earnings

Hewlett-Packard sucks wind with $8.9B loss, cuts outlook

HP saw revenue declines in four of its six units due to economic "headwinds" and ongoing restructuring efforts, the company said. Oh, and it also reported an $8.9 billion net loss for the third quarter.

In other words, HP is "still in the early stages of a multi-year turnaround," said HP CEO Meg Whitman.

HP's third quarter results came in largely as expected. HP telegraphed that it would take hefty charges related to its enterprise services unit.

Meanwhile, HP cut its fiscal 2012 outlook. The company said its non-GAAP earnings would be $4.05 … Read more

Surface tablet less than 2 percent of market, says Dell

Michael Dell said today he expects sales of Microsoft's Surface to be "relatively small."

The Dell founder and chief executive commented on Microsoft's upcoming tablet during the PC maker's second-quarter earnings conference call this afternoon.

"I think there's an understanding of the number of units that they're likely to sell is a relatively small percentage. Maybe in the 1 [percent] to 2 percent range of total PC units during next year," Michael Dell said in response to analyst's question.

CFO Brian Gladden also had something to say. "[About] Microsoft … Read more

Best Buy shows strains in 2nd-quarter earnings

Best Buy's fiscal second-quarter results illustrated the laundry list of issues that new CEO and turnaround specialist Hubert Joly will face.

Here's the short version:

Best Buy saw both earnings and revenue fall short of Wall Street expectations. The company declined to give an outlook for the rest of its fiscal year citing Joly's arrival and market uncertainties. Best Buy's cost structure is too high. Demand in China and Europe has been weak and the U.S. is soft. Technology buyers are holding off on purchases ahead of a bevy of product launches ranging from the … Read more

Groupon turns a profit, but sales fall short

Pressure is on for the much-maligned pioneer of daily deals.

Groupon turned a profit in the second quarter, but its sales fell short of expectations as demand for daily coupons softened.

Sales rose 45 percent to $568.3 million compared with the year-ago quarter, but Wall Street was looking for sales of $574.8 million. The Chicago-based company posted net income of $28.4 million, or four cents a share, compared with net loss of $107.4 million, or 35 cents a share, a year earlier.

Direct billings, which reflects the total amount collected from customers, rose 37 percent year-over-year … Read more

Nvidia touts ascendancy in Android, Windows 8 tablets

Nvidia's emergence as a leading player in both the Android and Windows 8 tablet markets was driven home today when the chip supplier's CEO discussed second-quarter results in an earnings conference call.

Revenue rose to $1.04 billion from $1.01 billion in the company's second quarter of last year. Analysts had forecast revenue of $1 billion.

Net income was $119 million, or 19 cents a share, below the $151.6 million, or 25 cents a share, recorded in the same period last year. But that exceeded analyst estimates of 14 cents a share on sales of $… Read more

T-Mobile loses customers, but ekes out $207M Q2 profit

T-Mobile USA continues to bleed its most valuable customers as the carrier struggles to keep up with its fellow national rivals.

The carrier, a unit of Deutsche Telekom, said today it lost 205,000 net customers in the second quarter, largely due to a defection in customers with long-term contracts.

T-Mobile posted a second-quarter profit of $207 million, down slightly from $212 million a year ago. Revenue fell 3.3 percent to $4.88 billion.

The company's subscriber results look a lot like Sprint Nextel's struggles with customer growth over the past few years, with staggering losses on … Read more

HP foresees $8B write-down for third quarter

Hewlett-Packard said today that it is swapping executives in its enterprise services unit and taking an $8 billion charge to write down goodwill associated with the division. HP also noted that more employees are taking early retirement packages than previously expected.

In a statement with a bevy of moving parts, HP said that its non-GAAP earnings in the third quarter would be better than expected. However, HP's reshuffle of the services unit as well as the goodwill charge indicate that the company hasn't quite figured out how to compete with IBM. HP Enterprise Services revenue, which accounts for … Read more

Facebook's stock: The bleeding just won't stop

Ouch!

Shares of Facebook dropped another four percent today, leaving the company's stock price just above $20 a share -- almost half where its shares debuted in a mid-May IPO. And let's not even talk about the $45 a share Facebook hit on its first day of trading. That seems like a distant memory.

The news hasn't changed since Facebook's latest wave of selling, which began when Zynga spooked investors with its lousy earnings report last Wednesday and continued with Facebook's own unspectacular earnings. Fear of mobile. Fear of a slowdown in user growth. And, … Read more

Apple's iPhone margins hit 58 percent, nearly double iPad's

Although Apple's iPad stole the show in the company's latest earnings report, its iPhone is the breadwinner.

Between April 2010 and March 2012, Apple was able to secure gross margins of 49 percent to 58 percent on U.S. iPhone sales, according to Reuters, which obtained the data from court documents unsealed yesterday and filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Apple's iPad, on the other hand, generated gross margins of 23 percent to 32 percent between October 2010 and March 2012.

Apple does not provide gross margin figures on individual … Read more