Jamba's Still Got Juice Left, Says Wedbush

• The share price of Jamba, Inc. JMBA has increase 1.41 percent over the past month, with a high of $15.53 on September 17.
• Wedbush’s Phil Terpolilli has reiterated an Outperform rating and price target of $18 on the company.
• The company has announced a transition in leadership, while also announcing robust preliminary comps for Q3.

Analyst Phil Terpolilli mentioned that Jamba has announces its system-wide same-store sales comps and company-owned store comparable store sales meaningfully ahead of the estimates, implying that “both franchisees and company-owned stores performed modestly better than expectations, rebounding nicely from a poor 2Q result.”

The company had raised its share buyback target from $40 million to $45 million in early September. According to Q2 data, Jamba has repurchased about $16 million worth of stock in Q3, or about 1-1.1 million shares.

“We expect further repurchases as the company generates cash from share buybacks,” the Wedbush report stated.

In addition, the company had announced in mid-September the additional refranchising of 13 stores. This leaves the company 88 percent franchised, which bring it closer to its goal of 90/10 percent and Terpolilli believes that Jamba could beat its 2015 refranchise targets.

Jamba’s CEO, James White, has announced his intention to retire from his responsibilities as CEO and Chairman, although he “will remain with company to help operations until a replacement is found.”

“We continue to believe Jamba will benefit over the next few quarters from share repurchase efforts, an asset-light model, improving cost structure in heading into 2016 and further activist involvement,” Terpolilli added.