Lowe\u2019s net sales rose 5.2% for the quarter (compared to 2015) to $18.3 billion \u2013 a serious chunk of change \u2013 and for the first half of the year, total sales were up 6.4%. Again, really good, but then there\u2019s Home Depot, sitting on a 7.7% increase for the first six months.<\/p>\n
The hand-wringing about its performance and the \u201cHome Depot Crushed Lowe\u2019s\u201d headlines had roots in investor-centric concerns with Lowe\u2019s lowering its earnings per share guidance by a few pennies.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a real world issue, though, that is cause for concern \u2013 same store US hardware sales. Coming off a first quarter that saw its same store sales rise by 7.5% (bettering the Home Depot mark of 7.4%), Lowe\u2019s percent increase in same stores sales for Q2 fell off to 1.9%, as seen in the graphic below. Analysts have attributed the performance gap between the two companies to the Home Depot\u2019s larger professional customer base (2-to-3 times larger by Chain Store Guide<\/strong> estimates) whose need to spend continued to be driven by favorable housing and economic conditions, especially in the West where Home Depot has a stronger presence.<\/p>\n Lowe\u2019s executives haven\u2019t let coming up short versus investors\u2019 expectations and an inability to maintain same-store sales momentum in the second quarter dampen enthusiasm for what they expect to be a solid year. We\u2019ll see whether or not the Q2 naysayers were onto something when we get another round of results in six weeks or so.<\/p>\n Sources: Chain Store Guide Database of Home Center Operators & Hardware Chains<\/a> and company reports.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The summer started off with a bang for the home improvement giant when Lowe\u2019s sealed the Rona, Inc. deal in early Q2 that brought it 500+ new stores and made the company the second largest home center chain in Canada. That was news. And a big deal. But with August\u2019s round of second-quarter earnings releases,… Continue reading \u201cLackluster\u201d Summer for Lowe\u2019s<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"post-template-no-sidebar.php","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-7857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-home-hardware","tag-csg-exclusive","entry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7857\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"lowes\"](\"http:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/email\/lowes_exclusive2016.jpg\")
<\/p>\n