(Bloomberg) -- If investors beset by trade woes and stock gyrations were looking for Caterpillar Inc. to reassure them about the global economy, they sure didn't get that.
Caterpillar shares fell 5 percent, helping to drag down S&P 500 futures on Monday, after the company reported lackluster fourth-quarter earnings and a cautious outlook for 2019. It shouldn't be a complete surprise to investors given that the company's chief financial officer said in October that the industrial bellwether “can't grow that fast forever.”
Instead, the company forecast a “modest” sales gain for 2019.
“You have a number of geopolitical things going on: tariffs, where we are on trade and so forth, which all can have an impact on our customers, and therefore can have an impact on our businesses,” CFO Andrew Bonfield said in a phone interview.
Exactly how modest that sales gain will be is likely to be the main question that will likely be asked when they address analysts during their earnings call at 11 a.m.
To contact the reporter on this story: Joe Deaux in New York at jdeaux@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Luzi Ann Javier at ljavier@bloomberg.net, Joe Richter
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