Getting long-struggling Sears to stop bleeding cash has been about as easy as closing the U.S. military prison in Cuba, according to CEO Edward Lampert.

Speaking at a shareholders meeting Wednesday, Lampert compared his quest to President Obama’s struggle to close the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay.

It’s “not so easy,” said Lampert, the retailer’s biggest investor. “Our focus right now is to show people that we can get this company back to profitability.”

More than a decade after he merged Sears and the formerly bankrupt Kmart, the 53-year-old Lampert is still trying to find a formula that will lift the chains out their protracted slump. The hedge fund manager has invested in digital operations and a loyalty program, yet the company has posted losses for five years.

It’s Lampert’s intention to return to profit this year, though that’s not a formal forecast, Lampert said at company headquarters in Hoffman Estates, Illinois. To do so, Sears is closing stores “more aggressively.”

Sears fell 6.9 percent to $11.87 at 11:36 a.m. in New York on Thursday. The shares were down 38 percent this year through Wednesday’s close.

Once the biggest U.S. retailer, Sears has been selling and spinning off assets as it continues to use more cash than it generates. Many of its most valuable sites went into a real estate investment trust that brought in $2.7 billion in proceeds last year. The move followed transactions that separated its Lands’ End unit and most of its Canadian business.

Yet the retailer lost $1.1 billion last year, making a total of $8.2 billion in losses since 2012. That prompted the company’s largest shareholder after Lampert to take a more active role.

Bruce Berkowitz, chief investment officer at Fairholme Capital Management, was named to the Sears board in February. While he told his investors that much of the cash burn was voluntary and that he expected it to improve, it “does not build confidence or trust among all of Sears’s constituencies,” he said in February.