What Happened?
Shares of renewable energy and infrastructure solutions provider Gibraltar Industries (NASDAQ:ROCK) jumped 19.4% in the morning session after the company reported impressive fourth-quarter results and provided optimistic full-year revenue, EPS, and EBITDA guidance, which beat analysts' expectations. Despite an 8.1% decline in sales, earnings outperformed significantly during the quarter, as margins improved in the Agtech and Infrastructure segments. Notably, the underwhelming sales growth was due to softness in the Residential and Renewables segments, where demand remained weak. Still, we think this was a decent quarter with some key metrics above expectations.
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What The Market Is Telling Us
Gibraltar’s shares are not very volatile and have only had 6 moves greater than 5% over the last year. Moves this big are rare for Gibraltar and indicate this news significantly impacted the market’s perception of the business.
The biggest move we wrote about over the last year was 4 months ago when the stock dropped 5.6% on the news that the company provided underwhelming preliminary earnings results highlighting headwinds (driven by trade and regulatory uncertainties following ongoing investigations) in the solar industry and a continued slowdown in the residential market. Notably, the company lowered full-year sales guidance to a range of $1,310m - $1,330m (vs. previous guidance of $1,380m - $1,420m). Similarly, full-year non-GAAP EPS guidance was lowered to $4.11 - $4.25 (vs. the previous estimate of $4.57 - $4.82). As a result, some weaknesses are expected to be felt in the third quarter, as Q3'2024 preliminary sales and EPS results fell below Wall Street's expectations. Overall, the updates are concerning and hint at potential challenges in the near term.
Gibraltar is up 14.6% since the beginning of the year, but at $66.95 per share, it is still trading 21.4% below its 52-week high of $85.19 from February 2024. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of Gibraltar’s shares 5 years ago would now be looking at an investment worth $1,217.
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