The following is an excerpt from this week’s Earnings Trends article. To see the full report, please click here.
Closing the Books on Q4 Earnings Season
With the 2013 Q4 Earnings reporting season now mostly behind us, it is fair to say that this earnings season was no better or worse than what we have been seeing in the last few quarters. In some respects, the Q4 earnings season was an improvement over the recent past.
Specifically, total earnings for the S&P 500 reached a new all-time quarterly record and even earnings growth for the quarter was the highest of the year (even after accounting for easy comparisons). Positive surprises started off on the weak side, but even those turned out to be better than what we had in the earlier quarters.
Where Q4 was no different from other recent reporting cycles was in terms of top-line growth and company guidance. Revenue growth has been a challenge for companies for quite some time and we didn’t see any improvement on that front in Q4 either.
Guidance has been no better – it has been week for more than a year now and Q4 provided no improvement on that front. Part of the guidance weakness is likely a function of management’s need for expectations management. The need for conservatism aside, one has to be extremely cynical to believe that management teams would guide lower while knowing that their business outlook was stable, if not improving. Weather provided a good excuse for many companies as well, with Gap (GPS) and DuPont (DD) as the latest to cite this year’s tough winter in guiding lower for Q1.
The 2013 Q4 Scorecard
The earnings season is almost over, with results from 496 S&P 500 members already out. Total earnings for these companies are up +9.2% from the same period last year, with 64.3% beating earnings expectations with a median surprise of +2.4%. Total revenues for these companies are barely in the positive, up only +0.7%, with 56.0% beating revenue expectations with a median surprise of 0.6%.
The +9.2 % ‘headline’ total earnings growth rate definitely looks fairly strong, particularly when compared to the growth rate for this same group of 496 companies in the last few quarters. Easy comparisons for three companies – Bank of America (BAC), Verizon (VZ), and Travelers (TRV) – account for a big part of the strong Q4 earnings growth. Exclude these three and total earnings growth for the S&P 500 companies that have reported drops by almost half. Performance on the revenue front is notably sub-par relative to recent quarters, dragged down by weakness in the Finance and Energy sectors.
The composite picture for Q4 – combining the results for the 496 companies that have reported already with the 4 still to come – is for earnings growth of +9.1%. This will be the highest quarterly growth pace of 2013, with easy comparisons playing a non-trivial role propping up the growth rate. But it’s not all easy comparisons, as total earnings for the index are on track to reach a new all-time quarterly record.
Trends on the estimate revision front have been negative for a while, but we could afford to overlook such details in the Fed-inspired rally. It will be interesting to see if investors will continue to shrug estimate cuts in the post-QE world.
Key Points
- Total earnings for the 496 S&P 500 companies that have reported results are up +9.2%, with 64.3% beating earnings expectations. Revenues for these companies are up +0.7%, with a revenue ‘beat ratio’ of 56.0%.
- Easy comparisons for Bank of America, Verizon and Travelers account for most of the growth thus far. Excluding these three companies, the earnings growth rate drops to +5.5%, which is comparable to what this same group of companies have achieved in recent quarters.
- Revenue growth at this stage is lower than what we have seen from this same group of companies in Q3 and other recent quarters, dragged down by weak top-line growth numbers from the Energy and Finance sectors. Excluding these two sectors, the revenue growth picture is still weak, but not so starkly.
- Total earnings in Q4 are on track to reach a new all-time quarterly record, surpassing the record reached just the preceding quarter.
- Easy comparisons, particularly for the Finance sector, account for a big part of the Q4 growth. Total earnings for the Finance sector are expected to be up +22.8%. Excluding Finance, total earnings growth for the S&P 500 drops to +6.4%.
- Guidance has overwhelmingly been negative in recent quarters and the trend has largely remained in place in the Q4 reporting season as well. As a result, estimates for 2014 Q1 and beyond have been coming down as the earnings season has unfolded.
- The bottom-up ‘EPS’ estimate for the S&P 500 for 2014 currently stands at $116.47, while the top-down estimate for the same is currently at $117.25. For 2015, the bottom-up estimate remains $129.77.
To see the full Earnings Trends PDF, please click here.
BANK OF AMER CP (BAC): Free Stock Analysis Report
DU PONT (EI) DE (DD): Free Stock Analysis Report
GAP INC (GPS): Free Stock Analysis Report
PRUDENTIAL FINL (PRU): Free Stock Analysis Report
TRAVELERS COS (TRV): Free Stock Analysis Report
VERIZON COMM (VZ): Free Stock Analysis Report
