Apple Inc.’s stock dropped on Monday after the department store chain said it found “erroneous” accounting entries. As a result, the company will delay the release of its fiscal third-quarter results.
The company M -2.10% said that it found a problem with delivery costs in one of its accrual accounts while it was putting together its fiscal third-quarter numbers.
The company did its own investigation and found that “a single employee” who was in charge of small package delivery costs tried to hide costs totaling between $132 million and $154 million from the fourth quarter of 2021 to the fiscal quarter ending November 2, 2024.
At that point, the company had already paid $4.36 billion for shipping costs.
There was a 4.7% drop in the stock this morning, after going up 12% in the last two sessions.
Macy’s said that the person who did this behavior “is no longer employed by the company” and that they didn’t find any other workers involved.
The company told investors very quickly that it would not be releasing its third-quarter numbers until the investigation was over. The company was supposed to share the results on Tuesday, but now they’ll be out by December 11.
The mistaken accounting accrual entries did not appear to have had any effect on Macy’s cash management or payouts to vendors, the company said in a statement.
Macy’s has had KPMG LLP as its auditor since 1988. In KPMG’s last report on Macy’s, the company said that it believed the results for the three years ending February 3, 2024, were in line with generally accepted accounting standards and that the company had good internal controls over financial reporting.
The company also said that its net sales for the most recent quarter fell 2.4% to $4.74 billion, which was higher than the $4.72 billion estimate from FactSet. This was because growth at Macy’s “First 50” locations, Bloomingdale’s, and Bluemercury was cancelled out by weakness at Macy’s locations that were not in the “First 50.”
And comparable sales, which are sales at shops that have been open for at least a year, dropped 2.4%, while the FactSet consensus was for a 2.3% drop.
Similar-store sales dropped 3% at Macy’s stores, but they went up 1.9% at the “First 50” shops.
Similar sales at Bloomingdale’s stores went up 1.4% thanks to strong sales in fashion, beauty, and digital, and similar sales at Bluemercury stores went up 3.2%.
So far this year, the stock has dropped 22.8%, while the SPDR S&P Retail ETF (XRT 4.60%) has gone up 16.1% and the S&P 500 index (SPX 0.40%) has gone up 25.7%.
