Can Balfour Beatty (LON:BALF) bounce back following Wednesday’s interim results?
The multinational infrastructure firm has struggled for consistency this year. Opening at £2.96, the stock had tumbled to £2.55 by early March, its worst price for 5 months. Cut to the beginning of June, however, and the company had seen a fairly substantial swing, briefly touching £3.14 for the first time in over 4 years. Since then it has pulled back once again, spending a good chunk of summer between £2.85 and £2.90. Balfour Beatty PLC now sits at a current trading price of £2.88 (Spreadex, 13/08/2018).
The company’s last update came towards the end of May, and was pretty light on detail. Balfour said that trading was ‘in line with full year expectations’, and that the Group ‘continues to make good progress on the second phase of the Build to Last transformation programme and remains on track to achieve industry standard margins’ in H2 2018.
As for the Aberdeen Western Peripheral Road project, a joint venture with Galliford Try (LON:GFRD) and the now defunct Carillion, the company stated that there was ‘no change’ to the £105 million to £120 million cash outflow guidance given earlier in the year.
Between then and now, Balfour has seen a few new deals, including an appointment to build an onshore substation for the Hornsea Project Two, the world’s largest offshore wind farm; a new, luxury 60 Curzon Street residential scheme; and the ‘Hinkley 400kV Cable Wirks (Mendips)’ contract by National Grid (LON:NG).
In terms of Tuesday’s half year results, investors will want a further update on the firm’s pipeline, alongside the progress of its margins targets.
Balfour Beatty PLC has a consensus rating of ‘Buy’ alongside an average target price of £3.42.
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