Johnson & Johnson Earns $1.37 Per Share

This morning, Johnson & Johnson ($JNJ) reported first-quarter earnings of $1.37 per share. That beat Wall Street’s consensus by two cents per share. On the top line, J&J’s revenue fell 0.2% to $16.14 billion which was short of Wall Street’s consensus of $16.28 billion. But the best news is that the healthcare giant raised its full-year forecast by two cents per share. The new EPS range is $5.07 to $5.17.

Revenue rose 1.2 for prescription drugs, to $6.13 billion from $6.06 billion, as sales from new medicines made up for lower sales from two medicines that got generic competition last spring, Levaquin for serious infections and Concerta for attention deficit disorder.

But revenue was down in J&J’s other two businesses. Sales of medical devices and diagnostic equipment, the company’s biggest segment, slumped 0.3 percent to $6.41 billion. Consumer product sales fell 2.4 percent, to $3.6 billion, due to the many products still not back in stores due to product recalls.

This earnings report is good news for J&J. The company has run into a mess of problems recently with a seemingly endless series of recalls. I’m glad to see that a new CEO will be taking over at the shareholder meeting on April 26th.

I also expect to see the company announce its 50th-straight dividend increase. The current quarterly dividend is 67 cents per share. I think the new dividend will be 70 cents per share.

Posted by on April 17th, 2012 at 9:14 am


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