SunPower Drops Before Solar-Panel Maker Misses Profit Estimates
SunPower Corp. (SPWRA), the second-biggest U.S. maker of solar panels, tumbled 2.6 percent in 131 seconds today, about an hour before the shares were halted and the company reported worse-than-estimated results.
SunPower lost 2.6 percent between 3:39 p.m. and 3:41 p.m. in New York, falling to $21.01 from $21.56, before slumping to $20.88 at the 4 p.m. close of trading and ending with a full-day loss of 6.5 percent. At 4:30 p.m., the company said in a statement that it lost money in the second quarter, while analysts anticipated profit, because of business conditions in Germany and Italy.
The company’s loss excluding some items was 19 cents to 20 cents a share during the three-month period that ended July 3, according to today’s statement. That compared with the average analyst earnings projection of 2 cents a share for San Jose, California-based SunPower, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
“It looks incredibly strange,” Paul Leming, an analyst with Ticonderoga Securities LLC in New York, said in a telephone interview. “It looks like someone had the release ahead of time, but I don’t have any information to back that up except for the pattern in the trading,” said Leming, who has a “neutral” rating on the shares.
Bob Okunski, a spokesman for SunPower, said in an e-mail that the company doesn’t comment on the trading of its stock. Florence Harmon, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, declined to comment on whether the regulator will review the timing of the retreat.
Today’s drop was the biggest since June 15, a week before Paris-based Total SA (FP), Europe’s third-largest oil producer, said it will spend $1.4 billion to buy 60 percent of the company.
“A stock shouldn’t sell off like that in the last hour of trading ahead of an important negative release,” Mark Bachman, a Boston-based analyst at Avian Securities LLC who has a “negative” rating on the shares, said in a phone interview.
To contact the reporter on this story: Nikolaj Gammeltoft in New York at ngammeltoft@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Nick Baker at nbaker7@bloomberg.net
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