SAN JOSE -- Sanmina-SCI swung to a fiscal fourth-quarter profit of $31 million on higher demand for communications and industrial products. The contract assembler lost $33 million a year ago.

Excluding one-time items, the company would have earned $37.8 million, compared to $94,000  in the year-ago quarter.

The world's fifth-ranked electronics manufacturing company reported revenue of $1.69 billion, up 4% sequentially and 20.1% year-over-year. Communications was up 13% sequentially and Industrial rose 4% sequentially, while Enterprise and Multimedia fell 10% and 5%, respectively.

Gross margins slipped to 7.8% on execution issues in the company's PCB segment. Inventories fell 1% sequentially during the period.

On a conference call with analysts, chairman and CEO Jure Sola said, "Printed circuit boards and all our components demand was pretty strong and continues to be pretty strong. Any issues that we have, that was more delivering what our customers were looking for in the last quarter."

For the full fiscal year, net income was $122.4 million, compared to last year's loss of $137.8 million.

The company guided for fiscal first quarter revenue of $1.625 billion to $1.675 billion. Sanmina said customer forecasts were uncertain and noted some excess inventory in customers' pipelines. Enterprise Computing and Multimedia are expected to be weakest, and Industrial and Communications are expected to be stable or grow modestly.

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