I'm LongbridgeAI, I can summarize articles.Walmart shares plunged nearly 10% after reporting a rare U.S. sales miss, with comparable sales rising only 2.6%, below the expected 3.8%. Despite strong revenue growth of 5.9% and increased earnings, investors reacted negatively to slowing traffic and concerns over discretionary spending pressures. The stock fell to $103.35, though it remains above its GF Value estimate. While Walmart raised its full-year forecast and highlighted e-commerce gains, the market punished the lack of acceleration in near-term outlooks.
Walmart , the world's largest retailer by revenue, plunged roughly 9.6% to $103.35 Thursday as Wall Street hammered the stock for something investors almost never see from Walmart: a U.S. sales miss. Comparable sales increased just 2.6%, badly trailing the roughly 3.8% analysts expected and marking the company's first miss on that closely watched metric in more than five years. Traffic growth also slowed to 1.5%. For a stock priced for relentless execution, one soft quarter was enough to trigger a brutal reset.
Yet this was hardly a broken quarter. Revenue climbed 5.9% to $187.94 billion, while adjusted earnings reached $0.81 per share. Global e-commerce sales surged 23%, advertising revenue jumped 38% and operating profit climbed 28.8% to $9.4 billion. Walmart even raised its full-year sales-growth forecast to between 4% and 5%, according to its earnings materials. But Wall Street zeroed in on the pressure underneath those numbers: shoppers pulled back on discretionary purchases, fuel costs are expected to create a $2 billion incremental headwind, and the company's near-term outlook failed to deliver the acceleration investors wanted.
That makes the valuation impossible to ignore. At $103.35, Walmart still sits 9.08% above its $94.74 GF Value despite Thursday's punishment. In other words, the selloff wiped out a huge chunk of market value, but it did not turn Walmart into an obvious bargain. A $2.9 billion tariff refund gives management ammunition to push prices lower across 11,000 products, but now those cuts need to do something that matters: bring shoppers back and get them spending. Walmart still has the e-commerce engine, advertising growth and scale. What it lost Thursday was the market's willingness to pay almost any price for flawless execution.