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Home Depot broke a two-year slump in same store sales during the fourth quarter as customer demand improved in a housing market that has been buffeted by soaring mortgage rates and a scarcity of homes up for sale.Revenue for the Atlanta company climbed to $39.7 billion from $34.79 billion. Analysts polled by FactSet were calling for $39.15 billion.Home Depot Inc. said Tuesday that the extra week in the quarter added approximately $2.5 billion in sales for the period.Sales at stores open at least a year, a key indicator of a retailer’s health, edged up 0.8%. In the U.S., comparable store sales rose 1.3%. It is the first quarterly increase since January 2023 and much better than the 1.5% decline expected on Wall Street.The extra week in the quarter was not included in the same-store sales results.“The fact that US comparable sales are back in the black after declining for eight quarters or two years is a very clear win for Home Depot, and it suggests that the home improvement market as a whole might finally be reaching the nadir of its more sluggish performance,” Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData, wrote Tuesday.However, Home Depot said Tuesday that it expects per-share earnings to decline about 2% this year on sales growth of approximately 2.8%.Shares slipped about 2% before the opening bell.Customer transactions rose 7.6% in the quarter. The amount shoppers spent climbed slightly to $89.11 per average ticket from $88.87 in the prior-year period.“Our fourth quarter results exceeded our expectations as we saw greater engagement in home improvement spend, despite ongoing pressure on large remodeling projects,” said Chair and CEO Ted Decker said in a statement. “Throughout the year, we remained steadfast in our investments across our strategic initiatives to position ourselves for continued success, despite uncertain macroeconomic conditions and a higher interest rate environment that impacted home improvement demand.”Home improvement retailers like Home Depot have contended with homeowners putting off bigger projects due to higher borrowing costs and lingering concerns about inflation.The U.S. housing market has been in a sales slump dating back to 2022, when mortgage rates began to climb from pandemic-era lows. Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes fell last month as rising mortgage rates and prices put off many would-be homebuyers despite a wider selection of properties on the market.Sales fell 4.9% in January from December to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.08 million units, the National Association of Realtors said last week. Home prices increased on an annual basis for the 19th consecutive month. The national median sales price rose 4.8% in January from a year earlier to $396,900.Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes fell last year to their lowest level in nearly 30 years.Home Depot earned $3 billion, or $3.02 per share, for the three months ended February 2. A year earlier it earned $2.8 billion, or $2.82 per share.Removing certain items, earnings were $3.13 per share. That’s better than the $3.04 per share that Wall Street anticipated. Michelle Chapman, AP Business Writer
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E-Commerce
The airline industry is notoriously hard to decarbonize: large jets traveling long distances cant feasibly use batteries, and sustainable aviation fuel is still only produced in tiny volumes. As airlines explore a range of options, United Airlines Ventures Sustainable Flight Fund just invested in one possible solutiona system that uses crushed rocks to capture CO2 for use in fuel or to store underground. The fund announced today that it invested an unspecified amount in Heirloom, a company that uses a powder made from limestone to pull CO2 from the air, relying on the material’s natural ability to absorb the greenhouse gas. At a facility in Californias Central Valley, robots stack trays of the limestone powder into tall stacks exposed to outdoor air. Then the powder is heated in furnaces to release the CO2 so it can be used or stored. United also now has an agreement with Heirloom that gives it the right to buy up to half a million tons of carbon dioxide removal from the startup. We can either sequester it and track it as a carbon removal credit, or we can use it for [sustainable aviation fuel], says Andrew Chang, managing director at United Airlines Ventures. [Photo: Heirloom] The investors liked the basic simplicity of the technology. “We understand how limestone can capture and release CO2,” Chang says. “It is not a novel, unproven technology or catalyst or chemical pathway. It works: Heat it and cool it and it’ll lock and unlock CO2.” Several other companies are paying Heirloom for the service of carbon removal to offset emissions, including Microsoft, which has a long-term contract to buy as much as 315,000 metric tons of CO2 removal from the startup. If the captured CO2 is combined with green hydrogen, it can be made into fuel that can be used on existing planes. Some other sustainable aviation fuel is limited because of the feedstockmaking jet fuel from corn, for example, poses environmental challenges because of the amount of land that’s needed to grow it. (United has separately invested in biofuels made from corn, along with several other approaches.) But CO2 has a supply advantage: There’s more than enough extra CO2 in the atmosphere to meet the industry’s needs. Some startups, including Twelve and Infinium, are now beginning to scale up production of CO2-based sustainable aviation fuel. The carbon footprint is as much as 94% less than conventional jet fuel. (If airlines also pay Heirloom to remove CO2 and store it, that can help offset the remaining carbon footprint.) Right now, this type of sustainable aviation fuel is two to four times as expensive as traditional fuel, though as airlines work on long-term plans to cut emissions by 2050, there’s a path to eventual price parity. The same approach could be used to cut emissions in other hard-to-decarbonize industries, like cargo shipping. United’s investment will help Heirloom scale up production faster. “The funding will be used to continue to drive down the cost of the technology, develop additional projects, and provide the funding needed to subsequently access infrastructure capital,” says Heirloom spokesperson Scott Coriell. The startup is focused on what it calls “deployment-led innovation,” using real-world installations to help it iterate and reduce costs. “As we continue to build larger projects, costs will come down and the market will grow,” he says. “The critical objective to scale [direct air capture] is to repeat this cycle again and again.” Ultimately, though huge volumes of captured CO2 could be used to make fuel, the carbon removal industry will have to grow even faster to deal with the problem of CO2 in the atmosphere; even as companies cut emissions, pulling CO2 out of the air is necessary to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Around a trillion extra tons of CO2 have been added to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, and the number keeps growing. As it’s captured, much of it will be stored. “We believe that over time, the vast majority of CO2 will end up underground,” Coriell says. “Even in a world where aviation, and other hard-to-abate industries, transition to cleaner fuels, there will still be billions of tons of CO2 emissions that will need to be abated each year.”
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E-Commerce
An annual United Nations conference on biodiversity that ran out of time last year will resume its work Tuesday in Rome with money at the top of the agenda.That is, how to spend what’s been pledged so farand how to raise a lot more to help preserve plant and animal life on Earth.The talks in Colombia known as COP16 yielded some significant outcomes before they broke up in November, including an agreement that requires companies that benefit from genetic resources in naturesay, by developing medicines from rainforest plantsto share the benefits. And steps were taken to give Indigenous peoples and local communities a stronger voice in conservation matters.But two weeks turned out to be not enough time to get everything done.The Cali talks followed the historic 2022 COP15 accord in Montreal, which included 23 measures aimed at protecting biodiversity. Those included putting 30% of the planet and 30% of degraded ecosystems under protection by 2030, known as the Global Biodiversity Framework.“Montreal was about the ‘what’what are we all working towards together?” said Georgina Chandler, head of policy and campaigns for the Zoological Society London. “Cali was supposed to focus on the ‘how’putting the plans and the financing in place to ensure we can actually implement this framework.”“They eventually lost a quorum because people simply went home,” said Linda Krueger of The Nature Conservancy, who is in Rome for the two days of talks. “And so now we’re having to finish these last critical decisions, which are some of the the nitty-gritty decisions on financing, on resource mobilization, and on the planning and monitoring and reporting requirements under the Global Biodiversity Framework.”The overall financial aim was to achieve $20 billion a year in the fund by 2025, and then $30 billion by 2030. So far, only $383 million had been pledged as of November, from 12 nations or subnations: Austria, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Norway, Province of Québec, Spain, and the United Kingdom.Participants will discuss establishing a “global financing instrument for biodiversity” intended to effectively distribute the money raised. And a big part of the talks will be about raising more money. ‘Completely off track’ on larger financial goal Chandler and Kruger both said the finance points at Colombia’s talks were particularly contentious.“It’s really about how do we collect the money and how do we get it distributed fairly, get it to the ground where it’s needed most, so that that’s really the core issue,” said Kruger.Oscar Soria, chief executive of The Common Initiative, a think tank specializing in global economic and environmental policy, was pessimistic about raising a great deal more money.“We are completely off track in terms of achieving that money,” Soria said. Key sources of biodiversity finance are shrinking or disappearing, he said.“What was supposed to be a good Colombian telenovela in which people will actually bring the right resources, and the happy ending of bringing their money, could actually end up being a tragic Italian opera, where no one actually agrees to anything and everyone loses,” Soria said.Susana Muhamad, Colombia’s former environment minister and the COP16 president, said she’s hopeful of “a good message from Rome.”“That message is that still, even with a very fragmented geopolitical landscape, with a world increasingly in conflict, we can still get an agreement on some fundamental issues,” Muhamad said in a statement. “And one of the most important is the need to protect life in this crisis of climate change and biodiversity.”Global wildlife populations have plunged on average by 73% in 50 years, according to an October report from the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London.“Biodiversity is basically essential to our livelihoods and well-being,” Chandler said. “It’s essential to the the air we breathe, the water we drink, rainfall that food systems rely on, protecting us from increasing temperatures and increasing storm occurrences as well.”Chandler said deforestation in the Amazon has far-reaching impacts across South America, just as it does in the Congo Basin and other major biodiverse regions worldwide.“We know that has an impact on rainfall, on food systems, on soil integrity in other countries. So it’s not just something that’s kind of small and isolated. It’s a widespread problem,” she said. The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org. Steven Grattan, Associated Press
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