Clinical research company Fortrea Holdings (NASDAQ:FTRE) will be reporting earnings tomorrow before market hours. Here’s what investors should know.

Fortrea met analysts’ revenue expectations last quarter, reporting revenues of $674.9 million, down 5.4% year on year. It was a softer quarter for the company, with a significant miss of analysts’ EPS estimates.

Is Fortrea a buy or sell going into earnings? Read our full analysis here, it’s free.

This quarter, analysts are expecting Fortrea’s revenue to be flat year on year at $703.2 million, improving from the 6.8% decrease it recorded in the same quarter last year. Adjusted earnings are expected to come in at $0.37 per share.

Analysts covering the company have generally reconfirmed their estimates over the last 30 days, suggesting they anticipate the business to stay the course heading into earnings. Fortrea has missed Wall Street’s revenue estimates five times over the last two years.

Looking at Fortrea’s peers in the drug development inputs & services segment, some have already reported their Q4 results, giving us a hint as to what we can expect. UFP Technologies delivered year-on-year revenue growth of 41.9%, beating analysts’ expectations by 1.7%, and Azenta reported revenues up 4.1%, topping estimates by 1.1%. UFP Technologies traded down 2.2% following the results while Azenta was up 4%.

Read our full analysis of UFP Technologies’s results here and Azenta’s results here.

Stocks, especially growth stocks where cash flows further in the future are more important to the story, had a good 2024. An economic soft landing (so far), the start of the Fed's rate cutting campaign, and the election of Donald Trump were positives for the market, and while some of the drug development inputs & services stocks have shown solid performance, the group has generally underperformed, with share prices down 5.5% on average over the last month. Fortrea is down 11.6% during the same time and is heading into earnings with an average analyst price target of $22.20 (compared to the current share price of $13.85).

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