What Are This Buffett Stock's Real Earnings?

LONDON -- Since Tesco (LSE: TSCO.L) recently released its results for the year ended Feb. 25, investors -- including many Fools -- have been trying to come to grips with this FTSE 100 (INDEX: ^FTSE) stock's earnings.

Maybe you're looking at Tesco's earnings for the first time, having simply followed Warren Buffett's lead and bought shares in the company after its profit warning in January.

(By the way, you can discover what price Buffett paid for his Tesco shares in this free report.)

Maybe you're a long-standing shareholder and are puzzled as to why Tesco's earnings per share seem to routinely come in a couple of pence higher than analysts had been forecasting.

What's going on? What are Tesco's "real" earnings?

A multitude of numbers
If you go to the income statement in Tesco's latest accounts, you'll find no fewer than five different EPS numbers, as follows:

Basic EPS amounts are calculated using the number of shares in issue, while diluted EPS also takes account of share options granted to directors and employees. In Tesco's case, as with most large companies, the difference is minimal.

The first two numbers in the table give us basic and diluted EPS for the whole business. However, Tesco put its loss-making Japanese business up for sale during the year, so the second two numbers give us basic and diluted EPS, as if the Japanese operation didn't exist.

Finally, we get an "underlying" diluted EPS number. This excludes not only the Japanese operation, but also certain non-trading and one-off items. The directors believe excluding these items gives "additional useful information for shareholders on underlying trends and performance."

Comparing apples with apples
It's not mandatory for companies to provide underlying EPS, and there are no absolute rules for calculating it. Nevertheless, most companies do give such a number. Furthermore, this underlying -- also called "adjusted" or "normalized" -- EPS is the one many investors rely on when calculating the historic version of the popular price-to-earnings valuation ratio.

Now, there's a crucial thing a lot of investors appear to be unaware of. Any analyst worth his or her salt doesn't just blindly accept the underlying EPS provided by a company. Analysts do their own calculations -- and for good reason. Tesco actually gives the reason in "Note 1" of its accounts: The underlying figure "may not be directly comparable with other companies' adjusted profit measures."

By doing his or her own calculations using a consistent set of rules, an analyst can be sure of having underlying EPS numbers that are directly comparable. Thus, earnings-based valuations such as P/E are also on an apples-with-apples basis, and a comparison of the P/Es of, say, Tesco, Sainsbury (LSE: SBRY.L), and Morrison (LSE: MRW.L) becomes meaningful.

Putting Tesco to the test
The problem for many private investors is that they have neither access to analysts' historic figures nor the time or knowledge to do their own normalized EPS calculations.

Most of the free-data providers used by private investors simply plug the underlying EPS number given by a company into their databases, which means investors are often unwittingly comparing apples with oranges when using trailing P/Es to judge the relative merits of companies.

One exception is Morningstar, whose analysts actually go to the effort of doing their own calculations of normalized EPS.

Let's look at the company-provided and Morningstar-provided EPS numbers for Tesco and the UK's other two listed supermarkets on a trailing 12-month basis and see how the P/Es come out:

On historic P/Es derived from company-provided EPS figures -- which, as we know, may not be directly comparable -- Tesco looks wildly undervalued against its peers. However, on the Morningstar figures, which we can assume have been calculated using a consistent methodology, the difference is considerably less.

As seems to be the case with analysts generally, Morningstar's normalized EPS numbers for Tesco are persistently below those given by the company itself. This is presumably the result of analysts using methodologies for calculating underlying EPS that enable a like-for-like comparison of Tesco with its peers.

The growth-forecast pitfall
Another serious hazard for investors, stemming from the same issues, is misinterpretation of forecast EPS growth.

Let's have a look at the current analysts' consensus forecasts for Tesco and see how EPS growth comes out when taken, on one hand, from the base of the company-provided 37.41 pence historic EPS and, on the other, from the base of the Morningstar's 33.26 pence historic EPS.

* Aggregated from several data providers.

Given what the directors have said about the prospects for the year ahead, the analysts' consensus forecast of 34.7 pence doesn't make much sense against Tesco's historic 37.41 pence, because it gives a substantial 7% fall in EPS. It makes much more sense against Morningstar's historic 33.26 pence, which gives a 4% increase. (I believe Morningstar's 33.26 pence is probably a little below consensus on this occasion and that the consensus for EPS growth is actually nearer 1% to 2%.)

Foolish bottom line
Underlying EPS figures provided by companies are often calculated in different ways. As such, investors may be unwittingly comparing apples with oranges when using historic P/Es to judge the relative merits of companies.

In addition, because analysts do their own calculations of underlying EPS, investors who compare analysts' consensus forecast EPS with the historic EPS provided by companies may arrive at a seriously flawed conclusion about expected EPS growth.

Morningstar's numbers give investors some protection against these pitfalls. In my experience, they're often reasonably close to the analysts' consensus. However, they can sometimes be a long way off, so you need to exercise caution and common sense.

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