Buckingham Cuts Price Target On Buffalo Wild Wings

Buffalo Wild Wings' BWLD wounded shares got aimed at Friday as an analyst lowered his target on the chicken chain, citing commodity costs.

Buckingham's Matthew DiFrisco said rising chicken wing costs "will become a headwind" for the company starting in its fiscal fourth quarter.

Buffalo shares are down 20 percent in the past quarter, mirroring a rise in wholesale chicken-wing prices. But they flew 1 percent higher Friday.

Further ahead, the company may face difficult sales comparisons in the first half of 2015 with the absence of traffic that had been drawn in to watch broadcasts of the 2013 Winter Olympics and World Cup soccer matches, DiFrisco said.

The company's earnings growth in 2015 should slow to 15 percent "or lower," from about 25 percent last year, according to DiFrisco, who maintained an Underperform rating and cut his target to $114, from $116.

But another analyst recently upgraded Buffalo on a thesis almost perfectly opposed to DiFrisco's.

The record current U.S. corn harvest plus the demise of McDonald's Corporation's MCD now-flopped Mighty Wings product promotion will serve to reverse high chicken prices, according to Miller Tabak's Stephen Miller, who rated Buffalo a Buy.

"Historically chicken prices have moved with a six-month lag to corn prices," Miller said. "So we expect bone-in wings to follow suit."