October is my favorite time of the year. The weather is starting to cool down, baseball playoffs are going on, and earnings season is just beginning. Kicking off earnings season in the health-related field is blood-testing diagnostic-equipment maker Immucor
Immucor has a strange fiscal year, so yesterday's announced results are from its first quarter 2007. Back in May, Immucor guided for its fiscal 2007 revenues to be in the range of $204 million to $212 million. It appears to be on its way towards this goal of 11%-18% revenue growth over fiscal year 2006, with $51 million in revenues coming in during this most recent quarter.
One of Immucor's long-term goals is to achieve gross margins of more than 70% by the first quarter of 2009 (mostly through product price increases), and with gross margins hitting 68% this quarter, the company should have no problem hitting this mark.
|
Q1 2006 |
Gross Mar-gins |
Q1 2007 |
Gross Mar-gins |
Year-over-year Reve-nue Change |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Tra-ditional Reagents |
$31.3 |
69% |
$37.5 |
74% |
20% |
|
Pro-prietary Reagents |
$7.9 |
80% |
$9.2 |
80% |
16% |
|
Instru-ments |
$2.1 |
-75%** |
$3.3 |
-31%** |
57% |
|
Total Revenue |
$42 |
63% |
$51 |
68% |
20% |
**Negative due to forward timing of instrument revenue recognition but current timing of costs.
On the valuation front, after the 11% increase in the price of shares in the past two days, Immucor is trading at a forward P/E ratio of approximately 34 times earnings for the company's fiscal year 2007. This isn't exactly cheap, but nor is it particularly expensive for a company that has a predictable revenue base and will grow earnings per share from $0.56 per share in the past year to $0.69-$0.74 in the upcoming fiscal year.
It is worth watching to see how Immucor copes with the retirement of its CEO last month, but most likely everything should proceed as normal, since the company has had a strong management team in place for awhile and is operating in an industry in which revenues are predictable and usually known well in advance. Investors in shares of Immucor should hope the new CEO can keep up the company's string of earnings and share price growth that has been occurring for the past five years.
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Fool contributor Brian Lawler can't wait to watch his Oakland A's win the World Series and does not own shares of any company mentioned in this article. The Fool has a disclosure policy .
