PALM: Palm Buyout Can’t Occur Quickly Enough for Shareholders

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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By William Trent, CFA of Stock Market Beat

Palm Reports Q3 FY07 Results: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance

Palm, Inc. (PALM) today reported revenue of $410.5 million in the third quarter of fiscal year 2007, ended March 2. Smartphone sell-through for the period reached a company record high totaling 738,000 units, up 30 percent year over year and up 20 percent sequentially.

It’s too bad they can’t make any money doing it. Because of the chronic oversupply we’ve talked about previously, all those extra units did next to nothing for sales and shrunk the bottom line.

One year ago Palm did $388.5 million in sales, this year they did $410.5. That is 5.6% using my math. If you are talking sequential growth they did $392.9 million in the November quarter, so the sequential growth was only 4.5%. And the January quarter includes the holiday sales season and is presumably the strongest. One positive sign was that inventory declined both on a sequential and a year/year basis. However, it is unclear how much inventory remains in the sales channel.

How about the guidance? $400-$410 marks a sequential decline and a midpoint growth rate of 0.5% over last year’s $403.1 million. Oh, and the consensus estimate was $416.

If it weren’t for buyout rumors there is no way they would be selling at 21x trailing earnings.

http://www.stockmarketbeat.com/

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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