Hooker Furniture Corp (HOFT)

Hooker Furniture is ranked among the nation's top 10 largest furniture companies. It deals in imports and manufacturing of residential wood, metal and upholstered furniture. Recently the company announced the closure of its last remaining wood furniture facility. The same marked Hooker’s exit from domestic wood furniture manufacturing. This shift results from an ongoing drift of decreased order and sales rates for the company's domestically produced wood furniture and increased demand and sales for its imported wood and metal furniture. Company’s shrunken domestic wood business vs. its import wood business will positively impact its margins in the coming future.


Company reported a sales decline in its recent two-month, but on the other hand it witnessed a 10% jump in the internal orders compared to last year same period. This gives some positive hope for the future sales trend of the company and it has a remaining year time to prove its sales performance. Company recently announced that it intents to purchase Sam Moore Furniture, from La-Z-Boy in a strategic move to further diversify into fabric-covered upholstered seating. Sam Moore has a similar dealer base and is a niche- and item-oriented line like Hooker, which makes this proposed acquisition a good match for the company. This acquisition will surely help boost up company’s sales.


At present the major concern remains is company’s year-by-year shrinking net income but the Company seems to be on it to solve this problem. It has already started out by bringing down its inventory item count and thus bringing the warehouse space down. It has vacated one warehouse already and plans to vacate another one or two, by the end of this year. Its possible acquisition and internal cost curbing should lead the company positively through the soft retail environment.