Earnings Previews: Box, Frontline, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HP

U.S. markets are closed Monday in observance of the Memorial Day holiday. On Friday, the Dow Jones industrials closed up 1.0%, the S&P 500 closed up 1.3% and the Nasdaq closed 2.19% higher.

After U.S. markets closed Thursday, Marvell Technology reported slight beats on earnings per share (EPS) and revenue but raised the stakes by talking up its future. The story it told followed the pattern set Wednesday by Nvidia, and it appears to be working again. Marvell’s stock closed on Friday with a gain of 32.4%.

Gap posted EPS of $0.01, while analysts had anticipated a loss of $0.16 per share. Quarterly revenue was about flat, and same-store sales declined in all the company’s segments except Gap Stores, where they improved by 1%. Investors must have expected much worse because the shares closed up 12.4% Friday.

Costco reported better-than-expected EPS but missed the revenue forecast by about 1.7%. Same-store sales rose by 3.5%, but that is a weak showing by Costco standards. Traffic growth was solid, although shoppers were not buying the store’s big-ticket items. Shares posted a gain of 4.26% Friday.

Before markets opened on Friday, PDD (Pinduoduo) absolutely hammered the consensus EPS and revenue estimates. Revenue was up more than 58% year over year. Shares closed 18.66% higher on Friday.

There are no notable earnings reports scheduled for release on Tuesday morning. Reports from the three of the following companies are due after markets close on Tuesday, and one is on deck early Wednesday.

Box

Box Inc. (NYSE: BOX) provides a cloud content management platform that allows businesses and organizations to share content from anywhere on any device. The stock posted its all-time high in early February but sank quickly after the company announced that its cost would rise this year as it moves its operations to the public cloud and gives up its in-house cloud infrastructure.

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In early May, the company announced a partnership with OpenAI to develop tools for Box’s platform. The stock has added 6% since then, roughly equal to its share-price gain over the past 12 months. At least the company was able to read the writing on the wall. Box reports results after markets close on Tuesday.

Analysts remain mostly bullish on Box stock, with 10 of 14 having a Buy or Strong Buy rating. At a recent price of around $27.60 a share, the upside potential based on a consensus price target of $34.00 is 23.2%. At the high target of $39.00, the implied gain is 41.3%.

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