Corning Glows and Crows

• Email
• Share
• Print

According to a press release issued today, right about now, somewhere in New York City, Corning (NYSE: GLW) COO Peter Volanakis is regaling Wall Street's wizards with news of Corning's expectations for the last quarter of this fiscal year. While we'd all love to be there (isn't New York lovely in the autumn?), or even to get a glimpse at a transcript from the conference call, for now, we'll have to settle for the summary of what Volanakis is supposed to be talking about. Here's the dime tour:

Guidance
Corning will be raising its guidance $0.02 from the previous range, and now expects to earn $0.38 to $0.40 per share "before special items." Coming from any other company (Symantec (Nasdaq: SYMC), for example, or Macrovision (Nasdaq: MVSN), for another), I'd consider such a caveat to constitute a pro forma cop-out. But as I explained in our pre-Q3 Foolish Forecast, Corning really must limit itself to such caveat-ed projections. Management has no way of knowing ahead of time how much the asbestos litigation settlement fund will jerk its net profits around in any given quarter. This is a case of no harm, no foul.

Sales projections, which are not affected by asbestos-fund accounting, also got upped, and now stand at $1.53 billion to $1.56 billion for the quarter. According to Volanakis, both October's actual sales and November's promise of sales to come (i.e. "orders") have been "strong." And the firm's Display Technologies business -- which makes the glass that panel makers such as LG.Philips (NYSE: LPL) use to build the flat-panel TVs lining the shelves at your local Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) -- showed sequential volume growth verging on 5%.

Even better, all these sales are earning better margins for Corning -- suggesting that high levels of glass supply are not at all flooding the market and depressing prices. To the contrary, Corning says its gross margin will be about one full percentage point higher than previously thought, so about 48% or 49%.

In all, Corning says we should expect to see earnings per share for the year up 23% over fiscal 2006, so about $1.43 per share. Granted, personally, I haven't been able to get over the firm's minimal free cash flow enough to force myself to buy in to this growth story. But if you can, and if you're willing to take Corning's P/E at face value, then there's no two ways about it: If Corning can keep up anything like 23% annual profits growth in the future, the stock's current valuation of 18 times current earnings makes for a very attractive entry point.

Corning's been all good news lately. Read about what it had to say at the last big conference in "Fool on the Street: Corning's Glowing Update."