Yahoo Finance Chipotle Earnings: Look Beyond These Hideous Numbers
Well, at least Chipotle Mexican Grill (CMG) is E. coli-free.
Chipotle's fourth-quarter earnings report, issued after the market closed Tuesday, had shares of the embattled stock falling by more than 5 percent in after-hours trading. The numbers were ugly, but expectedly so -- after all, Chipotle was dealing with E. coli and norovirus outbreaks for most of the quarter.
However, investors need to weigh that against the recent news that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have declared Chipotle's E. coli outbreak over, plus the fact that Chipotle stock was actually up 6 percent in the trading week before the report.
Are the sellers abandoning CMG's ship for good reason, or is this a buyable dip in the making? Let's take a look.
Chipotle earnings. Quarterly earnings for CMG stock were $2.17 per share, down 43.5 percent from the same quarter a year ago, but enough to beat a knee-high estimate of $1.85 per share. Revenues of $999.7 million were off 6.7 percent and missed analysts' expectations of $1.01 billion. And in perhaps the most obvious sign of pain, same-store sales were off 14.6 percent.
But all of these figures were simply scars from a quarter wracked by a bacterial outbreak across Chipotle's restaurants. Investors knew well ahead of time that Chipotle's performance arrow would be pointed down in the fourth quarter of 2015.
"I strongly believe that the quarter that was just reported is nothing more than just noise," says Scott Rothbort, president of LakeView Asset Management in Millburn, New Jersey. "There are too many cross currents that are going on at Chipotle to look at just this quarter and make any long-term definitive recommendation on the stock."
So really, investors looking to monitor Chipotle's health need to be monitoring ... well, Chipotle's health.
Get done with the sickness: Chipotle co-CEO Steve Ells calls the fourth quarter "the most challenging period in Chipotle's history," and few investors would challenge that thought. The culprit of the disastrous report was the much-publicized pair of E. coli outbreaks that started in October and ended up infecting 60 people, of which 22 were hospitalized across 14 states.
Unfortunately, while the CDC's all-clear should mean a clean bill of health and a return to normalcy for Chipotle, a prior outbreak threatens to linger even longer.
A norovirus outbreak in August that sickened 189 customers and 18 Chipotle employees has resulted in a federal criminal investigation, and Chipotle disclosed Tuesday that the probe into food safety at one California restaurant is being expanded to encompass the entire company.
The result of this investigation could put a renewed damper on consumers' perceptions of Chipotle. But perhaps already weighing on that perception is how Chipotle handled these outbreaks in the first place.
"I would have liked the company to have taken a bit of a more aggressive approach in handling some of the problems that they had recently," Rothbort says. "I look at the gold standard for dealing with these types of crises, as how Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) handled the Tylenol-McNeil crisis. They fell short of that."
Can Chipotle navigate the comeback trail? And just like Chipotle has a tall task ahead in repairing its brand, Chipotle investors will have a steep uphill climb to regain its losses from the past few months.
"This is the issue with Chipotle today: It's a stock without a buying clientele," says Charles Sizemore, founder of Sizemore Capital Management, a fee-based registered investment advisory firm based in Dallas. "It was a high-flying momentum stock that has now lost its momentum."
Chipotle was a hot mover for years prior to 2015's nosedive. Shares more than tripled from their October 2012 lows in the mid-$200s through its all-time high of $758.61 in August 2015. That included a rapid move of about 25 percent that drove CMG to its peak in about six weeks.
However, a decline of roughly 35 percent hasn't exactly been followed by a lot of dip-buying.
Yale Bock, a portfolio manager on Covestor and president of Y H & C, a registered investment advisor based in Las Vegas, says Chipotle is a "great business with a great model, and I believe they will get their recent problems behind them, maybe in six months or a year."
The problem? "The stock price is not cheap," he says.
Before Tuesday's report, CMG was trading at 28 times trailing earnings and 37 times forward earnings. "And while those numbers aren't off the charts for a restaurant stock," Sizemore says, "Chipotle doesn't follow a franchise model. A franchise model is generally more profitable in terms of return on equity and commands a higher earnings multiple. Chipotle manages its own stores and has no plans to franchise."
That leaves CMG in a precarious position. Sizemore says Chipotle's lost momentum means "trend followers probably won't return to it. But it isn't cheap enough yet to attract value investors. So it's something of an orphan right now."
Rothbort, whose LakeView Asset Management holds CMG for client accounts, remains more optimistic.
"(Chipotle needs) to do two things: Fight front-on what has happened over the next two months. They also need to look and say, we have an opportunity here, a free roll of the dice, to improve upon our brand and bring in people who weren't here before. I think that this is the type of management team that can do it."
"It's a stock that's in the penalty box, and you've got to let it play out," Rothbort says. "Time will get you out of the penalty box as long as you don't do something stupid."
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