Teledyne Technologies Earnings Preview

Investors are on the edge of their collective seats, hoping that Teledyne Technologies (NYSE: TDY  ) will top analyst expectations for the fifth consecutive quarter. The company will unveil its latest earnings Thursday. The company provides sophisticated electronic components and subsystems, and instrumentation and communications products, including defense electronics, monitoring, and control instrumentation.

What analysts say:

• Buy, sell, or hold?: Analysts strongly back Teledyne Technologies, with four of seven rating it a buy and the remainder rating it a hold. Analysts like Teledyne Technologies better than competitor Alliant Techsystems overall. That rating hasn't budged in three months as analysts have remained unchanged in their opinion of the stock.
• Revenue forecasts: On average, analysts predict $480 million in revenue this quarter. That would represent a rise of 8.5% from the year-ago quarter.
• Wall Street earnings expectations: The average analyst estimate is earnings of $0.77 per share. Estimates range from $0.74 to $0.80.

What our community says:
CAPS All-Stars are solidly backing the stock with 99% granting it an "outperform" rating. The community at large agrees with the All-Stars with 97.5% assigning it a rating of "outperform." Fools are gung-ho about Teledyne Technologies, though the message boards have been quiet lately with only 74 posts in the past 30 days. Teledyne Technologies has a bullish CAPS rating of five out of five stars that is about on par with the Fool community assessment.

Management:
Teledyne Technologies' profit has risen year over year by an average of 10.4%. The company raised its gross margin by 4.2 percentage points in the last quarter. Revenue rose 6.6% while cost of sales rose 0.3% to $313.1 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	33.1%	31.5%	30.7%	30.0%
Operating Margin	11.7%	14.4%	10.6%	10.3%
Net Margin	6.8%	11.5%	6.8%	6.5%

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

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