ABJ - August 2 - FirstEnergy Corp. has announced second quarter 2011 basic earnings of 65 cents per share of common stock (64 cents diluted) on a non-GAAP basis.

These results exclude the impact of special items listed below. This compares to basic and diluted non-GAAP earnings of 82 cents per share in the second quarter of 2010.

On a GAAP basis, second quarter 2011 basic and diluted earnings were 43 cents per share of common stock on net income of $171 million and revenue of $4.1 billion. Second quarter 2010 basic and diluted GAAP earnings were 87 cents per share on net income of $256 million, with revenue of $3.1 billion.

“These results are in line with our expectations, and today we are narrowing our 2011 non-GAAP earnings guidance to the upper end of the previous range, to $3.30 to $3.50 per share, from $3.20 to $3.50 per share,” FirstEnergy President and CEO Anthony J. Alexander said in a statement. “We have already made significant progress in realizing benefits from the merger with Allegheny Energy, and we remain confident that we will achieve our 2011 merger targets.”

Second quarter 2011 non-GAAP results benefited from the net accretion from the Allegheny merger, including the impact of shares issued in the merger. Results were negatively affected by higher maintenance costs for the generation fleet (principally nuclear refueling outage costs), lower commodity margin from FirstEnergy Solutions resulting from unplanned generating unit outages, higher financing costs, and the absence of favorable tax settlements that were achieved last year.