What Do Analysts Think About Westmoreland Coal Company’s (NASDAQ:WLB) Earnings Outlook?
Westmoreland Coal Company’s (NASDAQ:WLB) most recent earnings announcement in December 2017 suggested company earnings became less negative compared to the previous year’s level – great news for investors Today I want to provide a brief commentary on how market analysts perceive Westmoreland Coal’s earnings growth trajectory over the next couple of years and whether the future looks brighter. I will be looking at earnings excluding extraordinary items to exclude one-off activities to get a better understanding of the underlying drivers of earnings. Check out our latest analysis for Westmoreland Coal
Analysts’ outlook for next year seems positive, with earnings becoming less negative, reaching -US$17.00M in 2019. However, earnings are expected to fall off in the following year, falling to -US$23.00M in 2020 and -US$35.96M in 2021.
Although it’s informative knowing the growth year by year relative to today’s value, it may be more insightful determining the rate at which the business is moving every year, on average. The benefit of this technique is that it removes the impact of near term flucuations and accounts for the overarching direction of Westmoreland Coal’s earnings trajectory over time, be more volatile. To calculate this rate, I’ve inserted a line of best fit through analyst consensus of forecasted earnings. The slope of this line is the rate of earnings growth, which in this case is 27.13%. This means that, we can expect Westmoreland Coal will grow its earnings by 27.13% every year for the next couple of years.
Next Steps:
For Westmoreland Coal, I’ve put together three relevant aspects you should further examine:
Financial Health: Does it have a healthy balance sheet? Take a look at our free balance sheet analysis with six simple checks on key factors like leverage and risk.
Valuation: What is WLB worth today? Is the stock undervalued, even when its growth outlook is factored into its intrinsic value? The intrinsic value infographic in our free research report helps visualize whether WLB is currently mispriced by the market.
Other High-Growth Alternatives: Are there other high-growth stocks you could be holding instead of WLB? Explore our interactive list of stocks with large growth potential to get an idea of what else is out there you may be missing!
To help readers see pass the short term volatility of the financial market, we aim to bring you a long-term focused research analysis purely driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis does not factor in the latest price sensitive company announcements.
The author is an independent contributor and at the time of publication had no position in the stocks mentioned.
