Stifel, Nicolaus Cuts Rating on Furniture Brands, Cites Challenging Environment<\/p>\n
NEW YORK (AP) — A Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. analyst on Friday cut his rating on Furniture Brands International Inc., saying the retailer of Lane, Thomasville and other furniture brands has few options in light of a difficult industry environment.
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John A. Baugh in a client note cut his rating on the stock to “Sell” from “Hold.”<\/p>\n
“Our downgrade reflects our growing concerns that the weakness in housing will continue to dampen furniture sales and that a strategic restructuring will be difficult given the current environment,” wrote Baugh.<\/p>\n
The analyst also noted weak near-term demand for furniture, which is tied to a lagging home building industry.<\/p>\n
He said domestic furniture makers are increasingly becoming “middle men,” and are importing and distributing Chinese-made products, which hurts value-generating potential.<\/p>\n
While the St. Louis-based company has hinted at changes in its strategic direction, Baugh is not optimistic about prospects, including spin-offs of its more successful brand names. He also said the company’s 4.4 percent dividend could be threatened by operating losses.<\/p>\n
Shares closed at $14.50 Thursday, near its 52-week low of $14.30.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Stifel, Nicolaus Cuts Rating on Furniture Brands, Cites Challenging Environment NEW YORK (AP) — A Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. analyst on Friday cut his rating on Furniture Brands International Inc., saying the retailer of Lane, Thomasville and other furniture brands has few options in light of a difficult industry environment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-furniture-world-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4045\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}