What happened
After taking a 26% haircut in July, shares of Gogo (GOGO -1.87%) rose 25.4% in August 2018, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence. A respectable second-quarter earnings report helped the company erase the previous month's bad mojo in a hurry.
So what
The provider of in-flight broadband networking services saw sales rise 32% year over year, landing at $227.5 million. Your average analyst would have settled for roughly $208 million. On the bottom line, a net loss of $0.47 per share was an improvement over the year-ago period's $0.56 loss per share. Here, Wall Street had been looking for a loss near $0.75 per share.
Adjusted EBITDA profits nearly doubled to $18.9 million. Management also reaffirmed their previous full-year guidance targets, aiming for revenue in the neighborhood of $900 million and adjusted EBITDA of approximately $40 million.
Now what
Besides the financial surprises and the steady flow of system installations on aircraft around the world, Gogo CEO Oakleigh Thorne also provided an update on the company's strategic review.
"Gogo's received a number of strategic inquiries from financial and strategic players in the last few months and as we said on our last call, our board has considered those inquiries and asked management to assess them," Thorne said. "We don't have an update to provide on those matters today other than to say management is assessing various opportunities as requested by our board."
That alone could be enough to boost investor confidence in a stock that still trades 69% below its year-ago prices.
Gogo's revenue and EBITDA profits are rising quickly but investors take a dim view of the company's negative earnings and cash flows. In my view, Gogo looks like an undervalued high-growth company that's working through some temporary bottom-line weakness to build a profitable growth platform for the long term.