Ascena Retail Group Inc ($ASNA) Cautious Buy or Hold to $17 Confident Investor Rating: Fair

I am currently going through my Watch List to ensure that each company still deserves to be on the list. Because of the number of companies on my list, I am going to try to knock out 2 per weekday.

Company name Ascena Retail Group Inc
Stock ticker ASNA
Live stock price [stckqut]ASNA[/stckqut]
P/E compared to competitors Good

MANAGEMENT EXECUTION

Employee productivity Poor
Sales growth Good
EPS growth Fair
P/E growth Fair
EBIT growth Fair

ANALYSIS

Confident Investor Rating Fair
Target stock price (TWCA growth scenario) $14.08
Target stock price (averages with growth) $19.53
Target stock price (averages with no growth) $17.12
Target stock price (manual assumptions) $17.86

The following company description is from Google Finance: http://www.google.com/finance?q=asna

Ascena Retail Group, Inc. (Ascena) is a national specialty retailer of apparel for women and teen girls operating, through its wholly owned subsidiaries, the Justice; Lane Bryant; maurices; dressbarn; and Catherines. As of July 28, 2013, the Company operated over 3,900 stores throughout the United States, Puerto Rico and Canada. Ascena operates under five brands: dressbarn, maurices, Catherines, Lane Bryant and Justice. In October 2013, Ascena Retail Group Inc closed the sale of Fig’s, food gift retailer, to Mason Companies, Inc.

 

Confident Investor comments: At this time, I think that a Confident Investor can cautiously invest in Ascena Retail Group Inc as long as the price is correct. Most of the fundamentals of this company are good but there are some concerns. I am removing Ascena from my Watch List as I feel that I have plenty of better performing retail companies.

If you would like to understand how to evaluate companies like I do on this site, please read my book, The Confident Investor.

For owners of my book, “The Confident Investor” I offer the following analysis (you must be logged in to this site as a book owner in order to see the following analysis). If you have registered and cannot see the balance of this article, make sure you are logged in and refresh your browser.
[s2If current_user_can(s2member_level1)]
In order to assist you in using the techniques of this book, the values that I used when calculating the Manual pricing above were:

Stock price at the time of the calculation: $16.75

Growth: 0.12

Current EPS (TTM): $0.96

P/E: 17

Future EPS Calc: $1.69

Future Stock Price Calc: $28.76

Target stock price: $17.85

I hope that this makes you a better investor. [/s2If]

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