Smith International Sinks on (SII, SLB, HAL, BHI, WFT)

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Apr 28, 5:03AM EDT · Published Jan 30, 12:43PM EST

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Smith International, Inc. (NYSE:SII) led the parade of oil field services stocks downhill yesterday. Smith opened Thursday more than $1.50/share lower than Wednesday’s close and finished the day even lower. Schlumberger Limited (NYSE:SLB), Baker Hughes Inc. (NYSE:BHI), Halliburton Company (NYSE:HAL), and Weatherford International Ltd. (NYSE:WFT) all followed suit.

Smith reported soft fourth quarter and full year results yesterday. Non-GAAP EPS amounted to $1.00 on income from continuing operations of $218.6 million and revenue of $3.06 billion. Analysts were expecting EPS of $1.02 on revenue of $3.04 billion.

The company’s CFO noted that Smith has "one of the best cash flow downturn profiles in our industry. Over the coming quarters, we would expect to generate significant free cash flow as the business contracts…." She didn’t explain what that means, exactly, but one could interpret it to mean that as economic conditions worsen, Smith will perform better. Sure, we’ll buy that.

Paul Ausick Angrybear

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.