What happened
Shares of Vipshop (VIPS -0.44%) are getting hit hard in today's trading session. The company's stock was down roughly 11.5% as of 12:30 p.m. ET Wednesday.
The discount-focused Chinese e-commerce specialist published its fourth-quarter and full-year earnings results before the market opened, and the market clearly isn't happy with the results. The company's stock has still managed to climb higher early in 2022, but it's also roughly 76% over the last year of trading.
So what
Vipshop posted a non-GAAP (adjusted) earnings per American depositary share of $0.41 on revenue of 34.1 billion Chinese renminbi ($5.4 billion), but the average analyst estimate had called for per-share earnings of $0.42 on sales of $5.57 billion. The company's gross margin came in at 19.7%, which was down from 21.9% in the prior-year period, and active customers slipped roughly 7.2% to land at 49.2 million.
Image source: Getty Images.
Now what
In addition to Q4 sales and earnings results that fell short of the market's targets, Vipshop is guiding for sales to continue falling in the near term. For this year's first quarter, the company expects sales between 27 billion and 28.4 billion renminbi. At the midpoint of the target, that suggests a year-over-year decline of roughly 2.5%.
While the business seems to be taking some steps back, Vipshop also doesn't look unreasonably valued. The company has a market capitalization of roughly $5.9 billion and trades at roughly six times this year's expected earnings and 30% of expected sales.
