Jacobs' (JEC) Blue Canopy Buyout To Stoke Inorganic Growth

Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. (NYSE:JEC) recently boosted its inorganic growth trajectory by acquiring Blue Canopy — a premium cybersecurity, data analytics and application development firm. This move is likely to strengthen Jacobs Connected Enterprise (“JCE”) solutions’ business, going forward. Financial terms of the deal remain undisclosed.

On a month-to-date basis, Jacobs’ shares yielded a return of nearly 1%, as against 0.3% loss incurred by the industry.

This Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) stock is poised to grow on the back of diligent business contracts and strategic restructuring moves. Notably, the company (on Aug 7, 2017) signed an agreement to acquire CH2M HILL Companies Ltd., which is in sync with its efforts to become a $15-billion global solutions provider over the long run.

Inside the Headlines

Blue Canopy provides services across education, healthcare and Federal civilian financial sectors. Notably, the company’s state-of-the-art cybersecurity and data analytics services enjoy solid demand from a number of intelligence and defense communities. It reported revenues of $104 million in 2016 and has around 400 employees at present.

On the back of the above discussed acquisition, JCE intends to offer non-imitable analytic and data visualization solutions, through which end users will be able to promptly identify the exact areas of business improvement by unlocking the power of data. In addition to this, through the Blue Canopy buyout, JCE is aimed at providing wide-ranging cybersecurity solutions for managing services of resiliency and forensics with a more efficient approach.

Jacobs’ JCE business unit offers digital solutions to link complex infrastructure and evaluate data for the purpose of protecting infrastructure from external and internal threats, as well as optimizing operations.

Stocks to Consider

Better-ranked stocks in the sector are listed below:

TopBuild Corp. (NYSE:BLD) has an average positive earnings surprise of 10.42% for the last four quarters and currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 (Strong Buy) Rank stocks here.

Beazer Homes USA, Inc. (NYSE:BZH) carries a Zacks Rank #2 and generated an outstanding average positive earnings surprise of 103.47% over the trailing four quarters.

Energy Focus, Inc. (NASDAQ:EFOI) , which also holds a Zacks Rank #2, pulled off an average positive earnings surprise of 6.60% during the same time frame.

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