Eagle Materials reports Q3 EPS $3.72, consensus $3.55

Reports Q3 revenue $558.8M, consensus $536.57M. Commenting on the results, Michael Haack, President and CEO of Eagle, said, “We are pleased to announce another exceptional quarter against the backdrop of shifting, albeit constructive, market conditions as interest rates moved materially lower during the latter half of the quarter. In the third quarter, we achieved record revenue of $559 million, produced record EPS of $3.72 and expanded gross margins by 130 bps to 32.3%. We generated strong free cash flow, repurchased 558,500 shares of our common stock and returned $106 million of cash to shareholders, bringing total cash returned to $276 million in the first nine months of the fiscal year. We continued making progress on our environmental stewardship goals, expanding the production and sale of our eco-friendly Portland Limestone Cement and other blended cement products. In December, we announced an agreement with Terra CO2 granting us exclusive rights to use Terra’s technology to build and operate plants that would produce low-carbon supplementary cementitious material in three of our core cement markets. Once fully developed, this technology has the potential to not only reduce the carbon intensity of the cementitious products we sell, but also to fulfill the needs of our customers and meet the expected increase in demand for cement and supplementary cementitious materials. Eagle’s heartland geographic footprint remains well-positioned for long-term growth, supported by trends in population growth, well-documented housing production deficits and supply shortages, and a multi-year federal highway bill further enhanced by state-level infrastructure spending. We expect that our portfolio of businesses will continue to deliver leading financial results, and our capital allocation strategies will continue to generate superior shareholder value for the foreseeable future.”