May 5, 2026
— Jeff Ward, Lehigh Valley News Briefs
OraSure Technologies will post its first-quarter financial results on Wednesday, followed by Shift4 on Thursday and the week will end with PPL’s earnings.
OraSure will report numbers after 4 p.m. tomorrow and hold a conference call at 5 p.m. Whether any Wall Street analysts attend, time will tell. Probably, but when I checked Zacks Investment Research today for estimates of revenue and income/loss, I couldn’t find any. Investor interest has waned as the stock has wallowed.
Shares (NASDAQ:OSUR) in the Bethlehem-based maker of diagnostic kits and specimen-collection devices have muddled along since the COVID-19 pandemic. Today’s closing price was $3.00, and the 52-week range has been from $2.08 to $3.82.
OraSure draws interest when outsiders try to grab board seats or discuss a sale of the company. It hasn’t done anything internally for a long time beyond cutting costs, cutting jobs and losing money.
Shift4, the Upper Saucon Township-based company that processes payments, hasn’t done well either. The closing price Tuesday (NYSE:FOUR) was $40.97, less than half of the $108.90 52-week high.
The company will put out its numbers early Thursday. The Zacks consensus estimate of seven analysts is for earnings per share of 99 cents in the first quarter.
The market has not been treating the stock well, and in the past, Shift4 has talked about going private, that is, not being traded. So far it’s still on the New York Stock Exchange, with the prominence and the scrutiny that brings.
The big one, PPL, will report results early Friday and draw a lot of interest. The closing share price (NYSE:PPL) on Tuesday was $37.35, roughly in the middle of the 52-week range of $33.12 to $40.11.
The Allentown-based utility has drawn interest because of the potential for it to serve data centers, which consume huge amounts of energy and draw huge amounts of negative publicity.
PPL is also in the process of raising its distribution rate, and its default electricity price (charged to Lehigh Valley customers who don’t shop around) may also go up later this year. Again, time will tell.
Shop around! Click on the link, find a price. I’m paying about a third less for kilowatt hours than I would with PPL’s rate, but I have to check often and update my supplier, otherwise I can get stuck with a soaring rate.
The company may not be popular with customers right now, but investors expect to be rewarded, and Zack’s projects first-quarter EPS of 61 cents as of 4:55 p.m. Monday. Consensus estimates may change before the earnings are out.
— Disclosure: I own shares of PPL and Shift4. Now and then I buy some OraSure shares and usually sell them pretty quickly. I don’t recommend speed trading and rarely engage in it. When OraSure drops below cash value per share, it sometimes bounces back. Sometimes.
Lehigh Valley News Briefs 