Actuant Earnings Preview

Actuant (NYSE: ATU  ) beat estimates by $0.03 last quarter, and investors are hoping it can beat them again. The company will unveil its latest earnings on Wednesday. Actuant is a global manufacturer and marketer of a range of industrial products and systems.

What analysts say:

• Buy, sell, or hold?: The majority of analysts back Actuant as a buy. But with 66.7% of analysts rating it a buy, Actuant is still below the mean analyst rating of its nearest seven competitors, which average 75.7% buys. Analysts like Actuant better than competitor Sun Hydraulics overall. Zero out of two analysts rate Sun Hydraulics a buy compared to eight of 12 for Actuant. While analysts still rate the stock a moderate buy, they are a little more optimistic about it compared to three months ago.
• Revenue forecasts: On average, analysts predict $376.3 million in revenue this quarter. That would represent a rise of 18.2% from the year-ago quarter.
• Wall Street earnings expectations: The average analyst estimate is earnings of $0.43 per share. Estimates range from $0.41 to $0.45.

What our community says:
CAPS All-Stars are solidly backing the stock with 99.4% granting it an outperform rating. The community at large concurs with the All-Stars with 98.2% assigning it a rating of outperform. Fools are bullish on Actuant and haven't been shy with their opinions lately, logging 113 posts in the past 30 days. Actuant has a bullish CAPS rating of five out of five stars that is about on par with the Fool community assessment.

Management:
Revenue has now gone up for three straight quarters. The company's gross margin shrank by 4.5 percentage points in the last quarter. Revenue rose 78.1% while cost of sales rose 92.2% to $248.5 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	Q4	Q3	Q2	Q1
Gross Margin	38.4%	39.2%	37.8%	38.3%
Operating Margin	14.1%	14.8%	11.2%	13.1%
Net Margin	10.3%	9.3%	2.4%	8.1%

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Earnings estimates provided by Zacks