Why Celanese Corporation (CE) Went Down Last Week

We recently compiled a list of the 10 Stocks That Underperformed Last Week. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Celanese Corporation (NYSE:CE) stands against the other stocks.

Wall Street’s main indices ended in a bloodbath on Friday, as investors soured on a flurry of macroeconomic factors such as concerns over a slowing economy and a sticky inflation that tempered buying appetite.

Friday’s finish saw the Dow Jones decline by 1.69 percent, the S&P drop by 1.71 percent, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq nosedive by 2.20 percent.

Ten companies, in particular, were heavily hit, registering mostly double-digit losses on a week-on-week basis.

We have listed 10 names that performed poorly last week and detailed the reasons behind their declines. Please note that shares performances were based on the companies’ closing prices last Friday, February 21, as against their prices on February 14, or a week earlier.

To come up with last week’s biggest losers, we considered only the stocks with $2 billion in market capitalization and $5 million in daily trading volume.

A laboratory full of vials, tubes and Bunsen burners, with a scientist in the center examining a chemical.

Celanese Corporation (NYSE:CE)

Shares of Celanese Corporation (NYSE:CE) plunged by 22 percent last week, closing Friday’s trading at $52.76 apiece versus the $68.06 registered on February 14 as investor sentiment was dampened by a pessimistic outlook for the year coupled with dismal earnings performance in 2024.

Last year, Celanese Corporation (NYSE:CE) swung to a net loss of $1.5 billion, reversing a net income of $1.96 billion in 2023, as operating loss ended at $697 million versus an operating income of $1.69 billion in the same comparable period.

For the fourth quarter alone net loss stood at $1.9 billion, a reversal of its $259-million net income in the same period last year. Net sales, however, declined by 7.7 percent to $2.37 billion from $2.57 billion year-on-year.

According to the company, it expects the sequential demand and pricing challenges experienced in the fourth quarter to be largely unchanged in the first quarter of the year.

Overall CE ranks 4th on our list of the stocks that underperformed last week. While we acknowledge the potential of CE as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is as promising as CE but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.

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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.