Casual restaurant chain Dine Brands (NYSE: DIN) missed Wall Street’s revenue expectations in Q4 CY2025, but sales rose 6.3% year on year to $217.6 million. Its non-GAAP profit of $1.46 per share was 38.2% above analysts’ consensus estimates.
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Dine Brands (DIN) Q4 CY2025 Highlights:
- Revenue: $217.6 million vs analyst estimates of $226.2 million (6.3% year-on-year growth, 3.8% miss)
- Adjusted EPS: $1.46 vs analyst estimates of $1.06 (38.2% beat)
- Adjusted EBITDA: $59.8 million vs analyst estimates of $54.3 million (27.5% margin, 10.1% beat)
- EBITDA guidance for the upcoming financial year 2026 is $225 million at the midpoint, below analyst estimates of $227.1 million
- Operating Margin: 18.7%, up from 16.1% in the same quarter last year
- Free Cash Flow was -$8.55 million, down from $26.7 million in the same quarter last year
- Locations: 3,403 at quarter end, down from 3,438 in the same quarter last year
- Market Capitalization: $441.9 million
“In 2025 our brands’ performance improved as we made meaningful progress against our strategic priorities by strengthening the fundamentals of the business and positioning our brands for long-term growth,” said John Peyton, Chief Executive Officer of Dine Brands.
Company Overview
Operating a franchise model, Dine Brands (NYSE: DIN) is a casual restaurant chain that owns the Applebee’s and IHOP banners.
Revenue Growth
Reviewing a company’s long-term sales performance reveals insights into its quality. Any business can put up a good quarter or two, but the best consistently grow over the long haul.
With $879.3 million in revenue over the past 12 months, Dine Brands is a small restaurant chain, which sometimes brings disadvantages compared to larger competitors benefiting from better brand awareness and economies of scale.
As you can see below, Dine Brands struggled to increase demand as its $879.3 million of sales for the trailing 12 months was close to its revenue six years ago. This was mainly because it didn’t open many new restaurants and observed lower sales at existing, established dining locations.
This quarter, Dine Brands’s revenue grew by 6.3% year on year to $217.6 million, missing Wall Street’s estimates.
Looking ahead, sell-side analysts expect revenue to grow 3.2% over the next 12 months. While this projection implies its newer menu offerings will catalyze better top-line performance, it is still below the sector average.
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Restaurant Performance
Number of Restaurants
A restaurant chain’s total number of dining locations influences how much it can sell and how quickly revenue can grow.
Dine Brands operated 3,403 locations in the latest quarter, and over the last two years, has kept its restaurant count flat while other restaurant businesses have opted for growth.
When a chain doesn’t open many new restaurants, it usually means there’s stable demand for its meals and it’s focused on improving operational efficiency to increase profitability.
Same-Store Sales
A company's restaurant base only paints one part of the picture. When demand is high, it makes sense to open more. But when demand is low, it’s prudent to close some locations and use the money in other ways. Same-store sales is an industry measure of whether revenue is growing at those existing restaurants and is driven by customer visits (often called traffic) and the average spending per customer (ticket).
Dine Brands’s demand has been shrinking over the last two years as its same-store sales have averaged 1.8% annual declines. This performance isn’t ideal, and we’d be concerned if Dine Brands starts opening new restaurants to artificially boost revenue growth.
Note that Dine Brands reports its same-store sales intermittently, so some data points are missing in the chart below.
Key Takeaways from Dine Brands’s Q4 Results
We were impressed by how significantly Dine Brands blew past analysts’ EBITDA expectations this quarter. We were also glad its EPS outperformed Wall Street’s estimates. On the other hand, its revenue missed and its full-year EBITDA guidance fell slightly short of Wall Street’s estimates. Overall, this print was mixed. Investors were likely hoping for more, and shares traded down 1% to $30.28 immediately following the results.
Big picture, is Dine Brands a buy here and now? What happened in the latest quarter matters, but not as much as longer-term business quality and valuation, when deciding whether to invest in this stock. We cover that in our actionable full research report which you can read here (it’s free).
