Cardinal Health Beat by Half a Dollar, Added $5 Billion to Its Buyback, and Hit a 52-Week High

Cardinal Health, one of the three big US drug distributors, closed its fiscal year on August 11 with a fourth quarter built around a familiar shape for this business: a small revenue miss and a large profit beat. Non-GAAP earnings per share of $2.91 came in well ahead of the $2.42 estimate, while revenue of $63.7 billion — up 6% from a year earlier — fell short of the $65.03 billion expected. Distribution is a razor-thin-margin business, so the profit line, not the revenue line, is where these quarters are won.

The full-year picture explains why the board felt comfortable writing a bigger check to shareholders. Fiscal 2026 revenue reached $254.2 billion, up 14% from $222.6 billion the year before. On the same morning as the results, the board approved a $5.0 billion increase to the share-repurchase program, taking the total authorization to $6.4 billion — for scale, that authorization is roughly 2.5% of a year's revenue in a business that keeps only pennies of each revenue dollar, which is exactly why buybacks and dividends, not reinvestment, are how distributors return their cash.

Guidance did the rest of the work. Cardinal Health told investors to expect fiscal 2027 adjusted EPS of $12.40 to $12.60, growth of 13% to 15% from the year just closed. A distributor guiding to mid-teens earnings growth two years in a row is telling the market its newer, higher-margin businesses are becoming large enough to bend the overall profit curve. The market's verdict was straightforward: the stock rose after the release.