Overstock.com Reports Q4 and Fiscal Year 2017 Results

Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK) has announced its financial and fiscal results for the year ended December 31, 2017.

As quoted in the press release:

Dear Owners,

Your business has two sides: ecommerce and blockchain.

• We announced on our last earnings call that we had engaged Guggenheim to consider strategic alternatives, one of them being a sale of our ecommerce assets. This work is ongoing and we will provide an update when appropriate. That said, our philosophy has always been to run every asset like we intend to own it forever and our strategy discussion will be framed in that mindset. Our ecommerce business had its second annual pre-tax loss ($25 million) in nine years faced with a competitor called Wayfair running a pre-tax loss of $244 million for 2017. In fact, in the last four years, while our retail business has had pre-tax income of $30 million, Wayfair has lost $663 million: this is creating no small amount of margin compression. Because I do not want to watch this play out over years, I believe it is time for us to respond in kind. Thus, I am announcing that we are for the first time adopting the classic internet “growth strategy” I have previously eschewed: high growth, negative GAAP net income, funded out of our negative cash conversion cycle. We have already turned on the jets, and will demonstrate this year that our growth engine is far more efficient.
• Because of this change in strategy and recent losses, we have changed the treatment of our deferred tax assets. We are providing a full valuation allowance on our deferred tax assets, causing a $59 million non-cash tax charge in 2017. Additionally, the effect of Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act has created another $25 million non-cash tax charge in 2017, primarily due to the reduction of the corporate tax rate.
• Our blockchain enterprises under Medici are progressing nicely. We have a strong head start in a number of products under development. DeSoto, Bitt, and tZERO are most known, but there are some other developments within Medici that bear watching.

Our earnings call is going to be unusually robust and informative, geared for the analysts and shareholders trying to make sense out of a complex tale. We will also discuss our strategy. I strongly recommend anyone trying to understand this complex tale start by hitting this link to the recording of the call and slides which will be live two hours after the call’s completion: https://www.overstock.com/2017-FY-earnings.

Click here to read the full press release.