A Well-Engineered Quarter Followed by a Slide

By David Lee Smith | More Articles
February 13, 2009 | Comments (1)

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It seems we've almost officially reached the point where a company can report nearly lights-out quarterly results and still get backhanded by Mr. Market. One of the latest cases of that sort of mistreatment belongs to AECOM Technology (NYSE: ACM ) , which managed a 37% increase in net earnings for its December quarter and still has seen its shares slip since its Tuesday report.

For the period -- the first quarter of its 2009 fiscal year -- the company earned $40.5 million, versus $29.5 million in the same quarter a year ago. On a per-share basis, earnings were $0.38 a share, a 31% improvement over the December 2007 quarter. Revenue for the quarter climbed 35% to $1.5 billion.

As Congress mulls infrastructure-based stimulus spending, AECOM provides a variety of global construction-related technical, management support, architectural, and engineering design services for businesses and governments worldwide. It breaks out its results into two segments, Professional Technical Services (PTS) and Management Support Services (MSS). For the quarter, PTS improved its operating income by 44% year over year, while MSS saw a 194% increase in operating income.

To one degree or another, AECOM competes with the likes of Jacobs Engineering (NYSE: JEC ) , along with The Shaw Group (NYSE: SGR ) , Foster Wheeler (Nasdaq: FWLT ) , and ABB Ltd. (NYSE: ABB ) . The company's current projects include work on the new campus at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi, expanded transportation facilities in San Francisco and Toronto, and several projects for the U.S. military.

It also was recently awarded a 10-year contract by Florida's Broward County Aviation Department to upgrade the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. And under yet another new contract, AECOM will be charged with the provision of maintenance at Texas' Corpus Christi Army Depot, the only Army facility where rotary-wing aircraft are repaired and overhauled.

So what we have in AECOM is an entity that is expanding both internationally and domestically. My advice to Fools, however, is to limit yourselves to a moderate position in the company for now. The current topsy-turvy market only heightens my caution.

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Fool contributor David Lee Smith doesn't own shares in any of the companies mentioned. He does, however, welcome your questions or comments. ABB is a Motley Fool Global Gains pick. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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Help us keep this a respectfully Foolish area! This is a place for our readers to discuss, debate, and learn more about the Foolish investing topic you read about above. Help us keep it clean and safe. If you believe a comment is abusive or otherwise violates our Fool's Rules, please report it via the Report this Comment icon found on every comment.

Report this Comment On February 18, 2009, at 4:51 PM, OhBrotherCrap wrote:

I really have seen everything...You have an entire article devoted to saying how great this company is. How much it's grown and diversified in a slow economic period, yet your recommendation is..
".. to limit yourselves to a moderate position in the company for now. The current topsy-turvy market only heightens my caution."
This truely is foolish. If it's solid, invest. If it's not, then don't. If we are to get out of this slump, we should be supporting the solid companies. Look at the financials. It seems as though all you are doing is keeping this company down farther then it should be.

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