Southern Company 1Q Adjusted EPS Tops Estimates, Revenue Miss

Southern Company

reported net earnings of $485 million or $0.53 a share for the first quarter, down from $508 million or $0.56 a share in the prior year quarter. Both the period results were impacted by different charges. Excluding adjustments, it would have earned $532 million or $0.58 a share, up from $514 million or $0.56 a share in the same quarter last year. This was $0.05 a share higher than the Street analysts' expectations. However, the company's total revenues fell 5.2% to $3.965 billion from $4.18 billion and missed the analysts' predictions of $4.26 billion. Southern Company blamed the decrease to lower fuel costs. The company's Chairman, President and CEO, Thomas Fanning, commented, "Southern Company performed superbly in executing its business plan in the first quarter of 2016. We saw positive customer growth, along with strong residential and commercial sales and a robust economic development pipeline." He added that "Our franchise operations and our competitive generation subsidiary, Southern Power, continue to perform at a high level and deliver on our core strategy of providing clean, safe, reliable and affordable energy to customers." Kilowatt-hour sales to retail customers in its four-state service area fell 3.0 percent from the first quarter of 2015. Residential energy sales also dropped 7.2 percent while commercial energy sales skid 0.7 percent and industrial energy sales fell 0.8 percent. In the pre-market trading on Wednesday, the stock traded 0.98% higher.