Bed Bath & Beyond Profit Down, Misses Street

(RTTNews) - Bed Bath & Beyond Inc., (BBBY) on Wednesday reported a decline in third-quarter profit hurt largely by higher expenses that continued to weigh down the bottom line while sales remained relatively flat. The home goods retailer's earnings and sales for the quarter fell short of Wall Street expectations.

Union, New Jersey-based Bed Bath & Beyond's third-quarter profit dropped to $126.4 million or $0.85 per share from $177.8 million or $1.09 per share last year. On average, 24 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected earnings of $0.98 per share for the quarter. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items.

Sales for the third quarter inched slightly up to $2.96 billion from $2.95 billion last year. Twenty-one analysts had a consensus sales estimate of $3.01 billion for the quarter.

Comparable sales in the third quarter decreased by about 1.4 percent, compared with an decrease of around 0.4 percent in the prior year period.

Bed Bath & Beyond has been battling with weak margins. The company's selling and administrative expenses increased to $881.5 million from $822.5 million last year, while sales costs rose to $1.86 billion from $1.84 billion last year.

The company declared a quarterly dividend of $0.125 per share, to be paid on April 18, 2016 to shareholders of record as of March 17, 2016.

Bed Bath & Beyond expects fiscal 2016 earnings per share "to be at the low end of the $4.50 to just over $5.00 range that it has earned over the past several years." Analysts currently estimate earnings of $4.73 per share for the year.

BBBY closed Wednesday's trading at $45.56, down $0.64 or 1.39%, on the Nasdaq. The stock further slipped $1.58 or 3.47% in the after-hours trade.