Shares of Costa Mesa’s Emulex Corp., a maker of electronics for data storage networks, jumped Monday after the company gave an early look at its earnings for the December quarter.
Investors sent the stock up more than 9% in afterhours trading on a recent market value of $900 million.
Emulex’s revised outlook beats its own earlier guidance as well as analysts’ expectations.
For the three months through December, Emulex said it’s expecting profits of $13 million to $14 million, up from its previous outlook of $8 million to $10 million.
It’s looking for quarterly sales of $107 million to $108 million, up from a prior outlook of $88 million to $92 million.
Wall Street analysts, on average, are looking for profits of about $10 million on sales of $91 million.
Last year, Emulex fought off a hostile $912 million buyout bid by Irvine’s Broadcom Corp.
Emulex rebuffed the offer citing its prospects as an independent company and saying Broadcom was trying to acquire it on the cheap.
“The next few quarters will be really important to get a sense of where they are tracking relative to those high expectations,” said Kaushik Roy, an analyst at Wedbush Securities LLC in San Francisco. “They have to prove to everybody they were right.”
Emulex is looking to grow with electronics for a new technology known as converged networks, which promises to bridge everyday corporate networks of servers and desktop PCs with more robust, specialized data storage networks.
Chief Executive Jim McCluney cited growth in converged network adapters as one reason for the better-than-expected quarter.
“With an expanding portfolio of universal converged network adapters and embedded product design wins ramping in the first half of the year, combined with an improving information technology spending environment, we are exceptionally well positioned to deliver meaningful revenue growth in 2010,” he said.
Emulex is set to announce earnings results on Jan. 21.
