CR Bard’s Earnings Guidance

Seeking Alpha has the transcript for CR Bard‘s ($BCR) earnings call. There are lots of good details about their business, but I wanted to highlight Bard’s guidance for Q4.

Moving to financial guidance. For Q4, we are expecting constant currency sales growth between 0% and 2%. Obviously, the sales environment is pretty challenging, particularly in the U.S. and we’re trying to be appropriately cautious in this tough environment. Our Q4 sales expectations would put our full year constant currency sales growth between 3% and 4%.

From an EPS standpoint, excluding items affecting comparability, we see the fourth quarter in the range of $1.64 to $1.68, reflecting the $0.05 of dilution from Neomend that Tim mentioned. So with the deterioration in the U.S. market that we’ve seen during the year, we’re now aiming at the low end of our original EPS growth target for the year, excluding the new dilution from the Neomend acquisition. As for the renewal of the R&D tax credit, we likely won’t have clarity on that until the very end of the year. We still estimate that the credit is worth about $4 million, or just less than 1% of EPS.

Q4 guidance of $1.64 to $1.68 per share is frankly lower than I was expecting, even adjusting for the five cents for Neomend.

Before, Bard said it was expecting 3% to 4% growth for this year. Using the $6.40 per share they made last year as a base, that comes to $6.59 to $6.65 per share. Now they see full-year earnings at $6.56 to $6.60 per share not including the costs of Neomend.

This is disappointing but still within the range of decent business operations.

Posted by on October 24th, 2012 at 10:53 am


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