Coldwater Creek Plunges; VMWare Down

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Coldwater Creek (CWTR) were getting thumped late Monday after the Sandpoint, Idaho-based women's apparel retailer said it expects a sharp decline in sales to result in a surprise loss for its fiscal third quarter ending Oct. 30.

"Our fall merchandise assortment is meeting with limited success, as we did not offer products that resonated with our customers, particularly in important categories such as jackets, pants and woven shirts," said Dennis Pence, the company's chairman and chief executive officer, in a statement.

The depth of the company's anticipated miss is dramatic as Coldwater Creek now sees a loss of 14 to 19 cents a share for the three-month period vs. its previous expectation for earnings of 1 to 4 cents a share. The company expects total sales to come in between $225 million and $230 million for the quarter with same-store sales at its premium retail locations projected to drop between 18%-21%. Coldwater Creek's guidance had been for flat same-store sales on the same basis.

The current average estimate of analysts polled by Thomson Reuters is for a profit of 3 cents a share on sales of $278.5 million.

The stock was last quoted down 27% at $3.90 on volume of nearly 400,000, according to Nasdaq.com. Based on the regular session close of $5.36, the shares were up 22% so far in 2010, but it's been a volatile six months. On April 23, the stock hit a 52-week high of $8.75, but it swooned all the way down to a near-term low of $3.13 on June 2 when it announced the departure of its chief merchandising officer and forecast a loss for the second quarter.

While quarterly results from Apple (AAPL) and IBM (IBM) were garnering most of the attention from tech investors in afterhours trades, VMWare (VMW) also saw plenty of volume.

The shares were down 5.7% to $73.90 with 1.9 million shares changing hands after the Palo Alto, Calif.-based maker of virtualization software and other cloud computing products reported third-quarter non-GAAP earnings of $165 million, or 39 cents a share, on revenue of $714 million, up 46% on a year-over-year basis.

That performance topped analyst expectations for a profit of 35 cents a share on revenue of $698 million in the September period.

VMWare forecast revenue of $790 million to $810 million for the fourth quarter ending in December, which is ahead of the current average analysts' estimate of $774 million, but analysts on the company's conference ball noted that bookings fell 5% on a sequential basis and pointed out deferred revenue declined on a year-over-year basis to $32.5 million from $47.6 million.

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