What happened
Sturdy real estate company Cushman & Wakefield (CWK -0.62%) wasn't a very sturdy investment on Friday. The company's stock took a nasty hit, falling by nearly 11% a day after it published its latest set of quarterly results. That decline didn't mirror the generally good performance of many other stocks on the week's last day; the bellwether S&P 500 index gained nearly 2% as Cushman & Wakefield's shares dived.
So what
Cushman & Wakefield's first-quarter figures were unveiled after market hours Thursday. These revealed that the company earned slightly under $2.25 billion in revenue; this was down 4% from its Q1 2022 take. More discouragingly, the real estate mainstay plunged into the red on the bottom line; its non-GAAP (adjusted) net loss was $9.4 million, or $0.04 per share, against the year-ago profit of $109 million.
Those headline numbers were quite some distance away from the average analyst estimates.
Collectively, pundits following Cushman & Wakefield stock were modeling only $1.49 billion in revenue. Far less happily, they believed the company would post an adjusted net result well in the black at $0.22 per share.
Now what
Citing macroeconomic headwinds as a major influence on its quarterly performance, Cushman & Wakefield said the situation could have been worse. It quoted CEO John Forrester as saying that "our global diversified portfolio, especially in our recurring revenue service lines, helped mitigate the impact of lower demand for transactional services in our industry."
The company did not provide any guidance in its earnings report.
