Shares of athletic giant Nike, Inc. (NKE) are trading sharply higher after hours, following reporting better than expected earnings for its fiscal second quarter.
As we noted in our earnings preview, analysts had been expecting the company to show earnings of 71 cents per share, but the company outpaced these estimates with a reported 76 cents during the quarter, on revenues of $4.4 billion.
During the same period last year, Nike had earnings of 80 cents per share on $4.59 billion in revenues.
The company has been dealing with a slowdown in sales over the past year as consumers have been cutting back on discretionary spending, but Nike did report that it is seeing an increase of 4% in future orders between December 2009 and April 2010, a sign that demand is starting to pick up once again.
Today’s news is a bright spot for the company which has recently found itself wrapped up in the Tiger Wood’s scandal. Woods has been the company’s biggest face and it has publicly stated that it will continue to stand by the golfer as he deals with current sex scandal that has been grabbing the majority of news headlines over the past couple of weeks.
By beating out analyst estimates for its second quarter, Nike has now beat out analyst estimates for 10 consecutive quarters, and it has not posted lower than expected earnings since its fourth quarter 2006 report.
Following today’s better than expected earnings, after hours traders have pushed the stock up 3.3% to $65.33, up $2.08.
The following chart shows how the stock has behaved over the past 12 months:
