Equipment distributor Watsco (NYSE: WSO) will be reporting results this Tuesday morning. Here’s what investors should know.
Watsco missed analysts’ revenue expectations last quarter, reporting revenues of $2.10 billion, up 2.1% year on year. It was a disappointing quarter for the company, with a significant miss of analysts’ EPS estimates.
Is Watsco a buy or sell going into earnings? Read our full analysis here, it’s free for active Edge members.
This quarter, the market is expecting Watsco’s revenue to grow 7% year on year, a reversal from the 4.3% 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 will stay the course heading into earnings. Watsco has missed Wall Street’s revenue estimates multiple times over the last two years.
Looking at Watsco’s peers in the industrial distributors segment, some have already reported their Q3 results, giving us a hint as to what we can expect. Richardson Electronics delivered year-on-year revenue growth of 18.9%, beating analysts’ expectations by 10.1%, and United Rentals reported revenues up 15.7%, topping estimates by 4.4%. Richardson Electronics’s stock price was unchanged after the results while United Rentals was up 3.3%.
Read our full analysis of Richardson Electronics’s results here and United Rentals’s results here.
Over the past year, investors have repeatedly shifted their focus from one macro narrative to another (AI disruption and AI capex spending to geopolitics, interest rates, and the broader health of the economy). While some of the industrial distributors stocks have shown solid performance in this choppy environment, the group has generally underperformed, with share prices down 4.9% on average over the last month. Watsco is up 3.3% during the same time and is heading into earnings with an average analyst price target of $349.90 (compared to the current share price of $323.68).
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