Passers-by walk near an entrance to a Home Depot home improvement store Sunday, Feb. 21, 2021, in Boston. The Home Depot’s fiscal fourth-quarter sales surged 25% as the home improvement chain continues to meet the demands of consumers stuck at home and a resilient housing market. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
Shopping carts are lined up at The Home Depot store on Monday, Feb. 22, 2021, in Cornelius, N.C. The Home Depot’s fiscal fourth-quarter sales surged 25% as the home improvement chain continues to meet the demands of consumers stuck at home and a resilient housing market. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)
The housing market is extremely hot, one of the few economic bright spots for the U.S. economy, and Home Depot is in the middle of it, reporting sales exceeding $132 billion in 2020.
In the final quarter of the year, sales surged 25% and on Tuesday, the nation's biggest home improvement chain boosted its quarterly dividend 10%, to $1.65 per share.
Revenue rose to $32.26 billion from $25.78 billion, topping Wall Street expectations of $30.66 billion, according to a survey of analysts by Zacks Investment Research.
Global sales at stores open at least a year, a key indicator of a retailer's health, climbed 24.5%, and by 25% if only U.S. stores are counted.
With millions working and attending school remotely, many families have decided bigger homes, or at least different homes, are the answer. That has pushed sales of homes, and home supplies, though the roof. On Friday the National Association of Realtors said existing U.S. home sales in January soared 23.7% from a year earlier.
Home Depot Inc. earned $2.86 billion, or $2.65 per diluted share, for the three months ended Jan. 31 compared with $2.48 billion, or $2.28 per diluted share, a year earlier.
Earnings, adjusted for costs related to mergers and acquisitions, were $2.74 per share. That handily beat the $2.63 per share Wall Street was calling for.
The Atlanta company continues to withhold guidance for 2021, like many others, due to the ongoing uncertainty related to the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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7 Cloud Computing Stocks to Lift Your Portfolio to New HeightsCloud computing sounds complicated, and it has become more sophisticated as it evolves. However, the basic idea behind the cloud is the same. The “cloud” is a euphemistic term for the delivery of different services via the internet. In its early days, the cloud was used exclusively for data storage. Here’s an easy example of why this was important.
Back when the internet was cutting its teeth, I worked in marketing communications. The need to comply with Total Quality Control Systems (TQCS) for our largest clients meant we had to save every version of our files. Every. Single. One.
Now imagine that you’re producing a 120-page product catalog complete with photos and charts. Your hard drive is burning up just thinking about it. Yet that “data” had to be stored somewhere. And so we had a virtual server farm to try to warehouse all these graphic intensive (and memory sucking) files until we could archive them.
Other than the storage nightmare, consider that it was a pain to work remotely. You could copy a file from the server, but then were you working on the right file? I’m sure at least one person is reading this who remembers this pain.
The cloud takes that away. Cloud computing allows you to store files on a secure, remote server that everyone can access anywhere they have an internet connection. But it’s become so much more than that. Cloud computing now gives businesses a platform from which they can create applications and software. If that sounds confusing, I hope to simplify it in this presentation.
To help you understand which cloud computing stocks, you may want to add to your portfolio, and we’ve created this special presentation. These are seven of the cloud computing stocks that will continue to grow with the sector.
View the "7 Cloud Computing Stocks to Lift Your Portfolio to New Heights".
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