Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer told attendees at the company’s annual shareholder meeting that Windows 7 sales were astonishingly high. According to a Wall Street Journal account of the gathering, “Microsoft Corp. has sold twice as many copies of Windows 7 in its first few weeks than any previous version of the operating system,” Ballmer said.
The news means that one of Microsoft’s five major operating units may do well and next year. That leaves four to go. Read More
Verisk Analytics, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSK) is seeing some very cautious or at least unexciting analyst initiations now that its quiet period has ended. This post-IPO has at least held its value, which is more than many other post-IPOs can claim. The risk management suite of actuarial data came public in early-October in a $1.9 billion IPO after it sold 85.25 million shares at $22.00 per share.
It turns out that many felt it was a fully priced deal. Yet the stock popped above the pricing and has never gone back close to it. Since the deal opened, it has traded in a trading range of $26.10 to $30.00. The problem is that today’s slate of analyst initiations has failed to give investors any solid endorsement nor any solid hope of a real growth of shares.
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You have already seen the Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) buyout of 3Com Corporation (NASDAQ: COMS). But this week before that deal was announced we covered how mergers in the technology sector have been very slow to develop over the scale in which we and others think is possible for the sector. After the Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC) settlement with Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD), the tally of cash that is now estimated would be an implied $265 billion that is available for the tech giants in our 24/7 Wall St. Real-Time 500 to make acquisitions.
The giant cash balances are held by Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT), Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO), Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), and Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ: ORCL), assuming nothing happens with Sun Microsystems Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA). But players like QUALCOMM Inc. (NASDAQ: QCOM), EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), International Business Machines (NYSE: IBM), Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL), Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO), Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), and eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) are either all sitting with large amounts of cash or will be very soon.
We have broken out these technology, IT, software, and Internet companies by the cash amount they hold or what they have in a soon-to-be cash balance. Of course only a fraction of this cash will be used for mergers. But there is also a ton of room here for dividends and of course the share buybacks.
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We had already commented on hoe the merger offer for Corel Corp. (NASDAQ: CREL) from majority owner Vector Capital might be the strangest merger paths of this decade. The strange can always get stranger. Vector Capital had already raised its buyout price for the software company.
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Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL) is going to have to make some more threats if he wants the EU to approve his company’s deal to buy Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ:JAVA) for $9.50 a share. The Europeans have voiced some concerns that the combined company will have too much market share in the MySQL server software industry.
The EU’s concerns became more concrete today. Read More
Microsoft (NYSE:MSFT) Windows 7 sales in the first week after its introduction last month outdid Vista sales during the first week after its launch in January 2007 by 234%, according to industry research firm NPD. Microsoft has certainly encouraged the rumors that the operating system is doing well, but that no longer appears to be an empty boast. Read More
i2 Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ: ITWO) is a supply chain management company which has been a takeout stock before. Turns out that is again. In a complicated transaction, JDA Software Group Inc. (NASDAQ: JDAS) will pay some $34 million all said and done in a deal that values the company at $18.00. This was also an unlikely transportation stock, despite it being a software play, which we picked earlier as one which could double. It has doubled and then some.
Apple recently started publishing a list of the top grossing applications in its App Store. Since its inception the App Store has posted over 2 billion downloads. The App Store effectively operates like a consignment shop. Apple keeps a third of the price of any application sold in the App Store, while the developer gets the rest. Apple does not disclose how much revenue it derives from App Store sales, but we can bet that the lion’s share of revenue comes from the top 100 grossing applications. Below is a description of the top ten grossing applications sold in the App Store, along with a description of their developer.
It will be a shame when the day comes that Apple can’t put out good news every day. The market has become used to it. Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) now has the 9th highest market cap of all companies traded on a US exchange at $173 billion, about the same at Procter & Gamble (NYSE:PG) and JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM).
Apple today announced that its app store, certainly the most successful software service of its kind, has reached 100,000 applications available for iPhone and iPod users. Describing the triumph Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing said“The iPhone SDK created the first great platform for mobile applications and our customers are loving all the amazing apps our developers are creating.” Read More
There are reports from the Financial Times that were also just noted on CNBC that are almost baffling. It seems that the European Commission may issue a formal objection to the Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ: ORCL) buyout of Sun Microsystems Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA). The reasoning is that Oracle has apparently refused to offer any concessions to European regulators.
While a formal set of objections would not constitute a formal merger blockage, that is the first real step to a formal block. This is also not set in stone yet and does not mean that either Oracle nor the E.U. will offer concessions.
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Auriga is a boutique research firm that many have not heard of, but this morning the firm has reiterated its BUY rating on Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) and its $33.50 price target after yesterday’s $27.88 closing bell price. The reason for today’s call is that the firm obtained detailed Windows 7 pricing in as-sold models from Microsoft for six of the OEM companies from more than 100 PCs. And the first weeks of data may offer more insight than any official price target on overall market penetration rates. Particularly when you compare the data to other outside and independent research for overall Windows 7 penetration rates.
In a statement that must send chills up the spines of other tech CEOs, Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Steve Ballmer said that the vicious recession may have reset IT spending to a level which will never recovery to where it was in the period just before the downturn.
“While we will see growth, we will not see recovery,” Ballmer said. Read More
It has become commonplace to see initial public offerings from earlier private equity holdings that were once public and taken private. Yet it is very odd to see a company get acquired in a go-private deal to ultimately be followed by a re-IPO and then ultimately see a go-private transaction come its way yet again. But that is what we are seeing as a possibility, again, in Corel Corporation (NASDAQ: CORL).
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Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) issued an SEC filing noting that it and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) have extended the negotiating time on the previously announced search pact. Without getting to participate in the drawing room for the negotiations it is impossible to know if there were real snags other than the usual gossip that comes and goes or if it is simply nothing more than just needing more time to complete the documents. Here is a broken down excerpt from the Yahoo! SEC Filing:
Nokia’s (NYSE:NOK) Symbian mobile operating system has dominated the handset software business for years. Microsoft’s mobile Windows has made some progress in picking up market share during the last decade, but its success has been very modest.
The operating systems which are part of the Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone and RIM (NYSE:RIMM) Blackberry were almost instant successes because of the popularity of their handsets.
Among these four powerful mobile OS players there seemed to be no room for a fifth, and certainly not a fifth that could take any significant market share. Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) is in the process of proving that conventional wisdom wrong. Read More
Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) posted EPS for its fiscal first quarter of $.40 compared with $.48 last year. The company has revenue $12.92 billion. Both numbers were well ahead of Wall St. forecasts of $.32 a share on revenues of $12.4 billion. The revenue figure was off 14% for the three months ending September 30.
Microsoft deferred $1.47 billion, or $.14 a share for sales of Windows 7 Read More
We still have two DJIA components to report earnings this week. If you can believe it this week marked 12 of the 30 components reporting earnings, and that takes us to a total of 18 of the 30 components that will have reported earnings after the end of the week. This afternoon we have American Express Company (NYSE: AXP) on deck with earnings, and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) is on deck tomorrow morning. Also on deck Friday morning is Honeywell International Inc. (NYSE: HON), a former-DJIA component which many traders feel should have never been taken out of the DJIA.
We have compiled data using Thomson Reuters consensus data and added in color on options expectations, analyst calls, and technical analysis where appropriate. We have also included share performance from June 30, and then provided performance since the March 9 close that traders are using as the official date of the end of the death spiral in the financial markets.
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VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) has just posted its Q3 earnings report of $0.24 EPS on a non-GAAP basis on $490 million in revenues. Thomson Reuters had estimates at $0.20 EPS on $473.95 million in revenues. The US revenues were down 1% from a year ago at $246 million, while international revenues rose 9% to $244 million.
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After the close of trading today, we will get a look at the earnings report from VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW). The company’s former parent and still-majority shareholder (by far) is EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), and it has earnings on deck for tomorrow morning. We have prepared detailed previews with Thomson Reuters estimates, what to look for in guidance, and added color. We have also added in the performance of each stock since June 30, and we have included the stock performance since the March 9 close which traders are using as the official date of the end of the market death spiral.
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Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) App store offers an extraordinarily large number of downloads–more than 85,000. The store has downloaded more than two billion piece of software.
Developers are constantly creating new application in the hope of offering free services that may bring them fame or marketing opportunities for paid products. Other applications cost iPhone and iPod customers money, but only a few are popular enough to create a cash bonanza for their creators.
The efforts of corporations to market their products at the App store has finally gone too far. Read More
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