In an announcement this morning, PAETEC (news, filings) supplied financial guidance for the full year 2009, something they had not done previously due to the economic uncertainty. The reason seems to be stabilization of the economy, and increasing visibility. Hopefully this is the beginning of a trend, and providers are feeling more confident about their predictive ability. It would be nice to get a bit more than the opaque levels of caution we have been listening to.
PAETEC now expects 2009 revenue to be $1.575-1,585B, the midpoint of which implies an average of $399M for each of the third and fourth quarters. That seems to match analyst views and would reverse three consecutive quarterly declines, ending the year with sequential revenue growth. EBITDA should fall in the range $245-255M, which implies relatively flat performance or slight declines for that metric but nothing really unexpected. More important here is that visibility is improving.
Another sign of increasing confidence over at PAETEC this month was the announcement of a $25M stock buyback program spanning the next 5 quarters. While I don’t usually spend much time thinking about stock buyback programs, it’s still nice to see.
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Categories: CLEC · Financials
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Who is on the PAETEC acquisition radar? The quarterly conference calls suggest they would like to build their west coast marketshare. Could that mean Tele-Pacific, Integra?
Integra would be an excellent fit, as I have said before. TelePacific probably needs it less. There aren’t many other targets with a regional presence that I can think of off the top of my head. Maybe 360Networks or Pac-West, but the business model doesn’t fit as well.