UPDATE: Bank of America Merrill Lynch Downgrades Generac

In a report published Friday, Bank of America Merrill Lynch analyst Ross Gilardi downgraded Generac GNRC to Neutral from Buy, lowering its price target to $54.00 from $58.00. According to the report, the downgrade is on the back of the analyst's quarterly dealer survey, along with yesterday's comments from competitor Briggs and Stratton. They continue to like the long-term penetration story for residential standby generators but see limited upside to consensus in FY14 barring severe new outage activity. “We heard back from 29 standby generator dealers around the US. Assuming no major outages, the blended results suggest flattish order activity over the next six months, though we did see modest deterioration with only 34% projecting positive order growth versus 40% last quarter,” the report noted. “About 40% projected flattish growth with 31% guiding to negative orders versus 28% last quarter.” GNRC closed Thursday at $50.18 with shares trading down at 1.72 percent.