Sabre’s Back to the Basics Strategy Shift Starts to Bear Fruit

May marks the 17th month since Sean Menke became CEO of Sabre, the travel technology company based in Southlake, Texas. Menke inherited a company that may not have been in as good a shape as had been suggested by its stock valuation — which had nearly doubled from its 2014 initial public offering. So the CEO has been reorganizing the business. One of his moves was to cut the workforce by 10 percent, to about 9,000. On Tuesday, Sabre reported first quarter 2018 earnings. Revenue growth was up 8 percent, year-over-year, to $988.4 million. Its profit rose about 2 percent, year over year, to $121.2 million. Sabre's free cash flow — a metric investors use to track if a business has a solid financial position — is forecast to rise 18 percent this year to about $425 million. Investors liked the news, bidding shares up about 8 percent in early trading. But stock market investors tend to have a short-term view. In the past few years, Sabre has helped to boost its share