Shares of McDonald's Corporation (NYSE: MCD) are trading flat in today's market after reporting its third quarter numbers this morning. The stock is currently down slightly, falling 0.1% to $56.71, down $0.08.As we noted in our earnings preview earlier this week, analysts had been expecting to see the company report 81 cents per share during the quarter, and the company actually showed earnings for the quarter to be slightly higher at 83 cents a share.
So why is the stock not moving higher in today's action? Simple... the stock had already been priced to report 83 cents a share after the company set this as its target goal last week.
Overall, it was a great quarter for the fast food giant. Global same store sales rose by a nice 6.9 percent during the quarter, marking the seventh consecutive quarter of increases in same store sales. The U.S. market had its eighteenth straight quarter of same store sale increases.
Looking at its growing U.S. business, the company attributes recent success to breakfast items, chicken snack wraps and coffee. McDonald's coffee business has been really taking off over the past year and a half. Since the company started to serve higher-priced premium roast coffee back in the spring of 2006 it has seen its coffee sales jump by 20 percent.
Even with today's slight selling pressure, the stock remains very close to its 52 week high of $57.53 which is set back on the 10th of this month.
[Photo: Ruben Laguna]
Michael Fowlkes has worked as a stock trader for seven years and spent the last two years working as an analyst for the online investment advisory service Investor's Observer
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
10-19-2007 @ 11:43AM
Ted said...
The fact that McD's can pull off numbers like this when it was just so recently lambasted as one of the main causes of the "Supersize Me" phenomenon and anti-fast food craze just proves why nearly every business student studies McD's at one point or another http://www.newsvisual.com/newsvisual/2007/10/experience-show.html . I am not a fan of McD's food myself, but I have to give credit where credit is due.
10-19-2007 @ 2:33PM
Brian Patterson said...
My son got e coli 0157 H:7 from eating a McDonalds meal in August 2002. He was in the hospital and on morphine for 7 days. Both McDonalds and Zurich Ins. denied liablilty yet the CDC National PulsNet database found isolated and random PFGE matches. My advice to anyone is to save their reciepts and a uneaten portion of their meal for further testing and confirmation of e coli.