Good morning! The FTSE 100 futures are indicating a buoyant start, with an open up 29 points to 6,702 currently being forecast. However, one share which is likely to be maked down is NATURE (LON:NGR) which has issued a profit warning. The £28m market cap (at 36p per share) group indicates that trading at its maritime division (which provides services such as recycling polluted oil) is under-performing due to a variety of factors, such as delayed planning permission for its Gibraltar facility (which was damaged by fire in May 2011), and higher costs of complying with legislation in Rotterdam.

Their other divisions (Oil & gas, and engineering) are performing better than expected, but the overall group performance for H2 is slower than H1, therefore results for 31 Dec 2013 will be below market expectations.

Broker consensus is for 2.3p EPS this year, and 2.8p in 2014. The company reported just under 2.5p EPS for H1, although that seems to have been boosted by a one-off gain from the disposal of an interest in a former associate (which booked a £912k profit). That created 40% of the H1 profit, so if we adjust down H1 EPS by 40%, then it comes out at 1.5p. So if H2 is expected to be lower, then (guesstimate) we might be looking at say 1p for H2, which means the full year EPS might drop out at around 2.5p perhaps?

Although there is some guesswork in my figures here, this doesn't sound like a disaster, and it's down to clearly identifiable factors, which should be resolved in time. Therefore I would imagine, given that we're in a bull market, the share price here is not likely to be too badly hit today - I'm thinking perhaps a 10% drop in price?

No, hang on that doesn't make sense. If the company is saying it's going to miss FY 2013 market forecast of 2.3p, then that must mean that H2 will be less than 0.8p EPS. Hmmm, tricky one this, as the usual problem is that it's not clear which figures broker consensus refers to (i.e. normalised or not, diluted or not?).

Thinking about it again, this must mean that normalised EPS is more likely to be around 2p perhaps? That would put them on a PER of 17.8, but given that this has been affected by…

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