Target's holiday quarter sales were bad, but not as bad as Wall Street expected, considering the massive data breach that occurred in December.
The discount chain announced Wednesday that sales for the fourth quarter declined by 5.3% from the same quarter a year earlier due in large part to the security breach.
“During the first half of the fourth quarter, our guest-focused holiday merchandising and marketing plans drove better-than-expected sales," Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel said in a statement. "However, results softened meaningfully following our December announcement of a data breach."
See also: How to Check If Hackers Stole Your Data in Massive Target Breach
Target's profit declined by 46% year over year as the retailer incurred a range of expenses for investigating and managing the data breach. In its earnings release, the company noted that additional costs related to the incident "may have a material adverse effect on Target’s results of operations in first quarter and full-year 2014 and future periods."
As bad as that might sound, analysts had actually expected worse. Target reported earnings per share of $0.81 on revenue of $21.5 billion, beating Wall Street estimates for earnings of $0.79 per share on revenue of $21.45 billion.
Target first announced on Dec. 19 that some 40 million debit and credit card accounts may have been compromised as the result of an in-store security breach during the holiday season. The retailer later raised its estimate to as high as 110 million, making it one of the worst security breaches in U.S. history.
The company's stock ticked up by more than 1% in pre-market trading following the earnings release, though it is still well below its price in early December, before news of the data breach came out.

TGT data by YCharts