The Australian June 30 profit reporting season wraps up today and tomorrow with the stragglers, tiddlers and loss-makers lodging their reports. Tonight is the cut off and those that stagger in tomorrow morning will represent the backlog from today.
By tomorrow afternoon we should know the companies that haven’t lodged reports and are now in danger of having their shares suspended. Some will plead time constraints, others will just cop the suspension because they are moribund, broke, or just zombies without an active board or management.
So the season so far as the major companies are concerned, ended on Friday with a solid result from Harvey Norman, a questionable one from Slater and Gordon and a change of chairman, weak profits and rotten sales data from Woolworths.
The AMP’s chief economist, Dr Shane Oliver says although results have been a little disappointing they have not been disastrous. “43% of companies have beaten expectations and 59% have seen their profits rise from a year ago which is okay, but it’s well down on what we have been seeing in the last few reporting seasons.”
“Reflecting the slightly disappointing results and soft guidance only 48% of companies saw their share price outperform the share market the day their results were released which is down on the experience of the last few years.
“While Australian listed company profits fell nearly 2% over the last financial year this was driven by a 28% slump in resources profits with the rest of the market seeing profit growth of around 7% driven in particular by general industrials, building materials, retail and health care stocks although the latter disappointed relative to expectations.
“Key themes have been constrained revenue growth, strength in companies connected to home building and NSW and solid growth in dividends with 57% of companies raising dividends.
“Weak guidance saw profit growth expectations for 2015-16 revised down to around 2%, but again with the strength coming from non-resources companies which should continue to benefit from low interest rates and the lower $A," Dr Oliver wrote at the weekend.
Another feature absent at June 30 were buybacks, companies such as Telstra and Amcor announced buybacks at the halfway mark in February (perhaps they suspected some pressure on their share prices in 2015.
