Why Genuine Parts Stock Slipped 3% Today
Genuine Parts just turned its good news into bad.
Shares of Genuine Parts (NYSE: GPC) tumbled 3.3% through 11 a.m. ET Tuesday despite beating analyst targets for sales and earnings this morning.
Heading into its fourth-quarter 2024 report, Wall Street thought Genuine Parts would earn $1.55 per share, adjusted for one-time items, on sales of just over $5.7 billion. In fact, the auto and industrial parts supplier earned $1.61 per share, and its sales approached $5.8 billion.
Not all the news was good. Quarterly sales beat expectations but still rose only 3.3% year over year. Worse, an inventory write-down shrank gross profit margins 50 basis points to 35.9%. And while Genuine Parts reported $1.61 in adjusted earnings per share (EPS), its actual earnings as calculated according to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) were only $0.96 per share, less than half what the company earned in the year-ago quarter.
