TJX's Stock Jumps After Profit And Sales Beat, Raised Outlook

TJX Companies Inc.'s stock jumped 3.6% in premarket trade Tuesday, after the apparel and home fashions retailer reported better-than-expected fiscal second-quarter results and lifted its full-year profit outlook. For the quarter ended Aug. 1, earnings rose to $549.3 million, or 80 cents a share, from $517.6 million, or 73 cents a share, in the same period a year ago. That beat the FactSet earnings-per-share consensus of 76 cents. Sales increased to $7.36 billion from $6.92 billion, above the FactSet consensus of $7.26 billion, with same-store sales growth of 6% doubling up expectations of 3% growth. Gross profit margin improved by 0.5 percentage points to 29.1%. TJX raised its full-year EPS outlook to a range of $3.24 to $3.28 from $3.21 to $3.27. "It was great to see that comp sales were entirely driven by customer traffic--our fifth consecutive quarter of sequential traffic improvement--and that we had strong sales across all of our divisions," said Chief Executive Carol Meyrowitz. The stock has gained 4.4% year to date through Monday, while the S&P 500 has tacked on 2.1%.