Starbucks Corp: Growth and Shares

starbucks corp: The coffee seller said it expects fiscal 2020 earnings-per-share growth to be below its long-term growth target of at least 10%. The current Fact Set consensus for fiscal 2020 EPS of 3.12 implies 10.6% growth over the fiscal 2019 consensus of 2.82, according to Market Watch. At a Starbucks investor gathering in December, Chief Financial Officer Patrick Grismer said that, as a result of the benefit of share repurchases and efforts to cut general and administrative expenses, he expected EPS growth of at least 13% on average for 2020 and 2021. Starbucks Corp. shares SBUX, 0.19% fell 0.7% to close at 96.11, paring earlier losses of as much as 3.9%. Trading volume topped 12.9 million shares, well above the full-day average of about 7.3 million shares, Fact Set data show. On Wednesday, at the Goldman Sachs Global Retailing Conference, Grismer said one very significant headwind to 2020 EPS growth is the effective tax rate, given the one-time nature of the tax benefit realized in 2019. So in the context of a rapidly appreciating share price and given that we have the liquidity to do it, we pulled forward those share repurchases, and we're able to preserve what we had expected by way of an EPS growth contribution to or from the share repurchases, net of the associated interest expense, Grismer said at the Goldman conference, according to a Fact Set transcript. Regarding share repurchases, Grismer said the company chose to pull forward about 2 billion in share repurchases that were originally planned next year to the current fiscal year. (news.financializer.com). As reported in the news.