Buyers liked what Nova Lifestyle Inc. was selling at last month’s Las Vegas Market, a major trade show for the furniture industry. Trade publication Furniture Today even named one of the Commerce manufacturer’s pieces one of the hits of the show.
That news helped boost Nova’s stock price last week, and perhaps showed that money spent on designing and marketing new products was worth a financial hit last quarter.
Nova shares jumped 19 percent for the week ended Sept. 2 to close at $2.30, making it one of the top gainers on the LABJ Stock Index. (See page 38.) The gains helped erase some of the losses Nova stock suffered during last month’s market correction and after a second-quarter earnings report that showed the company swinging to a loss.
At Las Vegas Market, Nova showed off more than 40 new designs from its midcentury collection under its furniture label Diamond Sofa. It also showcased its newly created Smart Health Bed from its Smart Health Furniture line, which is able to monitor, record and deliver data directly form the bed to key medical care providers.
All of those new products help explain why Nova, despite growing sales, lost money in this year’s second quarter after being profitable in the same period last year. The company reported sales of $29 million for the quarter, an increase of 13 percent from the year-ago period, but it posted a net loss of $140,000, compared with net income of $3.4 million in last year’s second quarter.
Tawny Lam, Nova’s president, pointed to the company’s growing list of new products – and the marketing push to get those products into stores – as the reason for the dip in profits.
“We had to compromise margin a bit to gain more square footage in retail stores,” she said.
The move, she added, has helped as Nova has seen greater attention from retailers, especially in the Midwest, a market the company initially had a hard time penetrating.
Nova Lifestyle, founded in 2003, operates furniture manufacturing plants in China that produce products sold by Nova, furniture retailers and Swedish furniture giant Ikea.
