Nike Inc. (NKE) just does it, tops earnings guesses, stock rockets

Nike Inc. (NYSE: NKE) shares rose 6.9% to $87.27 a day after the athletic-shoe seller reported fourth-quarter earnings that beat estimates. Volume for the stock was 4.7 million shares, topping an all-day average of 2.7 million.

This morning, an article from the Associated Press stated that the sports gear maker said net income for its fiscal fourth quarter, ended May 31, rose 14% to $594 million, or $1.24 a share. Net income for the year ago period was $522 million, or $1.06 a share.

Nike was expected to earn $1.16 a share, according to the average estimate of analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Revenue for the quarter rose to $5.8 billion from $5.08-billion. Excluding currency movements, it increased 11%

Analysts expected $5.528 billion of revenue for the period.

The AP story quotes Matt Arnold, an analyst at Edward Jones as saying, “The best way to offset higher costs is to generate strong demand growth and Nike was able to do that.”

Futures orders, a closely watched measure of demand in coming months, came in ahead of Wall Street estimates. Orders for June through November jumped 15% to $10.3-billion. Excluding currency effects, orders rose 12%, Nike said.

Barclays Capital analyst Robert Drbul expected futures orders to be up 8 per cent to 10 per cent in constant dollars. Arnold was expecting future orders to be up at least 8%. Strong futures orders suggest Nike will be able to raise prices later this year, Arnold added.

Tags: buzz stocks, consumer discretionary, financials, NKE, NYSE

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 28th, 2011 at 11:38 am by Glenn and is filed under Consumer Discretionary Stocks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.