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Walmart will report earnings before the bell on Tuesday, as inflation eases and the holiday season heats up.
Here’s what the discounter is expected to report for the fiscal third quarter, according to a survey of analysts by LSEG:
- Earnings per share: 53 cents
- Revenue: $167.72 billion
The nation’s largest retailer will deliver its latest sales results and read on the U.S. consumer to Wall Street as investors gauge consumer sentiment and weigh the outlook for the most crucial shopping season of the year.
Retailers, including Walmart, are contending with a mixed bag of factors this holiday season. Inflation has moderated as gas prices decline and grocery inflation moderates. Fears of a dragged-out process to determine the winner of the U.S. presidential race never materialized.
Yet, President-elect Donald Trump’s proposal for tariffs on imports from China and other countries has fueled fresh fears about prices rising again. The holiday season is also shorter this year and parts of the U.S. have had unseasonably warm weather, two dynamics that could hurt retailers.
Holiday spending is expected to increase this year, but at a modest rate. The National Retail Federation, a retail trade group, said it expects holiday spending in November and December to increase 2.5% to 3.5% compared with 2023, to a range between $979.5 billion and $989 billion. That would be lower than the 3.9% year-over-year jump from the 2022 to 2023 holiday season, when spending totaled $955.6 billion.
Walmart, for its part, has benefited from its large grocery business and growing online sales. The company raised its full-year forecast in August and said it expects sales to rise 3.75% to 4.75% for the full year, and adjusted earnings to come in between $2.35 and $2.43 per share. Even so, its adjusted earnings outlook of between 51cents and 52 cents per share in the third quarter came in shy of what investors had then anticipated.