Darling International Earnings Preview

Motley Fool Staff
Updated

Darling International (NYS: DAR) beat estimates by $0.13 last quarter and investors are hoping it can beat them again. The company will unveil its latest earnings on Thursday, August 11. Darling International is a recycler of food and animal by-products and provides grease trap services to food service establishments. It operates within two industry segments: rendering and restaurant services.

What analysts say:

What our community says:
CAPS All-Stars are solidly backing the stock with 98.6% granting it an "outperform" rating. The community at large agrees with the All-Stars, with 97.4% assigning it a rating of "outperform." Fools are keen on Darling International and haven't been shy with their opinions lately, logging 338 posts in the past 30 days. Darling International has a bullish CAPS rating of five out of five stars that echoes the Fool community assessment.

Management:
Darling International's profit has risen year over year by an average of 70.6% over the past five quarters. Revenue has now gone up for three straight quarters. The company boosted its gross margin by 5.5 percentage points in the last quarter. Revenue rose 170.2% while cost of sales rose 150.3% to $301.4 million from a year earlier.

Now let's look at how efficient management is at running the business. Traditionally, margins represent the efficiency with which companies capture portions of sales dollars. The following table shows gross, operating, and net margins over the past four quarters.

Quarter

Q1

Q4

Q3

Q2

Gross Margin

31.5%

28.8%

25.5%

25.5%

Operating Margin

20.0%

10.9%

11.5%

11.4%

Net Margin

10.6%

4.4%

6.7%

6.8%

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At the time thisarticle was published

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