Author Archives: Scalper1

Already down 28% from Feb. 1 before the open Friday,  Luxoft Holding stock plunged as much as 16% in the stock market today before regaining some of its losses, with shares down 4.5%, near 53, in afternoon trading. Late Thursday, the company delivered Q3 earnings and gave full-year guidance below Wall Street estimates. A tech-outsourcing firm primarily targeting financial services IT and automotive tech markets, Switzerland-based Luxoft said EPS minus items  fell 11% year over year to 72 cents, on revenue that grew 18% to $172 million, for the quarter ended Dec. 31. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had expected 80 cents on $175 million. Luxoft stock is now 34% below its all-time high of 80.64 set just Dec. 8. Luxoft went public in June 2013 at 17. In the company’s earnings conference call early Friday, CEO Dmitry Loschin said Luxoft faced tough comps from a year earlier, “material” foreign-exchange headwinds, and offered “discounts to some of our key customers.” He said the discounts were enabled by “our strong performance during the first six months of the year” before uttering Deutsche Bank ( DB ), which he eventually explained. The bad news: Frankfurt-based Deutsche, Luxoft’s No. 1 client, was just coming off another big quarterly loss, prompting layoffs and a five-year restructuring program. The good news: Luxoft just signed a five-year master services agreement with Deutsche, expiring in December 2020, and made it to Deutsche’s shrinking preferred-vendor list. “With that, we believe Deutsche Bank . . . will provide a stable level of revenues for the next 12-14 months for Luxoft, but we are not forecasting significant growth,” Loschin told analysts. Asked by an JPMorgan analyst Alexey Gogolev if Deutsche would require further discounts, Loschin responded: “For sure we don’t expect every quarter to provide discounts to them. Our expectations for the next quarters is to be flat, with some variation up and down. . . . Taking into account the bank’s  position today, there are certain risks. They need to change their IT. This is a good year to make IT changes.” Luxoft said revenue tied to No. 2 client, UBS ( UBS ) rose 36%, and “now comprises 21.5% of our revenues,” said Loschin. “We are very optimistic regarding the upcoming work pipeline. . . . “Further, we have been successfully ramping up other major accounts in this vertical, such as Citigroup ( C ) and Credit Suisse ( CS ). The latter is going through many interesting, for us, transformational initiatives. ” For the first nine months of its fiscal year, financial services outsourcing revenue rose nearly 29% to nearly 69% of Luxoft’s total sales, said Chief Financial Officer Roman Yakushkin. Revenue from automotive and transportation outsourcing — in which car-audio maker Harman International Industries ( HAR ) ranks as its top sector client and No. 3 customer overall — rose 39% to 11.6% of total sales. Technology outsourcing rose 36% to 6.9% of sales. Telecom rose 10.5% to 5.7% of sales. Travel and aviation declined 15% to 4.5% of revenue. And energy increased 5.2% to 2% of sales. UBS analyst Steven Milunovich, in a research note issued Friday, reiterated his buy rating on Luxoft stock, with an 84 price target. “The stock is already down . . . on concerns of exposure to DB, UBS, and Credit Suisse,” he said. “However, the slowdown in constant currency growth, apparently largely due to DB, might cause further weakness. We believe strong performance in other verticals might be sufficient to limit downside, though, and the longer-term outlook remains bright.”