Balchem Earnings Preview

Motley Fool Staff
Updated

Watch Balchem's (NAS: BCPC) earnings report to see if it can beat analyst expectations for the fifth consecutive quarter. The company will unveil its latest earnings on Monday, Feb. 27. Balchem is engaged in the development, manufacture, and marketing of performance ingredients and products for the food, nutritional, feed, pharmaceutical, and medical sterilization industries.

What analysts say:

  • Buy, sell, or hold?: Analysts are split on Balchem, as equal numbers rate the stock a buy, sell, and hold. Analysts don't like Balchem as much as competitor Innophos overall. Two out of three analysts rate Innophos a buy compared to one of three for Balchem. Analysts haven't adjusted their rating of Balchem for the past three months.

  • Revenue forecasts: On average, analysts predict $77.4 million in revenue this quarter. That would represent a rise of 10.9% from the year-ago quarter.

  • Wall Street earnings expectations: The average analyst estimate is earnings of $0.35 per share. Estimates range from $0.35 to $0.36.

What our community says:
CAPS All-Stars are strongly supporting the stock, with 100% assigning it an "outperform" rating. The community at large agrees with the All-Stars, with 97.8% giving it a rating of "outperform." Balchem has a bullish CAPS rating of five out of five stars that is about on par with the Fool community assessment.

Management:
Balchem's profit has risen year over year by an average of 25.9% over the past five quarters.

Now let's get some insight into how efficient management is at running the business. Traditionally, margins represent the efficiency with which companies capture portions of sales dollars. Balchem's gross margin, which reflects the total sales revenue retained after costs, has been slipping year over year for the last three quarters. Here is how Balchem has been doing for the last four quarters:

Quarter

Q3

Q2

Q1

Q4

Gross Margin

30.4%

29.1%

28.5%

30.5%

Operating Margin

20.4%

18.8%

18.2%

19.8%

Net Margin

14.5%

12.8%

12.2%

13.5%

One final thing: If you want to keep tabs on Balchem movements, and for more analysis on the company, make sure you add it to your Watchlist.

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Earnings estimates provided by Zacks.

At the time thisarticle was published

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