(The following story by Randolph Heaster appeared on the Kansas City Star website on January 29, 2010.)
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Kansas City Southern beat analyst estimates in the fourth quarter in both earnings and revenues.
For the three months that ended Dec. 31, the railroad company earned $32 million, or 33 cents a share, on $406.8 million in revenues.
Earnings per share were down 17.5 percent from last year. But Kansas City Southern did better than analysts were expecting.
Eleven analysts on average had forecast earnings of 29 cents a share and revenues of $397.2 million for the final quarter of 2009.
“KCS management is cautiously optimistic that the company will be able to maintain the positive volume and revenue growth momentum that it experienced in the second half of last year throughout 2010,” chairman and chief executive officer Michael R. Haverty said in a statement.
For the year, Kansas City Southern earned $57 million, or 61 cents a share, on $1.48 billion in sales. Those figures were down sharply from 2008, due to a difficult first half of last year.
The railroad operates through the central U.S. as well as throughout Mexico.
Kansas City Southern shares fell 16 cents in trading Thursday, closing at $31.19 a share.
In other developments, the railroad Thursday made a regulatory filing referring to a report this week from Bloomberg News. The news service said Oscar del Cueto, Kansas City Southern de Mexico’s vice president of operations, indicated that the Mexican subsidiary would invest $121 million in 2010, including $80 million in rail infrastructure.
Kansas City Southern said it could not confirm the accuracy of del Cueto’s statements.
However, Bloomberg also reported that Haverty said at the same transportation conference that the company could invest $75 million to $100 million in the port of Lazaro Cardenas for future development.
As port-congestion issues increase in Southern California, Kansas City Southern expects to reap the benefits with its presence at Lazaro Cardenas, a Mexican west coast port through which Asian goods can flow into North America.
In other quarterly earnings reports Thursday:
•Waddell & Reed Financial Inc. improved in the fourth quarter from a year ago, when restructuring and other costs led to a loss.
The recent profit equaled $33.3 million, or 39 cents a share. A year ago, the Overland Park-based money management firm lost $730,000, or 1 cent a share.
The company also said its assets under management had fully recovered from the markets’ stark declines to reach their previous peak. Revenues of $244.8 million in the quarter were the highest since the second quarter of 2008.
Waddell & Reed shares closed at $31.41, down 55 cents.
•Colgate-Palmolive earned $631 million, $1.21 a share, up from a year-ago profit of $497 million, 94 cents a share. Revenue climbed more than 11 percent, to $4.08 billion.
•Eastman Kodak broke a series of four straight quarterly losses with a $443 million profit, $1.40 a share, compared with a year-ago loss of $918 million, $3.42 a share. Sales rose 6 percent, to $2.58 billion.
•US Airways Group said its quarterly loss narrowed to $79 million, 49 cents a share, from $543 million, $4.76 a share, a year earlier, as spending for fuel declined. Revenue declined 4.9 percent, to $2.63 billion.