Feb. 27--Acco Brands Corp.'s badly battered stock jumped Friday, after the struggling Lincolnshire office-products maker turned in fourth-quarter profits that topped analyst forecasts.

In late-session New York Stock Exchange trading, Acco's thinly traded shares were up 40 cents, or a whopping 60 percent, to $1.07 -- fueled by the fact that per-share earnings from continuing operations exceeded by three cents the 34 cents Wall Street had been anticipating.

Nonetheless, Acco's difficulties obviously deepened in the fourth quarter, as profits remained under pressure and sales declined significantly.

"The global economic slowdown continued to negatively affect sales across all of our business and geographies," the company noted. Even excluding the drag of a $249 million noncash charge the company recorded to write down the carrying value of goodwill and related intangible assets, earnings were down sharply, Acco noted.

Acco drew headlines recently when it announced an unusual and somewhat controversial plan to temporarily cut salaried workers' pay by nearly half, as a way of reducing costs without firing staff.

In the latest quarter, Acco's sales dropped 30 percent to $353.4 million from $506.9 million.

The big but largely meaningless goodwill-accounting charge gave the Linconlshire company a net loss of $258 million, or $4.76 a share, compared with a net loss in the year-ago quarter of $14.3 million, or 26 cents a share.

Stripping out special items in both quarters, Acco noted, earnings from continuing operations were down by 46 percent at $20.4 million, or 37 cents a share, from the year-ago period's adjusted $36.2 million, or 66 cents.

Known years ago as American Clip Co., Acco was a unit of Fortune Brands Inc. until the conglomeratespun it off as a separate company in the summer of 2005.

As recently as June, the company's shares were trading at $14.75, but the slump in demand for its products has clobbered the stock and even after Friday's run-up the stock is remains down by 93 percent from its level last summer.

jpmiller@tribune.com

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