Shares of Big Lots Inc. BIG edged up 0.5% in premarket trading Thursday, after the discount home essentials retailer reported a narrower-than-expected fiscal fourth-quarter loss but missed on sales and provided a downbeat outlook. The company swung to net loss for the quarter to Jan. 28 of $12.46 million, or 43 cents a share, from net income of $49.8 million, or $1.63 a share, in the year-ago period. Excluding nonrecurring items, the adjusted per-share loss of 28 cents beat the FactSet loss consensus of 85 cents. Sales fell 10.9% to $1.54 billion, just below the FactSet consensus of $1.55 billion, as same-store sales declined 13.0% to miss expectations of an 11.5% drop. “We estimate comparable sales were adversely impacted by approximately 130 basis points [1.3 percentage points] due to product shortages in furniture, resulting from the unexpected closure of our largest vendor in November,” the company said in a statement. For the first quarter, the company expects same-store sales to decline in the “low- to mid-teens” percentage range, while the FactSet consensus is for a 2.8% decline. The stock has tumbled 24.5% over the past three months through Wednesday, while the SPDR S&P Retail ETF XRT has slipped 2.5% and the S&P 500 SPX has declined 3.0%.
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