Top Performer for Wed: Unisys (UIS)

Earnings estimates for Unisys Corporation (UIS - Analyst Report) have moved sharply higher after its recent second-quarter report, in which the company announced earnings per share that easily surpassed the Zacks Consensus Estimate.

Shares are up more than 7% at the moment, which makes UIS a top-performing Zacks #1 Rank company. Volume is about 15.7 million shares, more than double the daily average of about 5.7 million.

UIS is a worldwide information technology company with a portfolio of IT services, software and technology. It specializes in helping clients secure their operations, increase the efficiency and utilization of their data centers, enhance support to their end users and constituents and modernize their enterprise applications.

Earnings Estimates Soar Higher

At the moment, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for this year and next is 8 cents per share and 20 cents per share, respectively. Those are stark improvements from the outlooks 3 months back; analysts were calling for a loss of 4 cents for this year and a profit of 7 cents for next.

Furthermore, those expectations suggest profit growth of 150% next year over this year.

However, even more interesting is the improvement in guidance over the past 7 days. This year's estimate has gained 700% in that time from a 1-cent profit prediction. Meanwhile, next year's advance has been 54% in the past week from 13 cents.

Second Quarter Report

Although revenue declined by 16%, UIS reported second-quarter earnings per share of 10 cents last week. That result handily topped the Zacks Consensus Estimate of a penny loss by as much as 1100%. In the year-ago quarter, UIS lost 4 cents.

The company said this advance was driven by its ongoing actions to more effectively concentrate its resources and reduce its cost base.

"While we have much more work to do, this is an important step toward our goal of becoming a consistently and predictably profitable company," said Chairman and CEO Ed Coleman.

The Computer Services Industry

UIS is 1 of 6 companies from the Computer-Services industry on today's Zacks #1 Rank List, which includes 234 stocks. Those other companies are CGI Group, Inc. (GIB - Snapshot Report), Dynamics Research Corporation (DRCO - Snapshot Report), Patni Computer Systems Ltd. (PTI - Analyst Report), SYNNEX Corporation (SNX - Snapshot Report) and Syntel, Inc. (SYNT - Snapshot Report).