Pet food company Freshpet (NASDAQ:FRPT) will be reporting earnings tomorrow before market hours. Here’s what you need to know.
Freshpet beat analysts’ revenue expectations by 2.1% last quarter, reporting revenues of $253.4 million, up 26.3% year on year. It was an exceptional quarter for the company, with a solid beat of analysts’ EPS estimates and an impressive beat of analysts’ EBITDA estimates.
Is Freshpet a buy or sell going into earnings? Read our full analysis here, it’s free.
This quarter, analysts are expecting Freshpet’s revenue to grow 22.7% year on year to $264.4 million, slowing from the 29.9% increase it recorded in the same quarter last year. Adjusted earnings are expected to come in at $0.46 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. Freshpet has missed Wall Street’s revenue estimates twice over the last two years.
Looking at Freshpet’s peers in the perishable food segment, some have already reported their Q4 results, giving us a hint as to what we can expect. Tyson Foods delivered year-on-year revenue growth of 2.3%, beating analysts’ expectations by 1%, and Cal-Maine reported revenues up 82.5%, topping estimates by 27%. Tyson Foods’s stock price was unchanged after the results, and Cal-Maine’s price followed a similar reaction.
Read our full analysis of Tyson Foods’s results here and Cal-Maine’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 perishable food stocks have shown solid performance, the group has generally underperformed, with share prices down 3.9% on average over the last month. Freshpet is down 15% during the same time and is heading into earnings with an average analyst price target of $165.43 (compared to the current share price of $136.62).
Today’s young investors won’t have read the timeless lessons in Gorilla Game: Picking Winners In High Technology because it was written more than 20 years ago when Microsoft and Apple were first establishing their supremacy. But if we apply the same principles, then enterprise software stocks leveraging their own generative AI capabilities may well be the Gorillas of the future. So, in that spirit, we are excited to present our Special Free Report on a profitable, fast-growing enterprise software stock that is already riding the automation wave and looking to catch the generative AI next.
