For Immediate Release
Chicago, IL – September 18, 2009 – Zacks.com announces the list of stocks featured in the Analyst Blog. Every day the Zacks Equity Research analysts discuss the latest news and events impacting stocks and the financial markets. Stocks recently featured in the blog include: Capital One (COF), American Express (AXP), The Dress Barn Inc. (DBRN), Tween Brands Inc. (TWB) and PetroChina (PTR).
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Here are highlights from Thursday’s Analyst Blog:
Initial Claims Drop Again
So what are people supposed to do when they have no job and their unemployent benefits have run out? Well, the best thing that could happen, obviously, would be for them to get a new job. However, businesses are simply not hiring.
That is actually a bigger part of the problem right now than busnesses laying off people. What jobs that are available tend to be at the very low end, the “flipping burger” type. Even those are scarce as witnessed by teenage unemployment rates of over 25%. For a middle-aged person with a college degree, taking a menial near-minimum-wage job with no benefits is not exactly a great solution. It sure will not put the kids through college.
Presumably by this point, they have also run up their credit card balances. If they have any equity in their houses, they will have tapped it — but given the number of people who are underwater on their houses, that is a pretty rare breed these days.
These people are at very high risk of defaulting on their credit cards, leading to higher charge-offs at the major credit card issuers like Capital One (COF) and American Express (AXP). They are also likely to cause a second wave of foreclosures, or people who just stop paying the mortgage and wait for the sherriff to show up at the door, in effect becoming bandos in their own homes (or what used to be their homes).
Still, I suspect the market will see the decline in intial claims as being good news. It is, just simply not yet good enough.
Dress Barn’s Q4 Exceeds
The Dress Barn Inc. (DBRN) reported fiscal fourth-quarter results after the closing bell yesterday. The company stated that GAAP net income expanded 19.5% year over year to $26.4 million, or 41 cents per share. Excluding certain items, adjusted earnings per share came in at 39 cents, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 3 cents.
The company recorded a 4.3% year-over-year growth in sales to $398.9 million, driven by a 3.5% increase in net store growth coupled with a 1% expansion in same-store sales. The company said that sales in Dress Barn stores grew 6.5% year over year to $253.7 million, mainly due to 4% growth in same-store sales. Sales in maurices stores rose 1% year over year to $145.2 million, driven by net store growth of 6.5%, partially offset by a 5% decline in same-store sales.
In June of this year, the company announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Tween Brands Inc. (TWB) in an all-stock deal. Dress Barn said at the time that it expects the deal to be earnings-neutral during the first full year of operations, and accretive thereafter.
PetroChina Focuses on Supplies
On increasing demand, PetroChina (PTR) plans to increase the quantum of gas supply to Beijing. The company wants to double the gas supply in the pipeline to 12 billion cubic meters (Bcm) from the estimated current years’ figure of 6 Bcm.
Beijing is China’s third largest province in natural gas consumption ( it consumed about 5.6 Bcm of gas last year). There are still a few potential suburban areas in Beijing that lack access to piped natural gas. As more than 80% of China’s natural gas is produced by the company, which runs most of the country’s gas pipeline networks, it wants to capitalize this favorable supply opportunity.
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