What happened
Shares of employer-sponsored fertility benefits manager Progyny (PGNY 1.10%) are up a bouncing baby 26.8% (as of 12:10 p.m. EDT) after the company reported a quadrupling in quarterly profit in its Q1 2020 earnings report last night.
Wall Street analysts had forecast that the fertility specialist would earn just $0.02 per share (still twice last year's haul) on sales of $71.8 million. In fact, Progyny earned twice what the analysts had expected -- $0.04 per diluted share -- and eclipsed sales estimates, too -- $81 million booked.
Image source: Getty Images.
So what
Progyny's business was not unaffected by the COVID-19 crisis that struck in Q1. To the contrary, "Our members' access to care was meaningfully disrupted during the first quarter," said CEO David Schlanger. Despite the pandemic, however, Progyny managed to grow its sales 72% year over year -- and quadruple its profit.
Importantly, the implication here seems to be that Progyny would have done even better had the coronavirus not happened, and investors like the sound of that -- a lot.
Now what
More good news: The company says it is "well-positioned to successfully manage COVID-related impacts" going forward, and clinics in its network "have implemented, or are currently implementing, safety protocols and other necessary measures in order to be up and running for their full range of treatments over the course of the next several weeks."
Already Progyny is seeing "week-to-week acceleration in both the volume of patient appointments as well as the dispensing of fertility medications." In the coming quarters, says company president Pete Anevski, Progyny is "looking forward to our clinics building back up to their pre-COVID patient volumes," and keeping this growth story going.
Granted, Q2 results are forecast to be only about $45 million in revenues, with a net loss on the bottom line. Seeing as Wall Street was predicting sales of only $15 million and change, however, investors are taking even this "bad" news as pretty darn good.
