Dollar General Cuts Financial Outlook Amid Current Economic Climate

(Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Dollar General shares climb as budget shoppers boost sales

The retailer has seen steady consumer demand even as profits get squeezed.

3/13/25 9:10AM

Shares of Dollar General climbed 5% in early trading Thursday after the discount retailer posted mixed fourth-quarter results.

Revenue narrowly topped analysts’ expectations at $10.3 billion. Home products drove the bulk of sales, followed by apparel and seasonal goods. Same-store sales also beat, growing 1.2%.

Earnings per share came in at $0.87, including $0.81 of one-time items like impairment charges and a review of the company’s store portfolio. Analysts polled by FactSet had expected EPS of $1.51. Operating profit sank 49% to $294.2 million, hurt by $232 million in charges tied to store portfolio optimization.

As part of that strategy, Dollar General plans to close 96 of its core stores and 45 Popshelf locations in Q1, while converting six Popshelf stores into its main Dollar General format. Popshelf, which launched in 2020, targets a slightly more upscale bargain shopper with home decor, beauty, and seasonal items at higher price points than the flagship chain. Despite the closures, Dollar General is still in expansion mode: the company opened 725 stores, remodeled 1,621, and relocated 85 last year.

For 2025, Dollar General expects same-store sales growth of 1.2% to 2.2%, roughly in line with Wall Street’s estimate of 1.8%. EPS is projected to land between $5.10 and $5.80, trailing Wall Street’s forecast of $5.83. Shares of rival Dollar Tree also ticked up following the results, and the chain is set to report its own earnings next Wednesday.

Luke Kawa7h

Micron soars after reporting huge Q1 beat, with Q2 sales guidance ahead of every Wall Street analyst’s estimates

Micron completely erased Wednesday’s big losses in after-hours trading after the memory chip specialist posted stellar results for its fiscal Q1 2026 and a much better outlook for the current quarter than Wall Street had anticipated.

For Q1, the company reported:

Revenues: $13.64 billion (estimate: $12.95 billion)
Adjusted earnings per share: $4.78 (estimate: $3.95)

And the Street’s consensus was well ahead of even the upper ranges of the guidance provided by management for the quarter for sales of $12.5 billion (plus or minus $300 million) and $3.75 (plus or minus $0.15).

For Q2, management provided an outlook for adjusted revenues of $18.3 billion to $19.1 billion, and adjusted EPS of $8.22 to $8.62. Wall Street had penciled in revenues of $14.38 billion with adjusted EPS of $4.71.

Even the bottom end of the ranges management provided is well above the top analyst’s estimate for the quarter.

These results may help spark a revival in semi stocks, which have gotten trounced in recent sessions. Hard disk drive sellers Seagate Technology Holdings and Western Digital are also rising in after-hours trading, as is flash memory seller Sandisk.

Micron has been one of the worst performers in the S&P 500 since last Thursday’s record close, down double digits from then until Wednesday close as investors broadly dumped AI names. Prior to that, shares had been on fire amid a bevy of Wall Street price target hikes and surging memory chip prices as demand runs ahead of supply. The AI boom has fueled a spike of immense appetite not only for GPUs and custom chips but also memory chips as well, as data centers also need a boatload of these to store information and feed it to those processors. Micron and its major competitors, SK Hynix and Samsung, have already sold out production for their most advanced high-bandwidth memory offerings for calendar year 2026.

Micron recently announced that it would be exiting its consumer chip business to focus on serving its AI customers.

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Oracle slides on report that data center partner Blue Owl won’t fund $10 billion Michigan facility; company says project is on track without Blue Owl

Oracle shares declined early Wednesday after the Financial Times reported that Blue Owl Capital, the largest funder of Oracle’s data center investment push, will not finance a 1-gigawatt Oracle data center planned for Saline Township, Michigan. The pink-paged periodical reports:

“Blue Owl had been in discussions with lenders and Oracle about investing in the planned 1 gigawatt data centre being built to serve OpenAI in Saline Township, Michigan.

But the agreement will not go forward after negotiations stalled, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The private capital group has been the primary backer for Oracle’s largest data centre projects in the US, investing its own money and raising billions more in debt to build the facilities. Blue Owl typically sets up a special purpose vehicle, which owns the data centre and leases it to Oracle.”

For its part, Oracle told Bloomberg on Wednesday morning that negotiations for a data center project in Michigan are “on schedule” and don’t include Blue Owl.

While not horrible, Wednesday’s drop puts Oracle down 15% so far this week, as the shares continue to be clobbered by rapidly shifting investor sentiment toward lofty AI investment plans.

Oracle is down roughly 45% from the all-time high it hit on September 10, in a plunge that has destroyed more than $400 billion in value. Yowza.

“Blue Owl had been in discussions with lenders and Oracle about investing in the planned 1 gigawatt data centre being built to serve OpenAI in Saline Township, Michigan.

But the agreement will not go forward after negotiations stalled, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The private capital group has been the primary backer for Oracle’s largest data centre projects in the US, investing its own money and raising billions more in debt to build the facilities. Blue Owl typically sets up a special purpose vehicle, which owns the data centre and leases it to Oracle.”