Can anyone shed some light on the recent significant increase in the consensus earnings for Gattaca (previously know as Matchtech) shown in the stock report. Until recently earnings for the year just ended were expected to be around 43 pence and flat going forward. The stock report, depending on which part you look at shows eps of 51.7 or 58.4 followed by 53.3 or 63.3 for the year ending 31 July 2017.
Gattaca will have reasonable exposure to overseas earnings as a consequence of its purchase of Networkers last year, but I can't imagine that FX benefits alone would account for such an increase. I am not aware of any forthcoming exceptional items and the fact that the share price has been falling together with the last trading update suggest that the apparent upgrade is a typo? Or am I missing something? Perhaps Ed can shed some light?
I had queried this with Stockopedia as I thought it looked odd too. They replied yesterday as follows:
"Just to let you know, Reuters have got back to me to say that they have updated the estimates figure - there was an update pending in their work queue that they have prioritized and pushed through. I can see the changes have been reflected in their database but those won't filter through to us until tomorrow now. The update has in fact pushed the consensus up higher however, to 58.4 and 63.3 to 2016/2017 respectively, with 3 brokers in the consensus estimate."
Still seems odd to me to be seeing such large upgrades in last month, given they gave a pretty detailed post year end trading update a while back & other sources still showing lower figures. They do have some overseas operations, currency translation effects could be a possible explanation as you say.
Does anyone else have consensus figures from elsewhere I saw 44.2p & 42p from Morningstar for example