If it weren't so frigid where I live -- and throughout most of rest of the country -- I'd drag out my green and yellow Deere & Co. (NYSE:DE) T-shirt and pay homage to yet another U.S. company that beat the pants off analysts' predictions.
For the quarter, Deere earned $243 million, or $0.57 per share. Those numbers compared to $203 million, or $0.48 a year ago. The per-share number easily topped the consensus prediction of $0.19 per share, and indeed even crushed the $0.38-per-share high prediction among the analysts. And if you're keeping percentage scores, the year-over-year income increase totaled roughly 19%. All this occurred in the face of revenue that declined 6% to $4.84 billion.
The results for companies that can be compared to Deere were generally mixed during the recent earnings season. Among other equipment manufacturers, Caterpillar (NYSE:CAT) posted a solid quarter, along with an optimistic outlook, while both Terex (NYSE:TEX), and Manitowoc (NYSE:MTW) registered losses. And for the other industrial companies tied to agriculture -- as, of course, Deere is -- both Monsanto (NYSE:MON) and DuPont (NYSE:DD) produced results relatively close to estimates.
According to Deere's CEO Samuel R. Allen, the company's focus on cost and asset management puts Deere on a strong footing to respond to an improving global economy. As he said, "In our view, positive developments based on the world's prospects for population and economic growth hold great potential and should help our company ..." He also increased the company's earnings estimate for the year to $1.3 billion, from an earlier $900 million.
So keep your eyes on Deere. The company's jump this quarter could be easily outdone in future periods.
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