Home Depot Sales and Stock Surge

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 13, 7:58AM EST · Published May 17, 6:28AM EDT

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Home Depot Sales and Stock Surge — © Thinkstock

Running against the retail retreat tide, and signalling good news for housing, and to some extent consumer spending, Home Depot Inc. (NYSE: HD) turned in extraordinary quarterly numbers:

The Home Depot, the world’s largest home improvement retailer, today reported sales of $22.8 billion for the first quarter of fiscal 2016, a 9.0 percent increase from the first quarter of fiscal 2015. Comparable store sales for the first quarter of fiscal 2016 were positive 6.5 percent, and comp sales for U.S. stores were positive 7.4 percent.

Net earnings for the first quarter of fiscal 2016 were $1.8 billion, or $1.44 per diluted share, compared with net earnings of $1.6 billion, or $1.21 per diluted share, in the same period of fiscal 2015. For the first quarter of fiscal 2016, diluted earnings per share increased 19.0 percent from the same period in the prior year.

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And a new forecast:

The Company raised its fiscal 2016 sales guidance and now expects sales will be up approximately 6.3 percent and comp sales will be up approximately 4.9 percent. The Company also raised its diluted earnings-per-share guidance for the year and now expects diluted earnings per share to grow approximately 14.8 percent from fiscal 2015 to $6.27.

Macy’s is in the wrong business.

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.