Jul. 24--Utah's Overstock.com saw a 7 percent decline in its revenue during the second quarter of its 2009 fiscal year but that didn't stop the well-known online discount retailer from posting a profit for the period.

The company reported Thursday that revenue for its quarter that ended June 30 was $176 million compared with $189 million for the same period a year earlier.

Still, Overstock.com reported net income of $389,000 for the quarter, or 2 cents per share. A year ago, the company recorded a second-quarter loss of $7.4 million, or 34 cents per share.

Overstock.com's revenue has declined in each of its past three quarters but the company recorded a profit in two of those three periods.

"I'm not going to make predictions about when you will see positive top line [revenue] growth emerge," Patrick Byrne, Overstock.com's chief executive, said Thursday during a conference call where he discussed the company's second-quarter results.

Byrne said the right thing to do for the business is to continue to "focus on getting the overall economics good, sustainable, making the nice cash machine before we worry too much about what the [revenue] growth is."

Morningstar analyst Larry Witt in a research note Thursday pointed out that, despite the weakness in revenue, the company was able to improve its operating and gross margins and decrease its expenditures for marketing and technology.

"Revenue growth may grab headlines, but

we're more interested in Overstock's ability to turn a profit," Witt said, indicating he expects the current recession to prolong the company's quest for sustained profitability.

Two weeks ago, Forrester Research Inc. and Shop.org, a division of the National Retail Federation, reported that U.S. online shopping sales rose 12 percent in the second quarter, up slightly from the 11 percent growth in the first three months of 2009.

They found that sales increased for 59 percent of the companies they surveyed, with those reporting more than $100 million in online annual revenue faring better than smaller companies.

Overstock.com's revenue for the first six months of 2009 was $364 million, a 7 percent decline from the first half of the previous year when the company generated revenue of $392 million.

For the first six months of this year, Overstock.com saw a loss of $1.7 million, or 7 cents per share.

Yet that represented a marked improvement over the loss of $12.1 million, or 52 cents per share, recorded in the first half of 2008.

Overstock.com's shares closed Thursday at $14, up 22 cents for the day.

steve@sltrib.com

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