FactSet Earns $2.18 per Share

This morning FactSet (FDS) reported fiscal Q3 earnings of $2.18 per share. That beat Wall Street’s estimate by five cents per share. Revenues increased 8.9% to $339.9 million compared.

Thanks to the good earnings, FactSet bumped up its full-year earnings forecast. The old range was $8.35 to $8.55 per share. The new range is $8.37 to $8.62 per share.

The CEO said, “We are making progress integrating and cross selling our acquisitions resulting in important wins this quarter, particularly within Analytics. We continue to innovate with the launch of the Open:FactSet marketplace and enhancing our risk offering. We believe we have a solid pipeline for the fourth quarter and expect to finish fiscal 2018 in our guidance range.”

A key metric for FactSet is Annual Subscription Value or ASV. For Q3, ASV rose 5.3% to $1.36 billion. At the end of the quarter, FactSet had 4,975 clients. That’s an increase of 80 clients. User count rose by 860 to 89,506.

FactSet’s operating margin fell to 31.0% last quarter compared with 31.9% a year ago. The drop reflects restructuring actions and certain one-time administrative expenses.

The CEO said, “We made good progress on our annual and medium term goals this quarter. The restructuring actions we initiated this quarter help us to optimize costs and benefit margins in the future. With our balanced capital allocation framework including our robust share buyback program and an increase in dividends, we continued to return value to shareholders.”

For the first nine months of the year, FDS has earned $6.34 per share. The new outlook implies Q4 earnings of $2.03 to $2.28 per share. Wall Street had been expecting $2.19 per share.

Posted by on June 26th, 2018 at 7:10 am


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