What: Shares of job search website operator Monster Worldwide (MWW) were down a whopping 33% at 1 p.m. ET on Thursday after its quarterly results and outlook disappointed Wall Street.
So what: Monster's stock has slumped over the past several months on a trend of declining revenue, and today's Q4 results -- EPS of $0.12 on a revenue drop of 9.2% -- coupled with downbeat guidance suggests that its top-line troubles are only accelerating. So while Monster also announced today that it was expanding its social recruitment ad platform beyond Twitter to distribute job ads on Facebook, severe near-term headwinds are forcing analysts to overlook the company's longer-term turnaround initiatives.
Now what: Management now sees current-quarter adjusted EPS in the range of $0.06 to $0.10, well below the consensus estimate of $0.13. "We underperformed in North America in our transactional business as a result of competitive pressures and seasonality, as well as macro considerations in Canada," said CEO Tim Yates. "We have implemented a number of actions which we believe will improve our performance going forward, remain fully committed to revenue and cash flow growth in 2016." When you couple the company's alarming top-line trend with its still-hefty debt load, however, I'd continue to be fearful about Monster's prospects going forward.
