From Macquarie:
Australian corporate profits are improving—just at a slightly slower rate than we expected heading into the reporting round, and this was a little disappointing.
On the positive side, earnings beats (35%) outweighed misses (27%) and there were few signs of deterioration in earnings quality via financial engineering, rising leverage or non-operating gains boosting reported profits. We saw a number of new areas show incremental improvement relative to the previous reporting round, including Materials, Capex & Construction, General Insurance and the Major Banks. This was on top of continued strength seen from the Consumer home fillers, Infrastructure, Paper & Packaging and Online Media.
