Fastenal's profit rises on demand, pricing in 'nice preview' of Q1 earnings
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Fastenal (NASDAQ:FAST) climbed ~2% Wednesday after reporting better than expected Q1 earnings that may indicate a good quarter for other manufacturing and construction companies reporting later in the quarter.
Fastenal is considered an earnings bellwether because it supplies basic materials such as fasteners to industrial and construction companies.
The company said earnings rose 28% Y/Y to $269.6M from $210.6M a year earlier, on a 20% sales increase attributed to continued improvement in business activity; fastener sales, which represent about a third of overall sales, jumped 25% on a daily basis from a year earlier.
Q1 gross profit margins improved to 46.6% from 45.4% in the prior-year period, helped by fewer bulk sales of its safety products for COVID-19 applications, which generally carried lower margins, and as the company said it was able to pass along cost increases to customers and manage labor cost inflation.
One earnings report does not solve all investor worries about inflation and profit margins, but "this is a nice preview for the rest of the industrial landscape," said Edward Jones analyst Jeff Windau, who rates Fastenal as a Hold.
Fastenal is "still a great company, but still at a high price," Daniel Jones writes in an analysis posted recently on Seeking Alpha.