Submitted by Mark Hanna
Courtesy of MarketMontage. View original post here.
I’ve been focusing a lot more on individual stock reports this week (and will next week as well) as a lot of the more interesting names in the mid cap space are during this time frame. There have been some incredible movements post earnings today – Deckers Outdoors (DECK) to the downside, Amazon.com (AMZN) to the upside – to name just a few. Expedia (EXPE) might be the biggest earnings mover of the day. Technically this sleepy stock has been doing nothing for a few months – and then today we get the explosion. Which is probably why a lot of people love to gamble on earnings – sort of like golf, that one great hit keeps you coming back to it.
As for the report itself, it looks like very nice numbers out of the hotel space, and especially the Hotels.com website.
Via Marketwatch:
- Expedia Inc. flexed its muscles on Friday in ways not seen in years as the online travel-booking company’s shares climbed to a record following a quarterly report that was driven by strong gains in hotel-room bookings. The company reported a fiscal first-quarter net loss of $3.3 million, or 2 cents a share, on revenue of $816.5 million. During the same period a year ago, Expedia earned $52 million, or 37 cents a share, on $727.8 million in revenue in the year-ago period.
- However, Expedia’s adjusted earnings came in at $36.9 million, or 26 cents a share, to top the estimates of analysts surveyed by FactSet Research, who had forecast Expedia to earn 15 cents a share on $792.3 million in revenue.
- The impetus for Expedia’s gains was its hotel bookings, led by the company’s Hotels.com business unit. Expedia said that during the quarter, total hotel-room nights booked rose 24% from the year-ago period, and rooms booked through Hotels.com increased by 37% over last year’s first quarter.
- Doug Anmuth, an analyst with J.P. Morgan, used Expedia’s results as the basis for raising his rating on the company’s stock to neutral from underweight, and increased his price target to $37 a share from $31. Anmuth said he was “encouraged by the sequential acceleration in room nights” and that Expedia is on track to see higher booking rates in 2013.
- Expedia also reported total gross bookings of $8.42 billion in the quarter, up 15% from the same period a year ago. Domestic revenue totaled $491 million, up 11% from a year ago, while revenue from international sources climbed by 14% to $325 million.
Disclosure Notice
Any securities mentioned on this page are not held by the author in his personal portfolio. Securities mentioned may or may not be held by the author in the mutual fund he manages, the Paladin Long Short Fund (PALFX). For a list of the aforementioned fund’s holdings at the end of the prior quarter, visit the Paladin Funds website at http://www.paladinfunds.com/holdings/blog
