Shares of Penney's, Foot Locker slide
After the strongest holiday-shopping season in more than a decade, investors have grown increasingly impatient with retailers that didn't share in the good fortune.
Shares of J.C. Penney Co. and Foot Locker Inc. tumbled Friday in the wake of lukewarm results during the fourth quarter, which included the Christmas season. The chains both posted weaker-than-expected comparable sales, a key benchmark.
Penney's stocks fell 0.21 points, or 5.4 percent, to 3.71; Foot Locker shares dropped 5.84 points, 12.73 percent, to close at 40.04.
The sharp reaction underscores the concerns that are swirling around store chains in the U.S., even as the retail picture brightened in recent months. Foot traffic remains sluggish at many American malls, and Amazon.com Inc. gobbled up about half of the e-commerce growth during the holidays.
More than 100 million square feet in store closings were announced last year, according to CoStar Group Inc., a commercial real estate information firm. So far this year, that figure is at more than 32 million square feet. Long-term, about one billion square feet of retail space may need to close, CoStar research director Suzanne Mulvee estimated.
-- Bloomberg News
Texas seafood rebounds after Harvey
AUSTIN, Texas -- Higher wholesale prices for freshly harvested oysters have Austin-area restaurants and seafood counters shelling out more for the popular bivalves these days -- one of Hurricane Harvey's few lingering repercussions on the area's seafood market.
Area distributors braced for Harvey-induced shortages of many varieties of seafood from the Texas Gulf Coast last year, after the hurricane grounded and in some cases sank fishing boats and caused millions of dollars worth of fresh catch to spoil when refrigerated coastal storage facilities lost power.
Damage and lost revenue incurred by the state's commercial fishing and processing industry have been pegged at nearly $50 million, according to an initial government assessment of the storm.
But about six months after the storm made landfall on Aug. 25 near Rockport, seafood lovers in Austin are having few problems finding their favorite Texas-caught entrees on local menus, and prices are largely back to normal, according to representatives of the area seafood sector.
Lance Robinson, deputy coastal fisheries director for the state wildlife agency, said so-called finfish -- such as flounder, black drum and sheepshead -- are mobile and were able to move away from danger and rebounded relatively quickly once the storm had passed.
-- The New York Times
Tennessee VW plant to idle for 2 weeks
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. -- Volkswagen will idle a Tennessee plant for two weeks this spring, amid slowing demand for its Passat sedan.
The Chattanooga Times Free Press reported that the Chattanooga plant will have a non-production period in March, dedicated to training hourly employees and retooling the plant to boost production of the Atlas SUV, followed by another period in April that will involve a mandatory shutdown.
Chattanooga plant spokesman Keith King said the market is shifting from sedans and passenger cars to "family-friendly SUVs," and the plant needs to correct course.
The company said SUVs accounted for 54 percent of all Volkswagen of America sales last month. Volkswagen officials have floated assembling a potential five-seat SUV at the Chattanooga plant, along with electric vehicle production.
King said no one will be laid off.
-- The Associated Press
600 currency-mining computers stolen
REYKJAVIK, Iceland -- Some 600 computers used to "mine" bitcoin and other virtual currencies have been stolen from data centers in Iceland in what police say is the biggest series of thefts ever in the North Atlantic island nation.
Some 11 people were arrested, including a security guard, in what Icelandic media have dubbed the "Big Bitcoin Heist." A judge at the Reykjanes District Court on Friday ordered two people to remain in custody.
The powerful computers, which have not yet been found, are worth almost $2 million. But if the stolen equipment is used for its original purpose -- to create new bitcoins -- the thieves could turn a massive profit in an untraceable currency without ever selling the items.
"This is a grand theft on a scale unseen before," said Olafur Helgi Kjartansson, the police commissioner on the southwestern Reykjanes peninsula, where two of the burglaries took place. "Everything points to this being a highly organized crime."
Three of four burglaries took place in December and a fourth took place in January, but authorities did not make the news public earlier in hopes of tracking down the thieves.
-- The Associated Press
6 people indicted in $50M stock fraud
U.S. prosecutors lifted the veil on a $50 million international stock-manipulation scam that got shut down after the culprits suggested to an undercover FBI agent that they buy a Picasso to launder illicit profits.
It's the "only market that is unregulated," one of the wrongdoers boasted in a conversation that was secretly recorded, U.S. prosecutors said as they handed down an indictment in Brooklyn, N.Y., against six people Friday.
The ill-fated art deal was just one part of a scam that sprawled from the gilded Mayfair neighborhood in London to the island nation of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. The perpetrators range from a U.K. stockbroker with hundreds of millions of dollars under management to a bank in Budapest, and the prosecution shows penny stocks continue to attract scrutiny from regulators across the globe.
During the fraud, which ran from March 2014 to last month, the defendants conspired to conceal the ownership and control of publicly traded companies in the U.S. and manipulated the price and trading volume of the stocks, in what were essentially "pump-and-dump" scams, prosecutors said.
-- Bloomberg News
Business on 03/03/2018