In the modern world, having a system outage for a single day can wreak havoc on any company. But when you combine weeks of system issues with a double digit decline in same store sales, a company’s top and bottom line are bound to be negatively impacted. These are some of the issues facing our Zacks Bear of the Day, Rent-A-Center Inc. (RCII).
This Zacks Rank #5 (Strong Sell) company operates company owned rent-to-own stores which offer high-quality, durable goods such as consumer electronics, appliances, furniture and accessories to consumers under flexible rental purchase arrangements that allow the customer to obtain ownership of the merchandise at the conclusion of an agreed-upon rental period.
Recent Earnings Report
On October 26, RCII posted Q3 earnings where they beat the Zacks consensus earnings estimate but came up short against the Zacks consensus revenue estimate. On a year over year basis the company saw declines in Diluted earnings per share -76.6%, Total revenues -12.3%, Core U.S. revenues -16.3%, Same store sales -12.0%, and EBITDA fell by 370 basis points.
Management’s Take
According to Robert D. Davis, CEO, “As previously announced, our third quarter operating results were negatively impacted by unexpected capacity-related system outages following the full implementation of our new store information management system within our Core U.S. stores. Consequently, I am terribly disappointed in the results for the quarter, both top and bottom line. Toward the end of the third quarter we had seen significant improvement in system availability and a reduction in the frequency of system outages. However, over the past two weeks on a couple of instances we have experienced system slowness and outages similar to but less impactful than what we saw earlier in the third quarter. Despite these recent challenges, over the past 6 weeks, past due percentages have been lower than they were a year ago.”
Price and Consensus Graph
As you can see from the graph below, RCII’s stock price and future estimates have been falling for the majority of 2016.
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