Seacor Holdings Earnings Preview

Seacor Holdings (NYSE: CKH) hasn't been able to establish an earnings trend, bouncing between beating and falling short of estimates during the past fiscal year. The company will unveil its latest earnings on Friday. Seacor Holdings is in the business of owning, operating, investing in, and marketing equipment, mainly in the offshore oil and gas and marine transportation industries.

What analysts say:

• Buy, sell, or hold?: Analysts don't like Seacor Holdings as much as competitor GulfMark Offshore overall. Four out of four analysts rate GulfMark Offshore a buy compared to zero of one for Seacor Holdings. Analysts haven't adjusted their rating of Seacor Holdings for the past three months.
• Revenue forecasts: On average, analysts predict $548.5 million in revenue this quarter. That would represent a decline of 5.5% from the year-ago quarter.
• Wall Street earnings expectations: The average analyst estimate is earnings of $1.71 per share.

What our community says:
CAPS All-Stars are enthusiastically backing the stock, with 96.8% assigning it an outperform rating. The community at large backs the All-Stars, with 95.6% giving it a rating of outperform. Fools are gung-ho about Seacor Holdings, though the message boards have been quiet lately with only 23 posts in the past 30 days. Even with a robust four out of five stars, Seacor Holdings' CAPS rating falls a little short of the community's upbeat outlook.

Management:
Seacor Holdings' profit has risen year-over-year by an average of 12.2% over the past five quarters. Revenue has fallen in the past two quarters. The company's gross margin shrank by 13.4 percentage points in the last quarter. Revenue fell 41.7% while cost of sales fell 30.5% to $475.2 million from a year earlier.

Now let's look at how efficient management is at running the business. Traditionally, margins serve as an illustration of how efficiently a company captures portions of sales dollars. Seacor Holdings' gross margins, which reflect the total sales revenue that the company retains after costs decreased year-over-year in the last two quarters. Here is how Seacor Holdings has been doing for the last four quarters:

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Earnings estimates provided by Zacks.