Russian investor Digital Sky Technologies appears to be hungry for a bigger piece of Facebook.
The firm just finished spending $100 million to purchase current and former Facebook employees’ shares of the company, on top of a $200 million direct investment into the social-networking site earlier this year.
TiVo shares this morning are heading lower after the company said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has granted a request by EchoStar to stay a contempt order imposed by a lower court pending the outcome of EchoStar’s appeal in the the patent dispute between the two companies.
Microsoft shares haven’t touched the $30 level in more than a year. But the stock has been rallying impressively since bottoming in the $15 range in March–can it complete the double? Some analysts think so. In fact, two of them this morning upped their targets on the stock to exactly $30.
Nokia shares are headed sharply higher this morning after the company indicated the worst may be over for the mobile phone business.
For the first quarter, the company posted revenue of 9.276 billion Euros, down 26.7 percent year over year, and 26.8 percent sequentially. Revenues from the device business were down 33.4 percent year over year, and 24.2 percent from Q4.
Intel reported stronger-than-expected earnings and said that it believed the slumping computer sales market had “bottomed out.” Wall Street’s response: Sell ‘em.
The chip giant’s shares are off four percent, dragging on the Nasdaq Composite and raising some questions about the tech sector generally. This bout of pessimism is probably a bit overdone and reflects more what’s happened in the past few months than what happened yesterday.
Take profits in Salesforce.com, Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Nemeroff advises.
Nemeroff this morning cut his rating on CRM to Sell from Hold, noting that the shares at last night’s close of $37.38 were more than $10 above his $27 target price.
Slowly but surely, Legg Mason has been easing out of its once gigantic stake in Amazon.com, formerly a favorite stock of Legg Mason portfolio manager Bill Miller.
In a filing with the SEC yesterday, Legg disclosed that it now holds 9,592,126 Amazon shares, down from 24,280,422 shares in its previous filing in October.
‘Tis the season to make year 2009 predictions. Today, Standard & Poor’s analysts released their predictions for the Internet in 2009. Internet analyst Scott Kessler says Microsoft and Yahoo will “finally bury the hatchet” next year “and decide to join forces to better compete against Google.”
Baidu, the Chinese analog of Google, is fighting allegations that it has been allowing unlicensed medical groups to purchase the most popular keywords and appear high up in search results. (The offending listings have since been removed.) The company has also been accused of removing unpaid users who decline to become paid users by purchasing keywords. Obviously, there is also a Chinese analog of “The Godfather.”
Yes, it sure is nice to see stock prices flashing green. But despite the market’s historic two-day move, there are still reasons to worry about what happens to technology shares over the next several quarters.
Corel (CREL) shares are rallying today after the company reported solid results for its fiscal second quarter ended May 31.
For the quarter, the company posted revenue of $67.0 million and non-GAAP EPS of 36 cents; the Street had expected $66.85 million and 35 cents.
Everyone assumed Microsoft was the loser when it handed Facebook a $15 billion valuation. But reports that Facebook insiders are trying to dump shares at a huge discount to that may highlight the danger of high expectations at a very young age.
Netflix shares are coming under pressure today following a skeptical note on the company from Needham analyst Charlie Wolf.
Wolf today picked up coverage of the company with an Under Perform rating; he writes that “the company’s current valuation incorporates unrealistic subscriber acquisition cost and churn rate assumptions.” He calculates fair value for the shares to be $22, well below the current level.
While not strictly a technology story, JP Morgan’s buyout of Bear Stearns on Sunday is worth looking at in the larger context of the tech industry. As you hopefully know by now, JP Morgan picked up Bear Stearns for $2 a share, a total of $236 million, which is (quite literally) pennies on the dollar for a firm that not so long ago was valued at $170 a share and on Friday alone had tumbled from about $55 a share to $30 a share.
If you’re following the twists and turns of Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo, you can’t escape one name that keeps popping up in the media: Eric Jackson. As an activist shareholder in Yahoo, he has become the voice of the opposition, calling on Yahoo to accept Microsoft’s takeover bid–or any reasonable bid. Last year, he was instrumental in raising a ruckus online over Yahoo’s poor stock performance, and helped get Yahoo CEO Terry Semel ousted.
But what’s amazing about Jackson is that unlike the big-name activist shareholders such as Carl Icahn and Daniel Loeb who have huge war chests to buy up stock, Jackson is a small fish. He only owns 96 shares of Yahoo stock. Where Jackson has innovated is in using the tools of social media to gather support from other shareholders and get the attention of the media to make his case for corporate change.
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