Famous Footwear Owner Caleres Bucks Negative Industry Trends with Strong Q4
Neil Weilheimer
Managing Editor
Caleres Inc. managed to push back against the headwinds that dogged many of its competitors in 2017.
The St. Louis-based company said today it earned a profit for the fourth quarter and had improved its full-year performance.
The owner of Famous Footwear and brands such as Sam Edelman and Allen Edmonds said net earnings were $20.3 million, or 47 cents a share. Results included a 2 cent charge for operations restructuring and a 1 cent benefit related to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. (Adjusted earnings came in at $20.6 million, or 48 cents a share.)
In the same quarter a year earlier, Caleres posted earnings of $14.27 million, or 33 cents a share.
The company said revenue for the quarter, meanwhile, rose 9.8 percent to $702.5 million, up from $639.5 million.
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Famous Footwear, in particular, registered sales for the period of $393.1 million, up 7 percent.
“We capped off an outstanding year by delivering a consolidated fourth-quarter sales increase of nearly 10 percent and earnings improvement on both a reported and adjusted basis. Famous Footwear and [our brand portfolio] both contributed to this growth and delivered fourth-quarter sales increases of 7 percent and 13.8 percent, respectively,” said Diane Sullivan, CEO, president and chairman. “Our success in 2017 is reflective of the foundational strength of our diversified portfolio of brands and is directly attributable to our ability to move to where the consumer is going. We expect to leverage our success in both of these areas in 2018 and to deliver adjusted earnings per share of between $2.40 and $2.50.”
For the year, revenues rose to $2.8 billion, from $2.6 billion.
Caleres’ solid performance results come on the heels of DSW also posting a favorable 2017. DSW earlier in the day beat Wall Street expectations with earnings of 15 cents per diluted share for the most recent quarter.
