JDS Uniphase Votes For Buyback Over Expansion (JDSU)

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published

JDS Uniphase Inc. (NASDAQ: JDSU) has just announced that its board of directors has authorized the repurchase of up to $200 million in shares of common stock.  The repurchases can be via open market or private transactions, and it set this as a two year period ending May 14, 2010.

JDS Uniphase’s market cap is roughly $2.6 Billion.  Based upon today’s prices, this would net out approximately 17 million shares.  That in turn is representative of nearly 2.5 days worth of average trading volume.

As far as how this relates to total cash, as of March 29, 2008, JDSU had $1.045 Billion in cash and short-term investments, and still had $26.7 million listed as long-term investments.  Its total liabilities were also $1.13 Billion. 

Unfortunately, this buyback doesn’t sound like it is going to be large enough to make any massive dent even though shares should run up initially on this news.  It also signals that there might not be that many great niche and complimentary or adjacent mergers it wants to make.

Shares closed at $11.51 yesterday and are up almost 1% pre-market at $11.61; its 52-week trading range is $9.49 to $16.05.

Jon C. Ogg
May 15, 2008

Jon Ogg produces and edits the "10 Stocks Under $10" newsletter and he does not own securities in the companies he covers.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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