How badly does AT&T want to renew its iPhone exclusivity contract with Apple? Pretty damn badly. Posting third-quarter earnings that topped Wall Street expectations this morning, AT&T said it activated a record 3.2 million iPhones during the period. Of those, 40 percent were for customers new to the carrier.
Though eBay reported a 29 percent drop in profit for its third quarter Wednesday, the company did deliver revenue that was reasonably higher than Wall Street’s expectations. Not that it mattered much. Investors took eBay out to the woodshed anyway, beating its shares down seven percent in after-hours trading.
“I’d be very surprised if Google did not hit $500 by the end of the year.” Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney said that just last week, and as it happens he has already been proven right. Earlier today, Google saw its shares cross the $500 threshold, setting a new 52-week high.
Apple’s September quarter is shaping up to be a good one, if the latest metrics from NPD as reported by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster are any indication. According to the research outfit, Mac sales for July and August are up seven percent year-over-year.
Motorola is getting a bit of long lost love from Wall Street today, now that it has unveiled the CLIQ–the Android-powered handset with which it hopes to regain market share in the intensely competitive cellphone business. Shares in the company spiked more than seven percent after the CLIQ announcement Thursday, and today they’re up well over six percent.
Apple’s iPhone continues to be AT&T’s marquee handset, though the data-guzzling “Hummer of cellphones,” as the New York Times has dubbed it, has inspired widespread customer dissatisfaction with the carrier’s network. Indeed, according to Piper Jaffray, the iPhone 3G and 3GS are AT&T’s top-selling phones.
Dell’s profit fell 23 percent in its second quarter. Its sales fell 22 percent. But the company still beat Wall Street expectations, and that’s what counts these days. Dell shares spiked nearly seven percent when the news was released, oddly, three minutes before the close of trading Thursday.
AT&T and Verizon have run afoul of TiVo’s video patents. Reporting a second-quarter loss and projected results below Wall Street expectations Wednesday, the digital video recorder pioneer said it is suing the two telecoms for infringing on its patents for technology that allows DVRs to simultaneously store and play back programs, pause live television and deliver other features.
Can this really be true? Vonage posted another quarterly profit? Indeed it is. The Internet phone service provider reported a second-quarter profit of $2.3 million, or a penny a share. Wall Street had been expecting a loss of three cents a share. Great news. Sadly for Vonage, it was tainted by an increase in subscriber defections.
This recession is a long way from over if Verizon’s latest earnings are anything to judge by. Reporting second-quarter earnings that were a penny better than the 62 cents per share Wall Street had been expecting, the company said it suffered a nasty 21 percent drop in profit thanks to the econalypse, which is pinching enterprise customers pretty hard these days.
The econalypse has done great things for Netflix, sending recession-addled customers running to embrace its way-cheaper-than-cable DVD-by-mail and streaming-movie service. The online DVD-rental pioneer posted earnings that beat Wall Street estimates and announced that its subscriber base has grown to 10.6 million.
Good thing Wall Street wasn’t expecting much from Microsoft. Because it didn’t get it.
After market close Thursday, the Redmond, Wash-based tech giant reported that fiscal fourth-quarter net income fell to $3.05 billion, or 34 cents a share, from $4.3 billion, or 46 cents a share, in the same period a year earlier. Revenue for the period ended in June fell 17 percent to $13.1 billion.
Microsoft missed Wall Street revenue estimates by $1 billion. Gruesome.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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