US companies managed for the large part to beat Wall Street expectations this quarterly earnings season, even if their performances did not manage to lift the stock market out of its lethargy.
With nearly all of the companies listed on the Standard and Poor's 500 index having given their results for the first quarter, profits are on average up 13.6 percent over the same period last year.
Healthy
That compares to consensus forecasts for a rise of just 8.6 percent over the year, so America Inc would appear to be in far more vigorous health than previously credited by analysts.
"It's an enormous ramp-up," said David Dropsey, an analyst at the financial information agency Thomson Financial, the source of the comparative figures for this earnings season.
But while the corporate earnings news overall was better than expected, US stock markets failed to liven up during the quarter.
Dropsey noted that normally, positive earnings news is "one of the key drivers of the market," but indices like the Dow Jones and NASDAQ benchmarks failed to rally.
Investors appeared to be more concerned with signs of flagging economic growth, high oil prices and successive rate hikes by the Federal Reserve in the period, he said.
Two-thirds of companies did stronger than expected in forecasts by investment houses published before the earnings season got under way.
The best performances came from producers of raw materials and chemicals, with profits in the latter sector averaging a stunning 68 percent increase over last year.
Dow Chemical for instance nearly tripled its earnings on turnover that was up a quarter.
Helped by record-high oil prices for much of the period, energy groups were also stars of the earnings season.
Energy broker Raymond James said the sector's average profits were up 45 percent, even if some individual oil majors like ExxonMobil did worse than expected.
Financial groups, which were predicted to do less well this time round, were one of the surprises with their earnings actually going up 10 percent on average.
Tech beats forecasts
Profits at technology companies were 15 percent higher on average.
Standard and Poor's analyst Ken Shay said that demand for personal computers "isn't very robust" but demand for tech services is.
"Companies like EMC, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM should continue to benefit from this trend," he said.
For most semiconductor makers, Shay said, "things looks a bit low."
Nevertheless, Intel Corp managed a surprisingly strong first quarter and on Friday pledged double-digit revenue growth this year.
The Internet sector continued a slow recovery from the ravages of the collapse of the "dotcom" boom.
Shay said Web companies that can keep generating cash revenues, rather than just grand ideas, "seem to be doing well, in particular Yahoo, Google and Ebay."
Online trader Amazon.com, however, posted disappointing figures.
Automakers suffer
Doing far less well were the big names of the US car industry.
General Motors, the world's biggest automaker, posted a quarterly loss of US$1.1 billion, its worst performance since 1992. Ford's profits slumped 38 percent in the first quarter to US$1.21 billion.
Both auto giants suffered from falling US demand for sports-utility vehicles and intensifying competition from rivals, notably Toyota of Japan.
Their troubles only deepened last week when Standard and Poor's reduced their creditworthiness to junk bond status.
The consumer goods sector also struggled for the most part, although Procter and Gamble surprised Wall Street by posting a 13 percent rise in quarterly earnings and lifting its full-year forecast.
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