Shares of drug-store chain CVS Caremark (CVS) are higher by $1.88, or 6%, at $32.95, but one wonders if that will stick: the company this morning beat Q4 profit expectations by a penny and forecast the year ahead of expectations, but the it also forecast the current quarter’s profit below analysts’ estimates.
Q4 revenue rose 7% to $25.82 billion, below estimates for $26.22 billion, yielding profit per share, excluding some costs, of 79 cents, a penny better than expected.
On the call with analysts this morning, company management forecast adjusted profit this year of $2.74 to $2.84, better than the $2.78 expected, as the company keeps capital expenditures for the year flat with last year.
But for Q1, the company sees 57 cents to 59 cents per share, below the average 62 cents.
For this year, the company said it will make less in free cash flow than last year — on the order of $2.5 billion to $3 billion, but the company expects that to pick up in 2011, and CFO David Rickard remarked, “We expect to generate significantly more free cash flow over the next five years than we generated in the past five years.”
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