Motley Fool’s 5 High Growth Stock Picks

1. ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR)

3-year Revenue Growth: 176.7%

ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) was incorporated in 1990 and is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. It is a clinical research organization that provides outsourced development and commercialization services worldwide. As of Q4 2022, Motley Fool Asset Management owns 67,600 shares of ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) worth over $13 million, representing 1.48% of the total portfolio. 

On February 22, ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) reported a Q4 non-GAAP EPS of $3.13, beating market estimates by $0.08. Revenue for the period came in at $1.96 billion, up 3.7% year-over-year, in-line with Wall Street consensus. 

Eric Coldwell, an analyst at Baird, raised the target price on ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) from $265 to $285 and maintained an Outperform rating on February 24. The analyst praised ICON’s transparent and consistent update, which included maintaining all aspects of their 2023 guidance. He also highlighted that the additional details on the business environment, margin expectations, and capital allocation objectives have increased his confidence in the company’s performance for 2023.

According to Insider Monkey’s fourth quarter database, 43 hedge funds were bullish on ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR), compared to 30 funds in the prior quarter. 

Baron Asset Fund made the following comment about ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) in its Q4 2022 investor letter:

“We did add modestly to our stake in ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR), the second largest participant in the $50 billion contract management organization (CMO) market. The company provides outsourced drug and device development and commercialization services to pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device companies. We believe that ICON is poised to benefit from a variety of positive secular growth trends, and we believe that ICON should remain relatively unimpacted by potential disruption in the broader economy. As clinical drug trials become increasingly complex and global in scope, market share among CMOs has been shifting to large-scale providers like ICON. The company offers several advantages to drug developers, particularly smaller and mid-sized biotechnology firms that lack the internal infrastructure to run the trials necessary to obtain regulatory approval for their drugs. These include the economic efficiency associated with converting previously fixed costs to variable costs, and a significant reduction in the time required to bring new drug treatments to market. ICON’s large scale has also enabled the company to secure long-term strategic partnerships with multiple large pharmaceutical customers, which provides added visibility into their revenue pipeline.”

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