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Posted
Oct 23 2009, 03:24 PM
by
Jim Jubak
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
When I added Microsoft (MSFT) to Jubak’s Picks on July 24, 2009 after the company announced results for its fiscal fourth quarter, I wrote “This is as bad as it gets.”
After its Oct. 23 earnings release, the company is now saying the same thing. In the post-earnings conference call, Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell said that the fourth quarter may have been the bottom. Certainly, the company is behaving as if it were: Microsoft resumed buying back shares in the quarter that ended in September, with purchases of 1.4 billion shares.
First quarter earnings for fiscal 2010 fell to 40 cents a share, but that beat the 32 cents expected by Wall Street. Revenue declined by 14% from the first quarter of fiscal 2009 to $12.92 billion. That big drop in revenue came because Microsoft deferred $1.47 billion in revenue from customers upgrading to Windows 7. Put that back in and revenue came to $14.39 billion, a 4% decline from the year-earlier period.
Microsoft beat Wall Street estimates this quarter by cutting costs by more than Wall Street expected. Operating costs dropped 6.9% after the company made its first ever company-wide firings, slashed travel costs, and cut the prices it pays vendors. In the conference call, the company increased its cost-cutting target.
The big question going forward, however, isn’t about cutting costs, but about how many copies of the new Windows 7 operating system Microsoft can sell.
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Posted
Sep 26 2009, 10:44 AM
by
Jim Van Meerten
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
HSN (HNSI), known by most of you as the Home Shopping Network, has been added to my Wall Street Survivor portfolio and is covered on my blog Financial Tides. What caught my eye was 17 new highs in 20 trading sessions and news that the network is carrying Serious Skin Care's FIRMA-FACE XP product line. This is its largest product launch to date, with 103,000 units sold in the first four days. Landenburg Thalmann has initiated coverage of this stock with a BUY recommendation.
HSNI is a retailer and interactive lifestyle network offering a broad range of products through TV home shopping programming and on the Internet through HSN.com. They are the leader in the TV home shopping industry, far outselling Value Vision (VVTV) and privately held QVC and Access Television Network.
The three analysts that cover HNSI have a strong buy consensus rating and project sales growth of 2.5% and earnings growth of 13% next year. Good fundamentals.
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Posted
Sep 09 2009, 03:49 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
Eighty-one million people visited federal government Web sites in July, which is about four out of 10 people on the Internet in America. There are several notable trends when the traffic is broken down by government department. Most of these indicate that people are better off spending their time elsewhere on the Internet. Visits to the Nasa.gov site are up 88%, which is a sign people don’t have enough to do with their days.
Research firm comScore did the survey about which sites people visit. One piece of data that stands out is that young people don’t visit government sites. These are individuals who spend a disproportionate part of their lives online, but they don’t spend it conducting research about their senators or congressmen. People ages 12 to 24 have an index of 75 for visiting the federal government online. All other age groups have an index of over 100.
Some of the information from the survey is not particularly surprising. The Cars.gov site which keeps data on the “cash for clunkers” operation received more than two million unique visitors in July. The project is now virtually forgotten, except for car dealers waiting to get overdue government rebate checks. The cars.gov site traffic should be close to zero by September.
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Posted
Aug 26 2009, 04:03 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
 American Internet speeds are slow, very slow, by international standards. That may be one reason the $787 billion economic stimulus package has a large financial commitment to building broadband infrastructure.
The U.S. ranks 28th among large countries in Internet connection speeds, according to new data from the Communications Workers of America. The organization has a reason to track the information. Many of the union members’ jobs rely on cable and telecom firms continuing to invest to build larger broadband systems, particularly the communications giants Comcast (CMCSA), Time Warner Cable (TWC), AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ).
The Internet speed champions are led by South Korea, Japan, Sweden, and the Netherlands.
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Posted
Jul 20 2009, 10:04 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
Investing in the Internet? Don't bother, writes James Altucher for Dow Jones. The Internet boom is long over.
"Internet companies now should be treated, at best, like utility companies that get bought at about 10 times earnings and sold at 13 times earnings," he writes.
Why so down? Take a lesson from the big companies, he says, which continually strike out with anything Internet related. Time Warner (TWX) prefers to keep People magazine instead of AOL. News Corp. (NWS) is running out of ideas on MySpace. Microsoft (MSFT) has blown billions on Internet strategy without much profit.
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Posted
Jun 15 2009, 05:18 PM
by
Catherine Holahan
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
 The music has officially stopped playing at
Virgin Megastores. The last of the iconic record shops closed today, June 14. The
New York
Times, present for the last day of business at the chain's landmark store
in Union Square, described the
closing as "particularly dispiriting."
That's putting it mildly. Sure, it's not as
though the demise of Virgin Megastores is surprising. Record stores have long
struggled for relevance in a digital age defined by à la carte downloads and
illegal file-sharing sites. Even the music discovery part of the record store experience
-- long touted by store owners as what would keep people coming into their
shops -- has largely been usurped by ad-supported music blogs and MySpace
pages.
But Virgin Megastores' closing is more than another
example of consumers pushing aside an old distribution model for a newer,
more-immediate one. It is a symbol of the inability of the music industry as a
whole to successfully adapt its business for digital consumers. As such,
Virgin's closing is downright depressing.
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Posted
Jun 15 2009, 04:05 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
The U.S. Postal Service, which has been dying for years due to the advent of the fax, e-mail, and overnight delivery, may finally be close to its last act.
The agency lost nearly $2 billion in its last fiscal year and is faced with the serious consideration of cuts of up to 3,100 offices, potentially eliminating thousand of jobs. Media reports say that first class mail volumes are plunging.
What is killing and will probably eventually finish off the Post Office? In a word: “broadband,” the high-speed Internet system that the current Administration plans to build out in the next two years.
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Posted
May 26 2009, 01:37 PM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
Is Facebook worth $10 billion? The Russians think so.
The social networking company has raised $200 million from a Russian investment firm, a deal that values Facebook at $10 billion. That's down from the $15 billion valuation set when Microsoft (MSFT) invested in the company two years ago.
Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged in a conference call that Microsoft bought in "at the absolute peak of the market," according to MarketWatch. The world is a different place now, he added. Gee, that's gotta make Microsoft feel good.
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Posted
May 18 2009, 03:30 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
It is the classic face-off between the king of bricks-and-mortar and the ruler of the e-commerce world. Wal-Mart (WMT) is about to up its bet on consumer electronics, a highly profitable and growing part of Amazon’s (AMZN) business.
At stake is whether physical stores can take back business from e-commerce sites which have been besting them at sales growth rates for nearly a decade.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Wal-Mart is "revamping the electronics departments in its more than 3,500 U.S. stores this week, ramping up an aggressive battle with Best Buy Co. (BBY) and Amazon.com."
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Posted
Apr 01 2009, 03:59 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
The business of having online sites with content created by amateurs to be viewed by other amateurs never had a reasonable chance of making money. The fact that Facebook once had a $15 billion valuation, and that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (NWS) bought MySpace, and that Google (GOOG) bought YouTube only proves the “greater fool” theory.
YouTube was started in 2005 and MySpace in 2003. Normally, having a social network where people go to share profiles of themselves, write blogs and submit videos would not seem like much of a business. But MySpace has well over 100 million users. People viewed over 5 billion videos at YouTube last month.
Investors assumed that any medium with such a large number of users had to become a huge business. Millions and millions of users must be worth something. They can’t be worth nothing. That couldn’t be possible.
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