What happened
Shares of Dave & Buster's (PLAY -4.99%), which operates entertainment and restaurant venues, rose strongly on March 29, gaining as much as 14.5% at one point during the day. By roughly 1:30 p.m. ET, the stock was still up around 13.5%. The big news was the company's earnings release after the close on March 28.
So what
Dave & Buster's fourth-quarter 2021 revenue came in at $343.1 million, up nearly 194% from the same period in 2020, a quarter that was materially impacted by the pandemic. Compared with the fourth quarter of 2019, revenue fell 1.2%. That same theme played out for full-year 2021 results as well, with a nearly 199% improvement in sales versus full-year 2020 and a 3.7% drop compared with 2019. Essentially, sales are largely back to where they were prior to the pandemic, but not quite all the way. Analysts had been expecting revenue in the fourth quarter to total $364 million.
Image source: Getty Images.
On the bottom line, fourth-quarter 2021 earnings for the restaurant company tallied $0.52 per share, up from a loss of $1.19 per share in 2020 and a profit of $0.80 in the final stanza of 2019. Again, the same trends held for the full year, with earnings per share of $2.21 in 2021 way better than the $4.75 per-share loss in 2020, but still lower than the profit of $2.94 in full-year 2019. Analysts had been expecting a fourth-quarter profit of $0.61 per share.
Now what
Normally, investors sell a stock when a company misses Wall Street consensus on the top and bottom lines. However, Dave & Buster's reported that its same-store sales trends were higher by 5.4% through the first eight weeks of 2022. The key, however, is that this metric is compared witj 2019. And that suggests that the company may finally be back on the growth path and fully recovered from the pandemic hit. Investors tend to be forward looking, and that's something that investors could easily, and logically, get excited about.
