Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, today reported a 4.5 per cent increase in fourth-quarter profits despite a lackluster Christmas season that tempered growth.
Total sales in the fourth quarter rose to $56.5 billion, up 10 per cent from a year-ago. Sales at stores open a least a year, a key measure of performance, rose 3.1 per cent in the quarter.
"It was a good year but a year that was not quite up to our high Wal-Mart expectations," Mr Lee Scott, Wal-Mart president and chief executive, said in a statement.
Shares of Wal-Mart, which operates about 3,100 stores in the United States and 1,072 stores internationally, ended at $52.36 in Friday's trade on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock has underperformed the index by about 5 per cent in the last 52 weeks.