Online discount retailer Overstock.com Inc drops on disappointing 4Q results

Overstock.com Inc (NASDAQ:OSTK) fell Monday after reporting a bigger-than-expected fourth-quarter loss.

For the quarter, the online discount retailer of furniture, bedding and jewelry posted a loss of $1.39 per diluted share on revenue of $452.5 million, which was down 1% from a year earlier. The average forecast of analysts was for a loss of $0.91 per diluted share on revenue of $474.15 million.

Shares of the Midvale, Utah, company declined 5.2% to $19.37 in Monday’s Nasdaq trading.

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The company attributed the drop in revenue to a 13% reduction in sales and marketing expenses.

Milestones for the Midvale, Utah-based retailer, according to Overstock, included a security token trading platform brought live by its tZero blockchain unit. The unit posted a pretax loss of $12.6 million while retail had a pretax loss of $27.7 million.

Company CEO Patrick M. Byrne pledged that the retail unit would return to profitability in 2019.

“Our retail arm lost money last year because I gunned things in an attempt to create a conventional high-growth/money losing e-commerce business, but the losses were nauseating, and we reverted back to the philosophy of profitability on which we built Overstock,” Byrne said in a statement.

Overstock says its online shopping site is visited by 40 million customers each month.

Contact Dennis Fitzgerald at [email protected]

Story by ProactiveInvestors