Although we don't believe in timing the market or panicking over market movements, we do like to keep an eye on big changes -- just in case they're material to our investing thesis.
What: Shares of Flextronics International, Ltd. (FLEX -0.10%) jumped more than 10% during intraday trading Thursday after the company's fiscal third-quarter results handily beat expectations.
So what: Quarterly sales rose 17.3%, to $7.183 billion, which translated to adjusted earnings of $0.26 per diluted share. For reference, both numbers easily exceeded Wall Street's expectations, which called for earnings of just $0.23 per share on revenue of $6.7 billion.
What's more, Flextronics provided fiscal fourth-quarter guidance for sales in the range of $5.9 billion to $6.3 billion, with adjusted earnings per share in the range of $0.18 to $0.22. The midpoints of both ranges easily topped analysts' estimates for Q4 earnings of $0.19 per share on sales of $5.97 billion.
Now what: Flextronics also repurchased nearly 6 million shares during the quarter, bringing its year-to-date buybacks to $363 million. And with shares currently looking cheap around 8.6 times next year's estimated earnings, its certainly hard to blame them for taking advantage.
On that note, Flextronics still has roughly $2 billion in total long-term debt with which it will eventually need to contend, but it also generates tons of cash -- around $614 million in free cash flow last quarter, mind you -- and should have little trouble covering its financial obligations when the time comes. In the end, that's why I think shares of Flextronics could still reward patient investors handsomely over the long term.
