Home Depot Beats

Published on Tuesday, 17 November 2009 07:40 Written by Danny Miller

Atlanta, Nov. 17 (TradersHuddle.com) – Home Depot (NYSE:HD), the home-improvement retailer, posted third-quarter profit that exceeded expectations after pushing cost cutting measures throughout the company. The Do it your self retailer also boosted its annual profit forecast.

Net income dropped 8.9% to $689 million, or 41 cents a share, from $756 million, or 45 cents, a year earlier. Analysts on average forecasted profit of 36 cents per share.

Home Depot reduced selling, general and administrative expenses by 8.4% to $3.87 billion. Customer transactions at the company slowed amid sinking home values and the high unemployment rate resulted from the worst recession in decades.

The company predicted adjusted earnings per share for the year of $1.55, a decline of about 13% from the previous year, compared with an earlier prediction of a decrease of as much as 20%.

Home Depot said that sales fell 8% to $16.4 billion as the value of the average transaction dropped 7.1% to $51.89 from $55.86. The number of customer transactions slipped to 314 million from 315 million.