CompUSA’s Retail Sales Fall Shy of Last-Quarter Target

DALLAS —  CompUSA Inc., the largest U.S. personal computer retail chain, Thursday blamed weak holiday sales for a disappointingly small rise in sales in the last three months of 1996.

Chief Executive James Halpin said sales growth had been fairly solid but suddenly softened in the last two weeks of December. The company said sales from stores open at least a year, or same-store sales, rose 1.5% in the last three months of 1996.

Most industry analysts had expected CompUSA’s sales for the three months ended Dec. 28 to rise about 3%, and the company’s stock closed at $16.25 Thursday, down $4.50 on the New York Stock Exchange.

Halpin said in an interview he was “not happy” with the downturn in consumer sales but said other computer retailers were suffering even more and that CompUSA would continue to gain market share.

Best Buy Co. last month reported its first quarterly loss in more than a decade, and Tandy Corp. this week said it was selling its chain of Incredible Universe superstores and closing 19 of its 108 Computer City stores in North America.

CompUSA’s poor retail sales performance in the last three months underlined the mounting evidence of a sharp slide in the growth of personal computer sales because the Dallas-based company had consistently bettered market expectations over the last two years.

Goldman Sachs responded by cutting its rating on CompUSA to “market perform” from “outperform.”

Halpin said he thought holiday sales were slow because many customers preferred to wait for the introduction next week of Intel’s new multimedia MMX chip before upgrading their computers.