- Walmart delivers Q4 earnings on Tuesday before the open.
- Wall Street expects $1.65 in adjusted EPS.
- Analyst consensus calls for $169.26 billion in revenue.
- The market will focus on the possible Vizio acquisition.
Walmart (WMT) kicks off earnings this week following the Presidents’ Day market holiday on Monday. The largest retailer releases its results for the fourth quarter in Tuesday’s premarket and ahead of Nvidia’s (NVDA) release scheduled for Wednesday.
Besides results and guidance, questions early Tuesday will most likely involve Walmart’s rumored buyout of Vizio for $2 billion, which company executives have remained mum on since The Wall Street Journal reported it last week.
Walmart stock earnings news
Wall Street expects Walmart to earn $1.65 in adjusted earnings per share (EPS) on a record $169.26 billion in sales for the quarter ending in January. This would amount to a 4% increase in revenue but a slight dip from the year prior’s quarter of $1.71 in adjusted EPS.
Walmart has a long track record of beating analyst consensus, and the odds are that it will do so this time as well. JPMorgan said in a recent note that with more than two-thirds of S&P 500 companies having already reported this cycle, 78% of companies have beaten earnings consensus, while 57% have beaten revenue consensus.
Walmart’s advertising business will also get special attention at the earnings call, which comes at 8:00am on February 20. Walmart brought in approximately $3.19 billion in advertising revenue in 2023, while forecasts call for that number to hit $4 billion in 2024.
Also on shareholder and analyst minds will be the impending stock split, which is typically bullish for stocks. On February 26, Walmart plans to hand shareholders three shares for every one currently owned. Based on the current price, this would mean a share value somewhere around $57.
Nvidia FAQs
Nvidia is the leading fabless designer of graphics processing units or GPUs. These sophisticated devices allow computers to better process graphics for display interfaces by accelerating computer memory and RAM. This is especially true in the world of video games, where Nvidia graphics cards became a mainstay of the industry. Additionally, Nvidia is well-known as the creator of its CUDA API that allows developers to create software for a number of industries using its parallel computing platform. Nvidia chips are leading products in the data center, supercomputing and artificial intelligence industries. The company is also viewed as one of the inventors of the system-on-a-chip design.
Current CEO Jensen Huang founded Nvidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in 1993. All three founders were semiconductor engineers, who had previously worked at AMD, Sun Microsystems, IBM and Hewlett-Packard. The team set out to build more proficient GPUs than currently existed in the market and largely succeeded by late 1990s. The company was founded with $40,000 but secured $20 million in funding from Sequoia Capital venture fund early on. Nvidia went public in 1999 under the ticker NVDA. Nvidia became a leading designer of chips to the data center, PC, automotive and mobile markets through its close relationship with Taiwan Semiconductor.
In 2022, Nvidia released its ninth-generation data center GPU called the H100. This GPU is specifically designed with the needs of artificial intelligence applications in mind. For instance, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4 large language models (LLMs) rely on the H100’s high efficiency in parallel processing to execute a high number of commands quickly. The chip is said to speed up networks by six times Nvidia’s previous A100 chip and is based on the new Hopper architecture. The H100 chip contains 80 billion transistors. Nvidia’s market cap reached $1 trillion in May 2023 largely on the promise of its H100 chip becoming the “picks and shovels” of the coming AI revolution.
Long-time CEO Jense Huang has a cult following in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street due to his strict loyalty and determination to build Nvidia into one of the world’s leading companies. Nvidia neary fell apart on several occasions, but each time Huang bet everything on a new technology that turned out to be the ticket to the company’s success. Huang is seen as a visionary in Silicon Valley, and his company is at the forefront of most major breakthroughs in computer processing. Huang is known for his enthusiastic keynote addresses at annual Nvidia GTC conferences, as well as his love of black leather jackets and Denny’s, the fast food chain where the company was founded.
Walmart stock forecast
Walmart stock is up 7% year-to-date and is trading at its all-time high. WMT stock has formed a cup with the range high from mid-November and closed last Friday just a little bit higher.
Walmart stock currently trades slightly above its five-year average on a forward P/E ratio. The Prices/Sales ratio also shows a slight premium at present compared with the five-year average.
Walmart stock has remained in an uptrend since June of 2022. With the weekly chart’s Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) indicator displaying a bullish crossover, WMT stock appears likely to make a new all-time high on Tuesday.
WMT weekly stock chart
Source: https://www.fxstreet.com/news/walmart-earnings-preview-wmt-stock-poised-to-blast-off-on-tuesday-results-202402192240