Unilever (UN, $53.85) Misses Sales Estimate in Q4; But Registers Healthy Full-Year Profit Growth
Unilever reported lower-than-expected sales growth in the fourth quarter, owing to weakness in Latin American markets.
The consumer goods company’s underlying sales increased +2.9% year-over-year in the quarter , compared to consensus estimate of +3.5%. According to Unilever, currency devaluations and rising commodity costs were headwinds to demand. The company indicated that hyperinflation in Argentina led to a more than 50 percent spike in prices - which shrunk demand volume by more than -20%. In developed markets, underlying sales in grew only +0.4% in the quarter.
For the full year 2018, Unilever had a 3.1% increase in underlying sales, which was in line with expectations. Underlying earnings were 2.36 euros per share for the year, exceeding analysts’ estimates of 2.31 per share. Net profit in full-year was 9.8 billion euros ($11.21 billion), compared to 6.5 billion euros in 2017.
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Sergey Savastiouk, Ph.D. has a degree in Applied Mathematics from Moscow University and has extensive experience as an entrepreneur, investor, manager, and mathematician. His professional expertise is in applied mathematics, mathematical modeling, system and pattern analysis, and software and hardware system integration. He has served as the CEO of several hi-tech start-up companies and nonprofit organizations, which has given him proven capabilities in business strategy for high-tech start-up companies, market assessment, company formation, team building, product development, marketing, and sales. He has published numerous articles in journals and magazines on related fields. As a retail investor, he spent 15 years developing his proprietary trading and quantitative algorithms (now Tickeron’s A.I.), which brought him significant returns in trading the stock market. His current work and goal in founding Tickeron is to bring professional, sophisticated stock market analysis capabilities to retail investors via an easy-to-use interface.
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