However, January trading was flat and the likelihood of fewer products being delivered both globally and domestically as the recession bites further was on the immediate horizon, ABN Amro Craigs broker Peter McIntyre said yesterday.
"Weaker January volumes point to the poor calendar-year 2009 outlook, which supports our full-year forecast for 2010 of a decline on the same period a year earlier," he said.
Consolidated sales revenues for the period were up 53.8% to $992.8 million, compared with $645.4 million in the same period last year, 8.7% of which resulted from foreign exchange adjustments.
For the December quarter, Mainfreight sales were $367.8 million compared with $262.0 million in the same quarter last year, while earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation improved 12.5% to $59.3 million from the previous year's result of $52.7 million"At first glance, the biggest disappointment from a margin perspective appears to be the Australian domestic business, where upfront investment in capacity has been impacted by insufficient demand," he said.
ABN still expects Mainfreight's earnings to go backwards in full-year 2010, relative to 2009, an assessment which put ABN at the bottom of the consensus range.
However, Mr McIntyre said he expected "reality to dawn on consensus earnings estimates" from yesterday's result and downgrades of other analysts were likely to put ABN closer to the rest of the pack.
"Albeit, we will also be revisiting our numbers ourselves, with modest downgrades to full-year 2009 and full-year 2010 likely," he said.
ABN had been expecting earnings of around $26 million for the quarterly result, which came in at $28.6 million, "which was credible given how big the previous Christmas quarter was", Mr McIntyre said.
