ALLETE Earnings Preview

Investors hope ALLETE (NYSE: ALE  ) will top analyst estimates once again after beating predictions by $0.26 in the previous quarter. The company will unveil its latest earnings on Friday. ALLETE, together with its subsidiaries, is engaged in the generation, transmission, and distribution of electric power in the United States.

What analysts say:

• Buy, sell, or hold? Analysts strongly back ALLETE, with three of four rating it a buy and the remainder rating it a hold. Analysts like ALLETE better than competitor CH Energy Group overall. Analysts still rate the stock a moderate buy, but they are a bit more wary about it compared with three months ago.
• Revenue forecasts: On average, analysts predict $223 million in revenue this quarter. That would represent a rise of 5.6% from the year-ago quarter.
• Wall Street earnings expectations: The average analyst estimate is earnings of $0.47 per share. Estimates range from $0.42 to $0.53.

What our community says:
CAPS All Stars are solidly backing the stock with 93.1% awarding it an "outperform" rating. The community at large agrees with the All Stars with 83% assigning it a rating of "outperform." Fools have embraced ALLETE, though the message boards have been quiet lately with only 27 posts in the past 30 days. Despite the majority sentiment in favor of ALLETE, the stock has a middling CAPS rating of three out of five stars.

Management:
ALLETE's profit has risen year over year by an average of 40.4%. Revenue has now gone up for three straight 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 gross and net margins over the past four quarters.

Quarter	Q1	Q4	Q3	Q2
Gross Margin	30.2%	18.2%	24.7%	24.4%
Net Margin	15.4%	5.6%	8.7%	9.2%

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