TJX sells Bob's Stores, updates guidance

FRAMINGHAM, Mass. TJX announced that it has sold Bob’s Stores to private equity firms Versa Capital Management and Crystal Capital. Terms of the sale were not disclosed.

Carol Meyrowitz, president and ceo of TJX stated, “While we continue to believe Bob’s Stores has great potential and an excellent organization, our decision to sell the business reflects our vision to grow TJX as a global, off-price company. We believe that focusing on the significant opportunities to expand the domestic and international presence of our core, off-price concepts is the right strategy for us at this time. Bob’s Stores has made a great deal of progress in improving its comparable store sales, operating results and cash flow over the past two years. We are sincerely grateful for the hard work and commitment of the Bob’s Stores team, and we wish them much future success.” 

As a result of this sale and reclassification of Bob’s Stores to discontinued operations, the company is updating its guidance to reflect income from continuing operations, which will exclude the impact of the sale of Bob’s Stores and its operating results. The company now expects full year fiscal 2009 diluted earnings per share from continuing operations to be in the range of $2.30 to $2.35, which represents an increase over prior guidance for diluted earnings per share due to the reclassification of Bob’s Stores results to discontinued operations.