LB - This Is How Much Worse Things Got for Victoria's Secret Last Quarter
Things were rough for most nonessential retailers in March and April, thanks to coronavirus-related shutdowns. For L Brands (NYSE: LB) and its Victoria's Secret business, though, they were downright horrible. Total sales at the lingerie brand fell 46% year over year for the fiscal first quarter that ended on May 2, leading it rather deep into the red during the three-month stretch in question.
This of course makes the impending sale, spinoff, or public offering (we still don't know which) of Victoria's Secret an even tougher task. Who would want to own an already struggling lingerie retailer that may have been further damaged by COVID-19? Private-equity firm Sycamore Partners certainly didn't. After it had agreed to buy a little more than half of Victoria's Secret in February, before the novel coronavirus made landfall in the United States, L Brands let Sycamore off the hook earlier this month. This brings L Brands back to square one: trying to figure out how to most effectively shed the increasingly struggling lingerie name.
Doing that was never going to be easy, but it just became much more difficult.