No New Hampshire stores are on the list of 63 Sears that will be closed by September as part of the latest round of cuts by the beleaguered department chain.
Sears has retail stores at malls in Concord, Manchester, Nashua, Newington and Salem. Sears operates several more smaller “hometown stores” around New Hampshire.
On Thursday, Sears Holdings released a list of 48 Sears and 15 KMart stores that it plans to close. Two Massachusetts stores, in Peabody and Springfield, are on the list.
The Illinois-based retailer posted a first-quarter loss of $3.93 a diluted share. Revenue fell due to fewer stores and a 12 percent drop in comparable-store sales.
Shares fell Thursday to trade under $3. They’d already lost 10 percent this year through Wednesday’s close. The decline in comparable-store sales, a key metric in retail, should be “alarming” to investors, said Noel Hebert, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst: “You’ve basically closed half the store base over the last few years and your ‘best’ stores are still negative 12 percent.”
Chief Executive Officer Edward Lampert has been striving to revive the company by closing unprofitable stores and selling or spinning off assets like its Lands’ End clothing unit. But Sears has lost about $11 billion since 2012. Now it’s hired a second set of advisers to re-shop its Kenmore appliance brand along with some home-services businesses. In April, Lampert’s hedge fund, ESL Investments Inc., said it was willing to purchase those assets itself.
The retailer said in a statement that it plans to take further action “with respect to certain near-term maturities of our debt, including through repayments, refinancings and extensions.” First quarter sales were $2.9 billion, compared with $4.2 billion a year earlier, Sears said.
A rally in Sears bonds triggered by the company’s search for asset buyers is casting doubt on plans for reducing the retailer’s debt, Lampert said earlier this week. He’s the retailer’s biggest shareholder and has been using his own money for years to keep the 125-year-old chain open.