Earnings Double at The Sportsman’s Guide
South St. Paul, MN-based outdoor gear cataloger The Sportsman’s Guide (Nasdaq: SGDE) continues to ride the wave of prosperity. Net earnings skyrocketed 164%, to $710,000 for the quarter, compared to $269,000 last year. While not as impressive as its bottom line improvement, sales increased 12%, to $41.2 million, compared with $36.7 million last year.
The company says the increases were driven by Internet and catalog sales. Internet-related sales totaled 36% of total sales in the quarter, compared to approximately 30% of total sales for the same period in 2002. Catalog sales grew because of increased catalog circulation and improved catalog productivity. Selling, general and administrative expenses grew 6%, to $11.4 million, compared with $10.8 million last year.
PC Mall Catalog Sales Fall on Backorders Due to unfilled backorders of recently introduced product, catalog sales at Torrance, CA-based computer reseller PC Mall (NASDAQ:MALL) fell 30% for the quarter ended Sept. 30. Total net sales increased slightly to $232.0 million, compared with $230.1 million last year. Sales from its government subsidiary, PC Mall Gov, grew 41%. Net income dipped 8% to $703,000 compared with $764,000 last year largely on a pretax charge of $200,000 and an additional $900,000 expense attributable to PC Mall’s new Canadian call center and costs from Onsale.com, its new online marketplace initiative.
Sales Rise, Losses Narrow at RedEnvelope San Francisco-based gifts cataloger RedEnvelope (Nasdaq: REDE) reported its first quarter since becoming a publicly-traded cataloger in September. RedEnvelope reported total net revenue increased 54%, to $8.3 million for the quarter ended Sept. 28, compared to $5.4 million last year. It also narrowed its net loss 33%, to $2.8 million, compared to a loss of $3.7 million last year. RedEnvelope sold 2.2 million shares of common stock at $14 each. The company says the IPO proceeds totaled about $29.0 million.
Gaiam Reports Loss Broomfield, CO-based Gaiam (Nasdaq: GAIA) the parent company of the SelfCare, Real Goods, Harmony, and Living Arts catalogs, posted a 9% sales decline to $23.5 million for the third quarter ended Sept. 30, compared with $25.8 million last year. The culprit? Lower sales to retailers. Net loss for the third quarter was $201,000 compared with net income of $1.4 million last year.
“As forecasted, we continued to see negative growth in our business channel during the third quarter. Our sales to retailers remained soft especially in the department store, distributor, and mall based specialty store channels,” said Lynn Powers, president in a statement. “Beginning in September, we saw an uptick in business including a store-within-store roll out to all Barnes and Noble stores, a test of our Healing Arts line in Kroger and a launch of our kids line exclusively with Target. We doubled our sales force, added new product categories, segregated our products by channel, reset store floor plans, consolidated our operations into our Colorado headquarters, restructured our management organization and reduced our labor costs. We are in the process of finalizing our distribution system consolidation and moving the support for our remaining accounts to our Cincinnati distribution facility. These benefits are expected be fully realized by January 2004.”
Looking ahead, Gaiam expects a significant increase in its revenues in the fourth quarter, which are anticipated to reach or be slightly above its last year’s fourth quarter revenue of $37.3 million. According to the company, the bottom line will return to profitability, but it is not expected to be sufficient to offset the current year-to-date earnings deficit.