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Tiffany Shines Amid Stock Market Gloom After Burnishing Forecast

Tiffany Shines Amid Stock Market Gloom After Burnishing Forecast

(Bloomberg) -- Tiffany & Co. was one of the few bright spots on the S&P 500 Friday.

The jewelry maker rose as much as 3.8 percent after forecasting slight growth for the year ahead. That was enough to reverse an earlier loss of as much as 2.8 percent and trigger a rally that’s among the biggest on the benchmark index.

Tiffany Shines Amid Stock Market Gloom After Burnishing Forecast

One of the company’s most closely watched retail gauges -- same-store sales -- came in flat, slightly below the Street’s average estimate for a 0.1 percent gain, the firm said during its fourth-quarter earnings release. But on the bright side, Tiffany expects single-digit growth in earnings per share and sales this year. Fourth-quarter per-share earnings came in at $1.67, beating the $1.60 average estimate.

“We expect a rebound to double-digit EPS growth on midsingle digit revenue growth over the long term,” Laura Champine, an analyst at Loop Capital Markets LLC, said in a note to clients as she raised the stock’s target price to $105 from $100. “Though Tiffany’s sales are under pressure in early 2019 on macroeconomic pressures, we expect an improving pace of growth as we move through the year.”

There weren’t too many surprises, as the company had already announced in January that its holiday-period performance was short of the jeweler’s own expectations. Tiffany is up 6.6 percent this week, the biggest gain since November. That compares with the S&P 500’s 0.7 percent drop over the last five days.

To contact the reporter on this story: Elena Popina in New York at epopina@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Courtney Dentch at cdentch1@bloomberg.net, Randall Jensen, Andrew Dunn

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.