Avnet Earnings Preview

While Avnet (NYSE: AVT  ) missed estimates last quarter, investors hope that it will bounce back and outpace Wall Street expectations this quarter. The company will unveil its latest earnings on Thursday, Jan. 26. Avnet, together with its consolidated subsidiaries, is an industrial distributor of electronic components, enterprise computer and storage products, and embedded subsystems.

What analysts say:

• Buy, sell, or hold?: Analysts strongly back Avnet, with seven of nine rating it a buy and the remainder rating it a hold. Analysts don't like Avnet as much as competitor Arrow Electronics overall.
• Revenue forecasts: On average, analysts predict $6.74 billion in revenue this quarter. That would represent a decline of 0.4% from the year-ago quarter.
• Wall Street earnings expectations: The average analyst estimate is earnings of $1.04 per share. Estimates range from $1.01 to $1.06.

What our community says:
CAPS All-Stars are solidly behind the stock with 98.3% assigning it an "outperform" rating. The community at large concurs with the All-Stars with 93.8% giving it a rating of "outperform." Fools are bullish on Avnet, though the message boards have been quiet lately with only 87 posts in the past 30 days. Avnet has a bullish CAPS rating of five out of five stars that is about on par with the Fool community assessment.

Management:
Avnet's profit has risen year over year by an average of 34.4% over the past five quarters. 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, operating, and net margins over the past four quarters.

Quarter	Q1	Q4	Q3	Q2
Gross Margin	11.7%	11.9%	11.8%	11.4%
Operating Margin	3.5%	3.9%	3.6%	3.4%
Net Margin	2.2%	3.5%	2.3%	2.1%

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Earnings estimates provided by Zacks.