Sterne Agee Upgrades Jacobs Engineering Group (JEC)

Sterne Agee is upgrading shares of Jacobs Engineering Group, Inc. JEC to Buy with a $60 price target on shares. In a note to clients, Sterne Agee writes, "We are upgrading JEC to BUY from Neutral and increasing our 6-12 month price target to $60. Our PT now reflects JEC trading at 19.7X our $3.05 FY12E EPS. With additional color on the Aker deal (AKSO.OSL – NOK 99.45, we are now more comfortable with JEC's ability to take advantage of global energy infrastructure investment in key International markets, as well as in Mining, which we expect to be the top performing E&C market in 2011, in addition to the fact that backlog in most of JEC's businesses is now near bottom levels, and we expect to see growing backlog in coming quarters. We have raised our FY11/FY12 EPS to $2.60/$3.05 from $2.45/$2.75, respectively, due to better core business assumptions in F2H11 and acquisition accretion in FY12." Shares of JEC lost 83 cents yesterday to close at $49.49, a loss of 1.65%.