Costco Wholesale Corp’s same-store sales expanded for another consecutive month in July growing 13.2% as the retail chain continued to benefit from robust e-commerce revenue growth.
US same-store sales, excluding the impact of gasoline prices and foreign exchange, increased 15.7% in July compared with a year ago, Costco (COST) said in a statement. During the same comparative period, e-commerce sales soared more than 75%.
Net sales in the four weeks ended Aug. 2 rose 14.1% to $13.04 billion year-on-year. For the forty-eight weeks ended Aug. 2, Costco posted net sales of $149.66 billion, an increase of 8.8% from the $137.56 billion reported during the same period last year. The food retail chain is scheduled to report fiscal fourth-quarter results on Sept. 24.
Costco operates 790 warehouses, including 548 in the US and Puerto Rico, 100 in Canada, 39 in Mexico, 29 in the UK, 27 in Japan, 16 in Korea, 13 in Taiwan, 12 in Australia, 3 in Spain, and 1 each in Iceland, France, and China. The chain also operates e-commerce sites in the US, Canada, the UK, Mexico, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and Australia.
Shares gained 1.8% to $346 in Wednesday’s after-market trading. The stock has advanced 9.1% over the past month and is up 16% year-to-date. (See Costco stock analysis on TipRanks).
Following the sales data, five-star analyst Rupesh Parikh at Oppenheimer ramped up the stock’s price target to $380 (12% upside potential) from $355 and maintained a Buy rating, saying that COST remains a top pick.
“While the catch up trade now appears to have largely played out to us, valuation is still not stretched on a relative basis, in our view, at 1.63x NTM consensus forecasts, which is just in line with recent historical averages,” Parikh wrote in a note to investors. “We view COST as both an attractive shorter-term beneficiary of money flows related to coronavirus fears and a longer-term winner, which should help to drive continued outperformance.”
Meanwhile, the rest of the Street has a cautiously optimistic outlook on the stock. The Moderate Buy analyst consensus is based on 15 Buy ratings versus 6 Hold ratings. The $339.29 average price target indicates shares are now more than fully priced.
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