Encore Capital reports Q4 EPS ($3.11), consensus $1.47

Reports Q4 revenue $295M, consensus $319.6M."2022 marked another year of strong financial and operational performance for Encore as we delivered earnings per share that were second only to our extraordinary result from a year ago," said Ashish Masih, Encore’s President and Chief Executive Officer. "The exceptional collections environment of 2021 in the U.S. gave way to more typical consumer behavior as the year progressed, which had the dual effect of reducing collections and increasing the supply of charged off receivables in the market.""After roughly two and a half years of reduced market supply, increased lending by banks and rising delinquencies have led to the beginning of a transition in the U.S. credit cycle in which opportunities to deploy capital at strong returns are also steadily rising. As a result, our largest business, MCM, increased U.S. portfolio purchasing in 2022 by 36%, which helped increase Encore’s global portfolio purchasing by 20% for the year." "In Europe, we have maintained our purchasing discipline in the face of portfolio pricing that we believe does not yet reflect recent higher funding costs. As a result, and because we are seeing double-digit inflation in parts of Europe, we are taking actions to control the cost base in our Cabot business. Consistent with our capital allocation priorities we will continue to focus our investments in markets with the highest risk adjusted returns."In the fourth quarter, a number of accounting items negatively impacted our results including small percentage reductions to our ERC forecast and certain one-time tax items. Despite these impacts, we delivered strong results for the full year."