NorthWestern Earnings Preview

Motley Fool Staff
Updated

NorthWestern (NYS: NWE) will look to avoid missing estimates for the fourth consecutive quarter when its earnings are released. The company will unveil its latest earnings on Thursday. NorthWestern provides electricity and natural gas in Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska.

What analysts say:

  • Buy, sell, or hold?: Analysts strongly back NorthWestern, with four of seven rating it a buy and the remainder rating it a hold. Analysts like NorthWestern better than competitor Black Hills overall. NorthWestern's rating hasn't changed over the past three months.

  • Revenue forecasts: On average, analysts predict $293.3 million in revenue this quarter. That would represent a rise of 0.5% from the year-ago quarter.

  • Wall Street earnings expectations: The average analyst estimate is earnings of $0.74 per share. Estimates range from $0.72 to $0.80.

What our community says:
CAPS All-Stars are strongly backing the stock, with 91.3% assigning it an outperform rating. Most of the community is in line with the All-Stars, with 88.3% giving it a rating of outperform. Fools are bullish on NorthWestern, though the message boards have been quiet lately with only 20 posts in the past 30 days. The bullish CAPS rating of five out of five stars for NorthWestern outpaces Fool enthusiasm for the company.

Management:
Revenue has now gone up for three straight quarters.

Now let's get some insight into how efficient management is at running the business. Margins are a representation of how efficiently a company captures portions of sales dollars. NorthWestern's gross margins, which reflect the total sales revenue retained after costs, have been rising year-over-year for the last four quarters. See how NorthWestern has been doing for the last four quarters:

Quarter

Q3

Q2

Q1

Q4

Gross Margin

59.8%

56.2%

52.1%

51.9%

Net Margin

6.1%

4.4%

9.6%

7.7%

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Earnings estimates provided by Zacks.

At the time thisarticle was published

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