Victoria’s Secret & Company reported earnings Wednesday. The lingerie purveyor posted $118 million in profit on $2 billion in revenue. The former was better than Wall Street was expecting, the latter worse by $10 million ($2.08 billion instead of a hoped-for $2.09 billion). But the numbers weren’t good enough, and now that the market has woken up, the stock is tanking, down 30%.
It’s the worst day in the company’s three short years of being publicly listed after going private in 2020. On an earnings call Wednesday evening, CFO Tim Johnson lamented that the market for intimate apparel has been down for four quarters in a row — meaning all of 2023. (The VS stock performance today, by the way, is worse than how it fared all of last year, when it ended up down 26%.)
The retailer made the gloominess official, issuing guidance that sales for all of 2024 would amount to $6 billion, “down low-single digits” from last year.
“We’ve assumed in our guidance that the domestic market for intimates will continue to be down through the spring season and we’ll start to stabilize, not grow,” Johnson said.