What happened
Shares of New Oriental Education (EDU -13.96%) jumped as much as 18% early Tuesday, then settled to trade up 5.6% as of 1:30 p.m. EDT after the Chinese private educational services company announced strong fiscal second-quarter 2019 results.
More specifically, New Oriental Education's quarterly revenue climbed 27.8% year over year -- or 33.6% computed in Chinese renminbi -- to $597.1 million. That translated to adjusted net income of $23 million, or $0.14 per share, up 68.4% from $0.09 per share in the same year-ago period. Analysts, on average, were only expecting adjusted earnings of a penny per share on revenue closer to $578 million.
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So what
New Oriental education added 185 schools and learning centers over the past year, including 24 learning centers and one new training school this quarter, bringing its total to 1,125 at the end of November. The company also saw total student enrollments climb 23.6% year over year to roughly 2,320,800.
"As we execute our well-proven 'Optimize the Market' strategy, we continued to progress our capacity expansion plan in this quarter," stated New Oriental CEO Chenggang Zhou. "[...] At the same time, we continued to refine and leverage our online and offline integrated standardized teaching system for the K-12 business across the nation, and particularly in some of the larger cities for our overseas test preparation business."
Now what
For the current third quarter of fiscal 2019, New Oriental Education expects revenue in the range of $769.9 million to $793.2 million -- good for year-over-year growth of 25% to 28% and well above the $755.8 million most analysts were modeling. In the end, combined with New Oriental's relative outperformance to end the first half of the year, this outlook gave the market more than enough reason to bid up shares today.
Check out the latest New Oriental Education & Tech earnings call transcript.
