Headline Earnings

Headline earnings refer to the earnings of a company generated from core operations and investments. As such, they exclude certain (positive or negative) one-off or exceptional items, for example, asset sales, asset write-downs or impairment charges, or changes in operating expenses as a result of, say, staff redundancy programmes. Financial analysts use headline earnings to gauge a company’s level of core earnings excluding non-recurring or one-off items that can distort a company’s true earnings power.