J.C. Penny Makes A Comeback

Last Friday, February, 28th, 2014, J.C. Penney reported its fourth quarter and holiday earnings and investors jumped in happiness. Shares of the infamous retailer leaped up more than 20 percent. Since then shareholders have been celebrating and shares have continuously gone up without a doubt. Shares are currently trading at $8.30 per share and have gone up $2.66 per share or 47.16 percent over the course of a week. Many analysts and investors now believe that the retailer does have the ability to recover and that the worst is over, since then a number of analyst' have issued optimistic reports on the retailer and believe that it is well-positioned for recovery J.C. Penny trimmed its expenses by a whopping 17 percent, and had grown same-store sales, while expanding its profit margins. The Plano, Texas based company is still is the process of renovating its company; as it has numerous pricing strategy failures and Chief Executive Officers bailing out on it. The infamous CEO Ron Johnson was ultimately known for not being able to run J.C. Penney efficiently. The current CEO Myron Ullman is doing a pretty good job positioning the retailer to get back up on its feet. “First, we knew we had to stabilize the business financially and operationally, but over the first several months we reinforced our relations with key domestic and international suppliers and we met with leaders across the enterprise and shared our turnaround priorities. This worked to restore calm and clarity of purpose within the Company and our supplier markets.” “During that time we also shored up the Company's financial position, which enabled us to end the year with more than $1.5 billion in cash and $2 billion in total available liquidity, consistent with our expectations.” The retailer is steadily increasing its revenue back to what its original all-time revenue and profitability highs were, the company has also said that it is focused on driving promotion, and in-store promotions. The company's website jcp.com has seen a 26.3 percentage increase versus a year ago.