If you’re a Whirlpool stockholder and have been watching the stock rise to its highest level in more than two years, you’re probably scratching your head in total consternation today as the stock has been slammed by the marketplace, falling nearly 5-percent on the day in the closing hour of Wall Street play.
Apparently the whole bloodbath for Whirlpool, Lowe’s, Home Depot and others has been precipitated by that juggernaut called Amazon.com threatening to take on the appliance market next in its bid to be all things to all people everywhere.
Wall Street has been reporting that Amazon is working a deal with Sears Holdings to get into the appliance market in a dramatic fashion, and competitors have been hit hard as a result.
CNBC reported this afternoon, “The market cap loss in Home Depot, Lowe’s, Whirlpool and Best Buy was about $13-billion at midday.” Meanwhile, they report that Amazon stock was up slightly and Sears had jumped by some 13-percent.
Sears reported today that they will sell their Kenmore-branded appliances on Amazon.com. It’s a bit of a head-scratcher when it comes to Whirlpool’s sharp fall-off in heavy trading inasmuch as Whirlpool is actually the source for roughly half of all Kenmore-branded appliances in the first place.
Some analysts characterized the big sell off as an overreaction, while other analysts predicted that the move to link up with Amazon would “prove beneficial for the Kenmore brand.”
What’s even more ironic is that in this week’s Barron’s report, one portfolio manager for a major firm suggested that Whirlpool “is a bargain at $192 a share and could jump as much as 35-percent to $260 a share in the next year.”
Whirlpool stock had started the day today at $196.35 a share, but dropped sharply within the first hour of trading on the news about the Sears/Amazon deal. It dipped as low as $188.37 a share before bouncing back above $189, and headed into the final half hour of trading was hovering around the $189 a share mark, still off by more than $9.00 from Wednesday’s close. Stay tuned.
