earnings

This blog was corrected at 3:35 p.m. PT to clarify the number of Best Buy employees offered buyouts.

Although Black Friday sales were better than expected, Best Buy's third-quarter earnings brought another heaping of bad news for the embattled electronics retail industry.

For the third quarter of 2008, Best Buy reported earnings Tuesday of $52 million, or 13 cents per share, on revenue of $11.5 billion. Wall Street had been anticipating earnings of 24 cents per share and revenue of $11.09 billion. It's a 77 percent drop from the same quarter a year ago, … Read more

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

Oracle reports its fiscal second-quarter results on Thursday, and analysts are expecting weaker-than-expected license revenue, healthy maintenance subscriptions, a potential earnings miss, and some belt-tightening on deck. In other words, expect a mixed bag.

Wall Street is expecting earnings of 34 cents a share, excluding items and 26 cents a share fully loaded. Revenue is expected to be $5.86 billion, with gross margins of 77.5 percent, according to Thomson Reuters estimates. Analysts expect Oracle to deliver third-quarter earnings of 34 cents a share on revenue of $5.9 … Read more

In another bad sign for the consumer electronics market, chipmaker Texas Instruments warned that its current quarter sales and earnings will come in far below earlier estimates.

The company said it now expects revenue of $2.3 billion to $2.5 billion, as compared with prior expectations of $2.83 billion to $3.07 billion. Per-share earnings are now seen between 10 cents and 16 cents, as compared with an earlier range of 30 cents to 36 cents.

TI did not provide further details in its press release, but said it would hold a conference call to discuss its finances. … Read more

As ever with Novell's earnings, there is good news and bad news. The bad news is that Novell's Workgroup plunged 6 percent to $92 million for the quarter compared to Q4 2007, coupled with a 26 percent decline in its services business. The two helped to drag Novell to a quarterly loss of $16 million, down from an $18 million loss in Q4 2007, and total revenue for the quarter at $243 million, $7 million less than Wall Street expected, as Reuters reports.

The good news? Everything but services and Workgroup rose, and significantly, resulting in an overall … Read more

Advanced Micro Devices warned Thursday its fourth-quarter revenue will come in significantly lower than previously expected, due to weakness across all regions in all its businesses.

AMD shares were climbing back up in the morning, after having dipped to as low as $1.92 just after the markets opened.

The chipmaker said Thursday it expects to post revenue of $1.19 billion in the quarter ending December 27, excluding process technology license revenue. That's 25 percent below its third-quarter performance.

When the company reported its third-quarter revenue of $1.59 billion (excluding the process tech license revenue) in October, … Read more

Novell will announce its earnings tomorrow at 5 p.m. EST. Red Hat's will come later. From interaction with the two companies over the past few months, I expect both to have good earnings to report.

Will it matter?

Right now Wall Street doesn't seem to be rationally correlating stock price with company performance. It has been too punitive, pummeling stocks that either should have been rising or should have received only a mild "scolding."

Analysts are almost universally giving Novell's stock a price target in the $8 range, yet the company's stock currently trades for roughly half that. … Read more

Warner Music Group, the label that represents such acts as REM and Green Day, is the second major recording company to report healthy growth in digital sales during the past quarter.

On Tuesday, Warner reported that digital sales in the quarter ended September 30 grew 27 percent to $167 million, up from $131 million during the same period last year.

Warner also beat Wall Street expectations by reporting earnings of $6 million or 4 cents per share on revenue of $854 million. Analysts had expected to a loss of 2 cents per share on $837 million in revenue.

Two weeks … Read more

This post was updated at 3 p.m. PST with information from the earnings call.

EchoStar's loss was TiVo's gain during the third quarter of 2008.

Alviso, Calif.-based TiVo on Tuesday announced it recorded profits of $100.6 million for the quarter, or 98 cents per share, compared with a loss of $8 million for the same quarter a year ago.

The staggering change in fortunes for the DVR maker was due to the patent litigation judgment it won against EchoStar. EchoStar paid TiVo $105 million in damages during the quarter--if it hadn't, TiVo would have … Read more

Updated at 2 p.m. PST with quotes from the earnings call.

Hewlett-Packard on Monday officially announced it recorded $33.6 billion in revenue during the fourth quarter of 2008, up 19 percent from a year ago, or 16 percent when adjusted for currency effects.

HP's profit came out to $2.1 billion, or 84 cents per share. That's down slightly from $2.2 billion a year ago, though up from 81 cents per share.

The company pre-released its results last week. The results are the rare bright spot for the PC industry, which is expected to bear … Read more