JACO, excerpts from a Dow Jones piece at the very end of March:
<<Jaco Electronics Inc. (JACO) Chief Executive Joel Girsky expects his company to ride the recovery in the computer-components industry to growing profits and revenue for at least the next two years....
Girsky is equally confident about the rest of the year, with earnings expected to grow to $1 a share in fiscal 2000, which ends in June, on revenue of $180 million. That would represent the first year-over-year growth for the company since 1996. "Over the next 12 to 18 months we're going to see huge growth out of Jaco," said Robert Damron, an analyst at Tucker Anthony Cleary Gull in Milwaukee. He expects per-share earnings to grow more than 30% in this fiscal year, and 40% the year after that....
Damron rates Jaco stock a strong buy and believes it could rise to 20 over the next 12 months, which would be an all-time high.
Hanging over the company's head, however, is the volatile cyclicality of the computer-parts industry, most notably the semiconductor category....
But Jaco CEO Girsky, a 61-year-old Brooklyn native who briefly took over his father's butcher business as a teenager, argues that the company is well positioned to weather future downturns. For one thing, he said, Jaco made a savvy decision in 1998 to begin selling flat-panel displays before most of its competitors, including several behemoth suppliers such as Arrow Electronics Inc. (ARW), based in nearby Melville, N.Y., and Avnet Inc. (AVT) - both of whom have revenue approaching $10 billion.
These days Jaco is "probably" the largest dealer of flat-panels in the U.S., Girsky said, and will take in between $15 million and $20 million in sales from the devices this fiscal year, which ends in June, up from nothing in 1999.
"It's something the giants of our industry have ignored," Girsky said of the flat-panel category. "This market is probably doubling every year for the next three to four years without batting an eye." Flat-panel sales, therefore, which now account for only about 10% of Jaco's top line, should serve to buoy the company's financial results when the semiconductor business inevitably sours.... |
