Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. (NYSE: HOT) reported its third-quarter financial results before the markets opened on Wednesday. The company had $0.74 in earnings per share (EPS) on $1.43 billion in revenue, compared to consensus estimates from Thomson Reuters of $0.72 in EPS on revenue of $1.44 billion. The same period from the previous year had $0.66 in EPS on $1.49 billion in revenue.
The company announced that it entered into a definitive agreements with Interval Leisure Group pursuant to which Starwood’s vacation ownership business will be distributed on a pro rata basis to stockholders and immediately after will merge with a wholly owned subsidiary of Interval. The transaction has a total value to Starwood of approximately $1.5 billion.
During the third quarter of 2015, Starwood signed 44 hotel management and franchise contracts, representing approximately 8,600 rooms, of which 32 are new builds and 12 are conversions from other brands. At the end of the quarter, the company had approximately 510 hotels in the active pipeline, representing approximately 113,000 rooms.
In the third quarter, Starwood declared a regular quarterly dividend of $0.375 per share, which was paid on September 25 to stockholders of record as of September 11. The total dividends paid in the third quarter of 2015 were approximately $64 million.
Adam Aron, interim CEO of Starwood, commented on earnings:
As we expected, the results for the completed third quarter were encouraging. Our performance is yet another indication that Starwood has been making progress on the sharply-focused strategy we launched in February 2015 to strengthen our brands, drive operational excellence, and accelerate the pace of our growth. Collectively these efforts have also yielded better growth in our new hotel signings, with rooms up 33% year-to-date through the end of the third quarter. These results on both operations and development give us optimism to have a bullish outlook for 2016 as well as the future of our brands and hotels.
Shares of Starwood were up 7.6% at $80.48 Wednesday morning, with a consensus analyst price target of $84.75 and a 52-week trading range of $63.99 to $87.99.
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