J&J’s Earnings Beat the Street

Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) reported fourth-quarter earnings of $1.02 a share which was five cents higher than Street forecasts.

Fourth-quarter sales rose 9% to $16.55 billion, also exceeding Wall Street expectations. Favorable currency-exchange comparisons contributed 4.5 percentage points of the growth, reversing the currency headwinds that J&J and other multinational drug companies had faced in previous quarters.
J&J’s biggest unit, medical devices and diagnostics, had sales of $6.31 billion, up 11.8%. Pharmaceutical sales rose 5.4% to $5.99 billion, while consumer-product sales rose 10.2% to $4.25 billion.
For the full year, J&J said it earned $4.63 a share excluding items, which exceeded the forecast range J&J had provided in October, of earnings between $4.54 and $4.59 a share. Full-year sales were $61.9 billion, in line with the forecast range of $61 billion and $62 billion.
J&J said it expects 2010 earnings of $4.85 to $4.95 a share, excluding certain items.

That means that JNJ is going for about 12.8 times this year’s earnings estimates which is about 13% less than the S&P 500.

Posted by on January 26th, 2010 at 11:31 am


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