Specialty food company Lancaster Colony (NASDAQ:LANC) will be announcing earnings results tomorrow before market hours. Here’s what you need to know.
Lancaster Colony met analysts’ revenue expectations last quarter, reporting revenues of $466.6 million, up 1.1% year on year. It was a slower quarter for the company, with a miss of analysts’ EBITDA and EPS estimates.
Is Lancaster Colony a buy or sell going into earnings? Read our full analysis here, it’s free.
This quarter, analysts are expecting Lancaster Colony’s revenue to grow 1.9% year on year to $495.3 million, in line with the 1.8% increase it recorded in the same quarter last year. Adjusted earnings are expected to come in at $1.94 per share.
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. Lancaster Colony has missed Wall Street’s revenue estimates six times over the last two years.
Looking at Lancaster Colony’s peers in the consumer staples segment, some have already reported their Q4 results, giving us a hint as to what we can expect. Simply Good Foods delivered year-on-year revenue growth of 10.6%, missing analysts’ expectations by 1.9%, and McCormick reported revenues up 2.6%, topping estimates by 1.2%. Simply Good Foods traded down 6.5% following the results while McCormick was up 2.2%.
Read our full analysis of Simply Good Foods’s results here and McCormick’s results here.
Stocks generally had a good 2024. The Fed fought high inflation and won without sending the economy into a recession, otherwise lovingly known as a soft landing. The US Central Band is now cutting rates. That, plus the election of Donald Trump in November 2024, sent markets even higher, and while some of the consumer staples stocks have shown solid performance, the group has generally underpeformed, with share prices down 3.4% on average over the last month. Lancaster Colony’s stock price was unchanged during the same time and is heading into earnings with an average analyst price target of $197.60 (compared to the current share price of $167.66).
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