Fulton Earnings Preview

Motley Fool Staff
Updated

Investors hope Fulton (NAS: FULT) will top analyst estimates once again after beating predictions by $0.01 in the previous quarter. The company will unveil its latest earnings on Tuesday. Fulton Financial is a multibank financial holding company that provides a full range of banking and financial services to businesses and consumers through its wholly owned banking subsidiaries.

What analysts say:

  • Buy, sell, or hold?: Analysts strongly back Fulton, with eight of 12 rating it a buy and the remainder rating it a hold. Analysts like Fulton better than competitor National Penn Bancshares overall. Analysts' rating of Fulton has stayed constant from three months prior.

  • Revenue forecasts: On average, analysts predict $145.8 million in revenue this quarter. That would represent a rise of 0.8% from the year-ago quarter.

  • Wall Street earnings expectations: The average analyst estimate is earnings of $0.20 per share. Estimates range from $0.18 to $0.22.

What our community says:
Most CAPS All-Stars are skeptical of Fulton's prospects, with 55.7% awarding it an underperform rating. The community is split on the stock with 53.8% Fools assigning it an outperform rating and 46.3% an underperform rating. Fools are skeptical of Fulton, though the message boards have been quiet lately with only 50 posts in the past 30 days. Fulton's bearish CAPS rating of two out of five stars falls short of the Fool community sentiment.

Management:
Fulton's profit has risen year over year by an average of 17.8% over the past five quarters. Revenue has fallen for the past three quarters.

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 net margins over the past four quarters.

Quarter

Q3

Q2

Q1

Q4

Net Margin

17.6%

16.4%

15.1%

13.5%

For all our Fulton-specific analysis, including earnings and beyond, add Fulton to My Watchlist.

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Earnings estimates provided by Zacks.

At the time thisarticle was published

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