Wal-Mart halts share buybacks

The world’s largest retailer, based in Bentonville, Arkansas, has bought back about US$10 billion of the US$15 billion of shares authorized by the board on May 31, 2007, Wal-Mart said in a regulatory filing Tuesday.

The filing comes after Wal-Mart Chief Financial Officer Thomas Schoewe told analysts Oct. 28 the company had decided to “step back on share repurchases.”

Wal-Mart is the best performer among the 30 companies of the Dow Jones Industrial Average this year.

Wal-Mart fell US$1.75, or 3 percent, to US$55.81 Tuesday in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares have climbed 17 percent this year, compared with a decline of 34 percent in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

The stock drop “was an overreaction to the update in the 10Q and the use of the word ‘suspend,’” Joe Feldman, an analyst at Telsey Advisory Group in New York, said Tuesday in a telephone interview. The company’s “prior commentary used words like ‘step back’ and ‘pause.’”

Wal-Mart plans to “let things settle down just a little bit before we re-enter the market,” Schoewe said at an analyst meeting in Rogers, Arkansas in October. “It’s not that we don’t have confidence in our stock.”

Wal-Mart had US$5.92 billion in cash as of the end of the third quarter, less than the US$6.91 billion it had at the end of the second quarter.

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