Railway infrastructure company L.B. Foster (NASDAQ:FSTR) will be reporting results tomorrow morning. Here’s what you need to know.
L.B. Foster missed analysts’ revenue expectations by 3.4% last quarter, reporting revenues of $137.5 million, down 5.4% year on year. It was a strong quarter for the company, with an impressive beat of analysts’ EPS estimates and a solid beat of analysts’ EBITDA estimates.
Is L.B. Foster a buy or sell going into earnings? Read our full analysis here, it’s free.
This quarter, analysts are expecting L.B. Foster’s revenue to decline 3% year on year to $130.8 million, a further deceleration from the 1.7% decrease it recorded in the same quarter last year.
Analysts covering the company have generally reconfirmed their estimates over the last 30 days, suggesting they anticipate the business to stay the course heading into earnings. L.B. Foster has only missed Wall Street’s revenue estimates once over the last two years, exceeding top-line expectations by 4.4% on average.
Looking at L.B. Foster’s peers in the general industrial machinery segment, some have already reported their Q4 results, giving us a hint as to what we can expect. Luxfer delivered year-on-year revenue growth of 7.8%, beating analysts’ expectations by 15.5%, and GE Aerospace reported revenues up 14.3%, topping estimates by 13.7%. Luxfer traded down 6.5% following the results while GE Aerospace was up 4.5%.
Read our full analysis of Luxfer’s results here and GE Aerospace’s results here.
Stocks, especially growth stocks where cash flows further in the future are more important to the story, had a good 2024. An economic soft landing (so far), the start of the Fed's rate cutting campaign, and the election of Donald Trump were positives for the market, and while some of the general industrial machinery stocks have shown solid performance, the group has generally underperformed, with share prices down 4.9% on average over the last month. L.B. Foster’s stock price was unchanged during the same time and is heading into earnings with an average analyst price target of $35 (compared to the current share price of $27.45).
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