Pep Boys Shares Off After Sales Decline
PHILADELPHIA (TheStreet) -- Pep Boys (PBY) - Get Report continued to cut costs aggressively during its just-ended quarter in a bid to deal with weakening retail sales.
Shares of the car-repair and auto-parts chain fell nearly 6% to $9.50 in premarket trading, giving back much of the gains achieved in Tuesday's regular session, when the stock surged nearly 9% ahead of the company's quarterly earnings release.
Pep Boys managed its bottom line well, however, turning in a profit of $7.7 million, or 15 cents a share, a penny better than analysts' estimates and 42% above the year-ago figures: $5.5 million and 10 cents a share.
Revenue slipped 2% to about $489 million from the same period in 2008 and missed analysts' top-line expectations of $502.5 million.
Same-store sales, meanwhile, fell 2.3%. Sales of merchandise declined 4%, which more than offset a jump in the company's service business, where same-store sales rose more than 5%.
-- Written by Scott Eden in New York
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Scott Eden has covered business -- both large and small -- for more than a decade. Prior to joining TheStreet.com, he worked as a features reporter for Dealmaker and Trader Monthly magazines. Before that, he wrote for the Chicago Reader, that city's weekly paper. Early in his career, he was a staff reporter at the Dow Jones News Service. His reporting has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Men's Journal, the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, and the Believer magazine, among other publications. He's also the author of Touchdown Jesus (Simon & Schuster, 2005), a nonfiction book about Notre Dame football fans and the business and politics of big-time college sports. He has degrees from Notre Dame and Washington University in St. Louis.
