HVAC and electrical contractor Comfort Systems (NYSE:FIX) will be reporting earnings tomorrow afternoon. Here’s what to look for.
Comfort Systems missed analysts’ revenue expectations by 1.7% last quarter, reporting revenues of $1.81 billion, up 31.5% year on year. It was a mixed quarter for the company, with a solid beat of analysts’ adjusted operating income estimates but a miss of analysts’ backlog estimates.
Is Comfort Systems a buy or sell going into earnings? Read our full analysis here, it’s free.
This quarter, analysts are expecting Comfort Systems’s revenue to grow 30.4% year on year to $1.77 billion, improving from the 21.5% increase it recorded in the same quarter last year. Adjusted earnings are expected to come in at $3.67 per share.
Analysts covering the company have generally reconfirmed their estimates over the last 30 days, suggesting they anticipate the business to stay the course heading into earnings. Comfort Systems has only missed Wall Street’s revenue estimates once over the last two years, exceeding top-line expectations by 4.5% on average.
Looking at Comfort Systems’s peers in the construction and maintenance services segment, some have already reported their Q4 results, giving us a hint as to what we can expect. Construction Partners delivered year-on-year revenue growth of 41.6%, beating analysts’ expectations by 9.7%, and Matrix Service reported revenues up 6.9%, topping estimates by 1.1%. Construction Partners traded down 3.6% following the results while Matrix Service’s stock price was unchanged.
Read our full analysis of Construction Partners’s results here and Matrix Service’s results here.
Stocks generally had a good 2024. The Fed fought high inflation and won without sending the economy into a recession, otherwise lovingly known as a soft landing. The US Central Bank is now cutting rates. That, plus the election of Donald Trump in November 2024, sent markets even higher, and while some of the construction and maintenance services stocks have shown solid performance, the group has generally underperformed, with share prices down 4.2% on average over the last month. Comfort Systems is down 25.6% during the same time and is heading into earnings with an average analyst price target of $545 (compared to the current share price of $393.59).
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