Cognizant Q3 earnings preview: What to look from CTSH?

Cognizant Technology Solutions (NASDAQ: CTSH) is slated to publish its third quarter 2019 earnings results on Wednesday, October 30, 2019, after market close. Wall Street expects the IT solutions provider to report earnings of $1.05 per share on revenue of $4.21 billion. This represents a 12% decrease in earnings and 3.3% growth in revenue compared to the third quarter of 2018.

Cognizant Q3 2019 earnings report: Cognizant (CTSH) outclasses Q3 earnings and revenue estimates

The Teaneck, New Jersey-firm had guided third quarter revenue to be between $4.23 billion and $4.27 billion in constant currency, representing a year-over-year growth of 3.8-4.8%.

For the full-year 2019, the company had projected adjusted EPS to be in the range of $3.92-3.98 and revenue is expected to grow in the range of 3.9-4.9% or $16.75 billion to $16.9 billion in constant currency.

For the second quarter ended June 30, 2019, Cognizant’s earnings of $0.94 per share topped estimates, while revenue of $4.14 billion came in line with the targets. Financial Services segment revenue growth of 1.7% in constant currency, and Healthcare’s decline of 1.5% in constant currency, impacted second quarter revenue growth.

Cognizant anticipates some cautiousness in overall levels of spend in the banking sector in the second half of the year due to weakness in capital markets across banking, M&A activity with the US regional banks and weak macro factors.

Cognizant had set up transformation office few months back ago to focus on growth categories, organizational structure, delivery and sales force transformation as well as to reduce cost strucute. To simplify its organization structure, Cognizant took targeted actions at the senior levels during the second quarter. The company had projected these actions to result in annualized savings of $65 million with half of the amount realized in the second half of the year.

During the second quarter earnings call, Cognizant stated that it expects to further reduce overall costs in Q3 and Q4 through a number of actions, including aligning headcount growth with revenue growth by further slowing the pace of hiring and being thoughtful on where it backfills the attrition. At the end of June 30, 2019, Cognizant had 288,200 employees compared to 268,900 employees at the end of June 30, 2018.

Cognizant is expected to give more details about the transformation office and the execution plan as well as associated restructuring charges during the third quarter earnings call.

In September, Credit Suisse maintained its “Outperform” rating on CTSH stock and this month, Citigroup maintained its rating of “Buy” on the stock.

CTSH stock, which edged up 0.35% to $60.67 at the end of today’s regular trading session, had slipped 4% in this year so far and 14% from this time last year.

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