Bed Bath & Beyond is probably undervalued - Here's why.

in retail •  2 years ago 

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376 million is Bed Bath & Beyond’s market cap.
2.7 billion was the market cap five years ago.
15.3 billion was the market cap in 2012.

Bed Bath & Beyond in the last ten years has 97% of its value and adjusted for inflation, it has lost 98.5% of its value.

What exactly did they do wrong in a period of ten years to now be less than 2% of the original value?

First thing to look at was revenue, which wasn’t actually that bad.

9.5 billion was the revenue in 2012.
7.9 billion is the projected revenue for 2022.

A drop of 16.8% not factoring in inflation, which sounds bad, but looking at other companies isn’t the end of the world.

Coca Cola’s revenue from 2011 to 2012 dropped from 46 billion to 38 billion, for a 17.4% loss, but despite that the stock has grown heavily, going from a 158 billion dollar market cap to a 279 billion dollar market cap.

Also, Bed Bath & Beyond was growing pre COVID, where it had 12 billion in revenue for 2019, which meant the company was seeing a revenue growth passed the rate of inflation.

This made me look more at the profit margins and Bed Bath & Beyond is currently in a loss.

A decade ago, the company had a profit of 791 million dollars and profits peaked at 1 billion in 2014.

For 2022, the company is projecting a loss of 560 million and has had losses since 2019.

The total debt for the company is now at 3.3 billion dollars, which means debt is now 41.8% of revenue.

Again, this is bad, but mainly due to COVID and a 41.8% debt isn’t actually as big of a deal as people would guess.

Which, the debt to equity ratio is bad at 6.7, where 2.5 is generally considered a good score, but most companies post COVID are suffering similar levels.

The big issue seems to be the store count.

1500 stores was the count in 2019.

Today, it’s 953.

Which again sounds bad, but not the worst case, seeing how they dropped over one third of all stores, but revenue didn’t decline over one third.

So what is the issue?

The big thing I’m seeing is they have a declining online business, which spiked during COVID, but never was very relevant to them and fell post pandemic.

All said and done though, I think Bed Bath & Beyond is undervalued by people who don’t see the strength of retail.

Bed Bath & Beyond’s average 45,000 square feet per store.
Walmart averages 180,000.

While noticeably smaller, a company like Amazon could buy them and get a major physical retail expansion, which wouldn’t be very hard.

It seems like the stock should be down, but to be down 97% in ten years is a little extreme.

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