings report will portray these numbers.
A few other analysts weighed in on Macy’s prior to the earnings report:
- Gilford Securities downgraded the stock to a Sell rating from Buy.
- Atlantic Securities downgraded Macy’s to Underweight from Neutral with a $64 price target.
- Cowen upgraded the stock to a Buy rating.
- Merrill Lynch reiterated a Neutral rating but raised its price target to $78 from $68.
Shares of Macy’s were down 0.6% at $66.97 just in late morning trading Tuesday. The stock has a 52-week trading range of $54.84 to $73.61.
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