By Rex Crum, MarketWatch
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Tech stocks ended up putting in a
broadly upbeat market performance Thursday, as notable gains from
SanDisk Corp, Netflix Inc. and newly public Chinese Internet
company Weibo Corp. paced the sector's advance and help withstand
losses from bellwethers such as IBM Corp. and Google Inc.
SanDisk (SNDK) shares climbed more than 9% to close at $82.99 a
day after the memory and storage-chipmaker reported upbeat
quarterly sales and earnings.
Weibo (WB) shares rose 19% to end the day at $20.24. The company
that is considered the Twitter of China went public Thursday when
it sold 16.8 million U.S.-listed shares at $17 each, which was at
the low end of an expected range of $17 to $19 a share.
Twitter (TWTR) shares rose 1.3% to close at $45.01 as the
company said it would allow advertisers to offer
application-install ads on mobile devices.
Gains also came from Netflix (NFLX), up 4.3% to close at
$345.74; Groupon Inc. (GRPN), which rose 4.4% to end the day at
$7.41 a share, as well as Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) and Apple Inc.
(AAPL).
IBM Corp. stood out among decliners as investors turned against
Big Blue following a disappointing quarterly earnings report.
IBM (IBM) fell by $6.39 a share, or more than 3%, to close at
$190.01 after the company said late Wednesday that it earned $2.38
billion, or $2.29 a share, for its first quarter ended in March.
During the same period a year ago, IBM earned $3.03 billion, or
$2.70 a share. Revenue declined by 4% to $22.5 billion.
Excluding one-time items, IBM would have earned $2.54 a share,
which was in line with estimates of analysts surveyed by Thomson
Reuters, who had also forecast IBM to report $22.91 billion in
revenue.
The results showed IBM's lowest quarterly revenue since it
reported $21.71 billion in the first quarter of 2009. The main
source of IBM's sales drop was the company's hardware sales, which
declined 23% from a year ago to $2.4 billion. The company has been
moving more into software and cloud-based services and is in the
middle of selling its low-end server business to Lenovo Group.
Still, such moves have yet to spur meaningful sales or earnings
improvements at IBM. Analyst Brian Marshall, of ISI Group, said the
company "has a long history of proactively discarding unattractive
businesses" such as hard-disk drives, printers and PCs, but that
Chief Executive Virginia Rometty and Chief Financial Officer Martin
Schroeter need to take more dramatic action in order to transform
the company.
"Unfortunately, the pace of change in tech has only accelerated
and we believe the focus now needs to turn to building attractive
new multi-billion dollar business lines rather than shedding old
ones," Marshall said.
The Nasdaq Composite Index (RIXF) reversed course from its early
losses and rose 9 points to close at 4,095. The Philadelphia
Semiconductor Index (SOX) ended the day with a gain of almost
2%.
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