Boston, MA 05/21/2014 (wallstreetpr) – Tiffany & Co. (NYSE:TIF)‘s shares are beaming early morning today as the jewelry maker reported its extremely brilliant first quarter results. The company’s improved sales in its lower cost collections drove both revenue and profit higher, topping the Wall Street expectations.
Remarkable Quarter
In the reported quarter, Tiffany & Co. (NYSE:TIF)’s revenue jumped 13% year-over-year to $1 billion, while the analysts had kept their expectations at $953 million. Taking the currency on a constant basis, Tiffany said that its net sales across its global stores surged by as much as 15% and its same-store sales grew 11% during the quarter. The jewelry retailer’s net income jumped by 50% to $125.6 million as against $83.5 million in the previous year’s quarter. Resultantly, the earnings per share too soared to a whopping $0.97 per share in comparison to $0.65 per share in the previous year and $0.77 per share estimated by the analysts. The net earnings on a diluted basis, excluding pre-tax expenses grew 41% year-over-year.
Low-Cost Collections
Tiffany & Co. (NYSE:TIF)’s Atlas, a low cost collection as it is priced as less as $125, boosted the sales in the U.S. and, thereby helped the company to improve its gross margin from 56.2% to 58.2% year-over-year. Tiffany gets higher margins in its low-cost collections as against expensive pieces of jewelry. Tiffany witnessed robust sales around the Valentine’s Day, even as it saw some stores in the northeast impacted by snow storms. Tiffany did extremely well in Japan, where its sales soared 20% to $174 million. One of the specific reasons for an “exceptionally” strong demand in Japan in March was the consumption tax that was to take effect from April’ 1 2014. The tax applicability did hurt some sales in April’ 2014, but the company maintains its full-year sales forecast for Japan.
The remarkable quarter prompted the management of Tiffany & Co. (NYSE:TIF) to raise their full-earnings guidance for the current year by $0.10 per share to $4.15-$4.25 per share. The final earnings therefore are expected to record growth in between 11-14% over $3.73 per share earnings in the previous year.
