Pharmacy chain Walgreens Boots Alliance (NASDAQ:WBA) will be announcing earnings results tomorrow before market hours. Here’s what to expect.
Walgreens beat analysts’ revenue expectations by 5.6% last quarter, reporting revenues of $37.55 billion, up 6% year on year. It was an exceptional quarter for the company, with a solid beat of analysts’ EBITDA estimates and an impressive beat of analysts’ same-store sales estimates.
Is Walgreens a buy or sell going into earnings? Read our full analysis here, it’s free.
This quarter, analysts are expecting Walgreens’s revenue to grow 1.9% year on year to $37.42 billion, slowing from the 10% increase it recorded in the same quarter last year. Adjusted earnings are expected to come in at $0.38 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. Walgreens has a history of exceeding Wall Street’s expectations, beating revenue estimates every single time over the past two years by 3.2% on average.
Looking at Walgreens’s peers in the consumer retail segment, some have already reported their Q4 results, giving us a hint as to what we can expect. CarMax delivered year-on-year revenue growth of 1.2%, beating analysts’ expectations by 2.9%, and Costco reported revenues up 7.5%, in line with consensus estimates. CarMax traded up 3.6% following the results while Costco’s stock price was unchanged.
Read our full analysis of CarMax’s results here and Costco’s results here.
Stocks, especially growth stocks where cash flows further in the future are more important to the story, have 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 consumer retail stocks have shown solid performance, the group has generally underpeformed, with share prices down 5% on average over the last month. Walgreens is down 5.9% during the same time and is heading into earnings with an average analyst price target of $10.43 (compared to the current share price of $9.26).
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