Bed Bath & Beyond's (BBBY +0.00%) stock hit a five-year low recently after the release of a weak first-quarter earnings report. The home-goods retailer has certainly matured over the years, and though it's tried to give itself a bit of a face-lift recently with the purchase of a flash-sale site, that might not be enough to move the needle.
In this clip from the Motley Fool Money radio show, Jason Moser explains a few reasons the company is far from a buy, even at this discounted price.
A transcript follows the video.
This podcast was recorded on June 24, 2016.
Chris Hill: Bed Bath & Beyond stock hitting a five-year low after a first quarter that missed on just about everything you can measure, Jason. They missed on profit, revenue, same-store sales. This was not a good quarter.
Matt Argersinger: Did they miss on the "beyond part," too?
Jason Moser: I was going to say, let's not dismiss the "beyond" here; that's the real catalyst. Chris, I feel like we've been calling this one for the past four or five years we've been doing MarketFoolery and Motley Fool Money. This is, I think, to us in this room, not a big surprise at all. I don't think it's hyperbole to say that this is a business in decline, either. Certainly it has hit its growth limit. You see that top-line revenues are flat; it looks like they're starting to shrink. Margins are telling the tale -- they've fallen and they can't get up.
And I don't know what they do in the face of this new e-commerce market to really turn this around. I know one thing they tried to do, recently, is buy the web property One Kings Lane, which, a time ago, in 2014, just about hit unicorn status as a billion-dollar privately managed business. It's been a bit of a downfall since then, and One Kings Lane has more or less become irrelevant. It's so irrelevant that, with the purchase from Bed Bath & Beyond, when they were asked about the price, they said, "Well, we bought it for a price that was not material to our financials." That tells me all we need to know. It's not really something that's going to be leading this business forward. I don't think it's going to have a material effect on their financials in the years to come, because I think One Kings Lane is a business that has also become more or less irrelevant.
I don't see any reason in the world why you would need to invest in Bed Bath & Beyond today, and I'm going to keep that thumbs-down in CAPS for a little while longer
