Bed Bath & Beyond’s (BBBY) stock ended the quarter at an all-time low of 43 cents per share, as the home goods retailer taps the public markets one more time in its latest effort to turn itself around. BBBY is down 82% year-to-date.
The company’s last few years have been chaotic, amid a dwindling footprint of stores, which sell everything from kitchenware to linens.
Here’s a look at how the stock got here:
In January, Bed Bath & Beyond said it had defaulted on its loans and didn’t have the funds to pay its debt. Its liquidity issues have made it difficult for the company to keep up with vendor relations and retain talent.
The company has been shutting down more and more stores, shrinking its footprint to 360 locations, down from more than 1,550 open in 2017.
Bed Bath & Beyond has made attempts to turn itself around, but to no avail. In 2019, the company brought in Mark Tritton, a former Target (TGT) executive. His tenure lasted until June 2022, when board member and retail veteran Sue Gove was tapped to lead the company, after quarterly sales had collapsed a whopping 27%.
In August, when the stock was trading at $10 per share, Loop Capital analyst Anthony Chukumba told Yahoo Finance Live that BBBY was only worth $1 and that the company is in a “death spiral” and may go out of business in under a year.
BBBY had been a meme stock favorite since 2021. When activist investor Ryan Cohen’s RC Ventures took a 9.8% stake in company in March of 2022, the stock shot up 86%, hovering around $22. Cohen was nicknamed “Papa John” after his involvement in GameStop (GME), eventually becoming chairperson of the company.
However Cohen’s push for strategic changes at BBBY was short lived. In August of last year he dumped his entire stake in the retailer, cashing out 9.45 million shares and call options for a profit of $68 million. The stock declined about 40% in one day following his exit.
A Hail Mary pass to stay in business came in February of this year, when Bed Bath & Beyond announced a deal with hedge fund Hudson Bay Capital to secure $1.025 billion in funding via an equity offering. That day shares declined more than 40% to about $3 each.
The stock spiraled down even more since then, and Hudson Bay abandoned its agreement. On Thursday March 30, Bed Bath & Beyond said it would tap the public markets in an equity offering worth up to $300 million, otherwise it could face bankruptcy.
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Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bed-bath–beyond-stock-closes-at-all-time-low-of-43-cents-202223786.html