Market behavior can be funny sometimes. News that should bring a particular stock price up makes it go down, and vice versa. Take, for example, TTM Technologies (NASDAQ:TTMI), which reported quarterly earnings last night and outperformed pretty much any estimate you can think of. Among eight analysts, the highest net EPS estimate was for $0.23, but TTM turned in $0.25 per diluted share. That was on $76.7 million of gross sales, up 34% year over year and right at the top end of analyst estimates.
Trailing-12-month gross margins were up 2.7 percentage points over last quarter to 26.5% thanks to better pricing, and net margins rose 1.6 percentage points to 15.5%. There are a handful of new customers on board, the existing clients ordered more expensive circuit boards, with higher layer counts than ever before, and rising materials costs were successfully passed on to the customers.
Yet the stock is down more than 20% today. The culprit seems to be disappointing near-term earnings guidance. The next quarter is expected to be essentially flat compared to this one, on sales and earnings as well as margins. That's apparently enough to send many traders running for the exits.
The panicked short-termers might have wanted to listen in on the earnings call for an explanation, though. Management explained that this is a seasonal pattern, fueled by slower business from client companies like IBM (NYSE:IBM), Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO), and Juniper Networks (NASDAQ:JNPR) during the summer months when many of their staffers go on vacation. Sales are expected to pick up again by the last month of the now-current quarter, and rocket on from there as they have been doing for the past year or so.
The guidance really wasn't much of a surprise, either -- it's right in line with analyst estimates made before yesterday's report. And if the quarter turns out as expected, it will still look impressive year over year, with about 27% gross sales improvement and nearly double the earnings. Hardly the stuff nightmares are made of. Funny guy, that Mr. Market. If you ask me, the price drop could be a huge buy-in opportunity, as the shares were hardly valued at nosebleed levels before the drop. Now, they look downright cheap. Do your own due diligence, and act accordingly.
Further Foolish reading:
- Even truly great companies can be had on sale sometimes.
- TTM has been tagged as a hyper-growth stock. Find out more about handling growth while it's happening.
TTM is a Motley Fool Stock Advisor selection. Find out why Tom Gardner likes quick-release circuit boards with a free 30-day trial.
Fool contributor Anders Bylund holds no position in the companies discussed here. He's not sure how many layers it takes to represent Foolish disclosure properly. Maybe you should check out Anders' holdings for yourself.
