Athenahealth Earnings: Here’s Why Investors are Bidding Down Shares

Athenahealth, Inc. (NASDAQ:ATHN) delivered a profit and beat Wall Street’s expectations, BUT came up short on beating the revenue expectation. The revenue miss is a negative sign to shareholders seeking high growth out of the company. Shares are down 1%.

Athenahealth, Inc. Earnings Cheat Sheet

Results: Net income increased 10.69% to $5.9 million (28 cents per diluted share adjusted) in the quarter versus a net gain of $5.33 million in the year-earlier quarter.

Revenue: Rose 25.72% to $116.3 million from the year-earlier quarter.

Actual vs. Wall St. Expectations: Athenahealth, Inc. reported adjusted net income of 28 cents per share. By that measure, the company met the mean analyst estimate of $0.28. It missed the average revenue estimate of $116.97 million.

Quoting Management: “2012 was a pivotal year for athenahealth. We delivered strong top and bottom line performance and made marked progress on our mission to be medical care givers’ most trusted service,” said Jonathan Bush, the Company’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “While information liquidity in health care is mostly an abstract concept, our effort to build a sustainable, market-based national health information backbone is slowly gaining traction. Our information services cover the life cycle of a claim, the chart, the patient relationship and the hospital admission, but they are still small. We have the right model and together with our nearly 40,000 forward-thinking providers who are tapped into our cloud-based network, we are slowly connecting the synapses of health care.”

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