Stock Market Trends: Garmin Searching for Answers

Shares of Garmin (GRMN) are plummeting 22% to $35 and change, which is a new 52-week low today after it cut its full-year sales and earnings outlook due to poor growth in its navigation market. It also delayed the launch of its smartphone. The company said that consumers are being more cost-conscious that it thought.

For the full year, the company is now projecting profits of $4.13 a share on sales of $3.9 billion. It previously expected profit to exceed $4.40 a share on revenue of more than $4.5 billion. Analysts were expecting earnings of $4.03 on sales of $4.13 billion.

For our subscribers, we did a short profile on the company on June 12 and said the stock had significant downside. Here is a snippet of what we said:

“There is brutal competition in the industry from the likes of TomTom and Navteq just to name a couple. Recently, Apple showed off navigation features on its iPhone, which lopped a few dollars off of GRMN’s stock due to competition fears. These fears might intensify as there is a lot of consolidation going on in the industry…….We see the stock testing its 52-low of $39.75 in the next few months.”

The stock is well below that now, and our subscribers profited handsomely on our call to short it back then. This company will need at least a couple more quarters to get its act together and turn around. The poor economy will only prolong things further.