Wolverine World Wide's earnings jump, but stock is down

Wolverine World Wide, Inc. (NYSE: WWW), a footwear maker that competes with businesses such as The Timberland Company (NYSE: TBL), announced impressive earnings -- yet the stock as of this writing was down almost 3%. What gives, you ask? Well, it looks like revenues came in a bit on the light side.

According to Briefing.com, Wolverine beat Wall Street's expectations by a whopping three pennies. They came in at $0.46 per diluted share -- this represented growth over the previous year's quarter of almost 18%. But the top line was rather sheepish in terms of expansion -- Wolverine took in $288 million this quarter versus $281 million in Q1 2007. Yeah, that performance wasn't anything to be proud of, I suppose. So investors were in a punishing mood and sold the stock.

Still, Wolverine is an interesting stock that probably should be put on a watch list. It's not too far from the 52-week high, it doesn't appear to be overly expensive, and according to the company's earnings release, gross margins expanded by 100 basis points. I wouldn't necessarily get in now if I wanted to invest in Wolverine, but I'd be on the lookout for pullbacks.

Disclosure: I don't own shares in any of the companies mentioned here; positions can change at any time.