Earnings Preview for Jabil Circuit

Jabil Circuit JBL is set to report third-quarter fiscal 2011 results Tuesday, June 21, after the markets close. Analysts are looking for the tech company to report that earnings grew 29.8% from a year ago to $0.57 per share. Sixty days ago, that consensus earnings estimate was the same. The revenue forecast for the quarter calls for $4.1 billion, an increase of 19.9% from the same period of last year. The Company St. Petersburg, Florida-based Jabil Circuit is one of the leading providers of electronics manufacturing services in the world. Its largest customers include Apple AAPL, Cisco Systems CSCO, General Electric GE, IBM IBM, Research In Motion RIMM and Hewlett-Packard HPQ. In the three months that ended in May, the company added an independent board member and announced a strategic partnership with JA Solar JASO. Looking Ahead Analysts so far expect to see sequential and year-over-year growth of earnings and revenue from Jabil in the fourth quarter. For the full year, earnings are expected to be up 34.5% to $2.32 per share and revenues up 22.7% to $16.5 billion. Note that earnings results were better than expected in the past nine quarters; the beat was by 6.7% in the previous quarter. Performance The long-term earnings per share growth forecast is 10.0%. The trailing P/E ratio is 8.8 and the PEG ratio is 0.8. Jabil has a return on equity of 15.2 and a dividend yield of 1.5%. Analysts on average recommend buying JBL and have for more than 90 days. Their mean price target (a sign of where they expect the share price to go) is currently $25.45. However, the share price has traded mostly between $19 and $22 since December. Shares closed Friday at $18.29. Yet, year to date, the stock has outperformed its industry average, but underperformed the broader markets.