Tobacco company Philip Morris International (NYSE: PM) will be announcing earnings results this Friday before the bell. Here’s what you need to know.

Philip Morris beat analysts’ revenue expectations by 2% last quarter, reporting revenues of $10.85 billion, up 9.4% year on year. It was a satisfactory quarter for the company, with a decent beat of analysts’ revenue estimates but a slight miss of analysts’ EBITDA estimates.

Is Philip Morris a buy or sell going into earnings? Read our full analysis here, it’s free for active Edge members.

This quarter, analysts are expecting Philip Morris’s revenue to grow 6.3% year on year to $10.31 billion, slowing from the 7.3% increase it recorded in the same quarter last year. Adjusted earnings are expected to come in at $1.70 per share.

Analysts covering the company have generally reconfirmed their estimates over the last 30 days, suggesting they anticipate the business to stay the course heading into earnings. Philip Morris has only missed Wall Street’s revenue estimates once over the last two years, exceeding top-line expectations by 2.2% on average.

Looking at Philip Morris’s peers in the consumer staples segment, some have already reported their Q4 results, giving us a hint as to what we can expect. Constellation Brands’s revenues decreased 9.8% year on year, beating analysts’ expectations by 2.9%, and Altria reported flat revenue, topping estimates by 1.1%. Constellation Brands traded up 5.3% following the results while Altria was down 1.8%.

Read our full analysis of Constellation Brands’s results here and Altria’s results here.

There has been positive sentiment among investors in the consumer staples segment, with share prices up 9.9% on average over the last month. Philip Morris is up 16.2% during the same time and is heading into earnings with an average analyst price target of $180.38 (compared to the current share price of $180.21).

Today’s young investors won’t have read the timeless lessons in Gorilla Game: Picking Winners In High Technology because it was written more than 20 years ago when Microsoft and Apple were first establishing their supremacy. But if we apply the same principles, then enterprise software stocks leveraging their own generative AI capabilities may well be the Gorillas of the future. So, in that spirit, we are excited to present our Special Free Report on a profitable, fast-growing enterprise software stock that is already riding the automation wave and looking to catch the generative AI next.