MSFT - Microsoft Corporation
| Previous close | 153.24 |
| Open | 153.00 |
| Bid | 154.45 x 1100 |
| Ask | 154.54 x 1800 |
| Day's range | 152.85 - 154.89 |
| 52-week range | 93.96 - 154.89 |
| Volume | 23,850,062 |
| Avg. volume | 21,918,030 |
| Market cap | 1.2T |
| Beta (5Y Monthly) | 1.23 |
| PE ratio (TTM) | 29.16 |
| EPS (TTM) | 5.30 |
| Earnings date | 28 Jan 2020 - 3 Feb 2020 |
| Forward dividend & yield | 2.04 (1.33%) |
| Ex-dividend date | 2020-02-19 |
| 1y target est | 160.69 |
- Bloomberg
Palantir Wins New Pentagon Deal With $111 Million From the Army
(Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Army will spend $111 million next year in a new contract with Palantir Technologies Inc., deepening ties between Peter Thiel’s data analytics company and the Pentagon.The new Defense Department deal will represent about 10% of Palantir’s revenue next year, according to people familiar with the company’s finances. It’s the first step in what could be a four-year, $440 million deal with the Army.The Silicon Valley company will provide software to connect human resources, supply chains and other Army operations systems into a single dashboard. The Army considered earlier proposals for related work from Accenture Plc, Deloitte, Ernst & Young and Microsoft Corp.“We started Palantir in 2004 to help the war fighter and solve difficult problems,” Doug Philippone, head of Palantir’s global defense business, said in an emailed statement. “In helping the Army make better use of its own data, we accomplish both goals.”The Defense deal solidifies a relationship between the U.S. government and the Palo Alto, California-based company, which was co-founded and partly bankrolled by Thiel. The billionaire venture capitalist and adviser to President Donald Trump has chastised other technology companies, in particular Alphabet Inc.’s Google, for their reluctance to work with the Defense Department. After Google abandoned a Pentagon effort known as Project Maven, Palantir stepped in to help develop video recognition software as part of the project, a move reported earlier by Business Insider.On Saturday, a company spokeswoman said Palantir will run its first-ever commercials, which will air during the Army-Navy football game, in a bid to show its support for the U.S. military.In recent years, Palantir has sought to work more with companies and be less reliant on government contracts. Airbus SE and Merck KGaA are among its customers, but government clients still make up a significant portion of revenue.To contact the reporter on this story: Lizette Chapman in San Francisco at lchapman19@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Mark Milian at mmilian@bloomberg.net, Anne VanderMeyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Zacks
Amazon Roundup: Government, re:Invent Conference, India, Other
Amazon had a big week with government issues, a host of new deals and announcements at its annual conference and developments in India.
- Bloomberg
A Startup Fired Its CEO for Expensing $76,120 at Strip Clubs
(Bloomberg) -- Scott Lang, the new chief executive officer of Turvo Inc., wants to emphasize an important corporate policy at his startup: Employees may not entertain clients at strip clubs and certainly not bill those trips to the business. The rule is salient because his predecessor was fired for doing just that.The board accused the co-founder, Eric Gilmore, of expensing $76,120 at strip clubs over a three-year span and removed him as CEO in May, according to legal filings. Gilmore, 39, didn’t deny the accusations, but he sued the company, claiming the board didn’t follow the proper protocol for his termination. Turvo said it did, and they settled in September. Gilmore declined to comment through a spokesman.Lang, a former executive in the energy industry, joined Turvo just before Thanksgiving. The Silicon Valley startup makes software to help companies track the movement of freight and is backed by about $85 million in venture capital. In his first interview since taking the job, Lang said he’s focused on helping the company move past the scandal. When asked about trying to win over prospective clients at stripper joints, he said: “Never have. Never will.”The situation at Turvo, which hasn’t been previously reported, illustrates the steps some boards are taking to quietly address allegations of misconduct before they become public. The MeToo movement has claimed the jobs of many technology executives, such as Kris Duggan of Betterworks Systems Inc. and Andy Rubin of Essential Products Inc., and venture capitalists Justin Caldbeck and Shervin Pishevar. Often, the consequences only arrive after allegations are published in the news.Gilmore, a veteran of Microsoft Corp. and Coupons.com, started Turvo in 2014. Mubadala Investment Co., the Abu Dhabi-based sovereign wealth fund, led a $60 million investment in the Sunnyvale, California-based company last year. Soon after, Gilmore hired a new chief financial officer, who discovered a pattern of unusual charges from the CEO in a review of corporate spending.The stripper-related expenses spanned most of the company’s life, and Gilmore made no attempt to conceal them. Strip clubs represented more than half of the $125,000 in entertainment charges initially flagged by the CFO.At a hastily called meeting in May after the board learned of the expenses, directors from Mubadala and venture capital firms Felicis Ventures and Activant Capital told Gilmore he was out. They demanded he sign a separation agreement. Gilmore declined and argued the process violated company bylaws because the confrontation wasn’t at first presented as a formal board meeting and didn’t adhere to other rules. The board disagreed. Gilmore’s lawsuit over the dispute lasted three months. Terms of the settlement weren’t disclosed.Gilmore remains on the board and is the company’s largest shareholder, according to a person familiar with the matter who wasn’t authorized to discuss it publicly and asked not to be identified. Gilmore’s two co-founders still hold executive roles at Turvo, and there has been no suggestion they misused their expense accounts.The Turvo board selected Lang as the new CEO in the hope he could reinvigorate a company still grappling with a demoralizing situation. Lang, the former CEO of Silver Spring Networks, praised the 200-person team at Turvo for winning several big contracts recently and posting “massive” growth this year. He declined to provide details.To contact the author of this story: Sarah McBride in San Francisco at smcbride24@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Milian at mmilian@bloomberg.net, Molly SchuetzFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Zacks
3 Growth-Focused Cloud Stocks for Tech Investors to Buy for 2020
We found three cloud-focused software stocks using our Zacks Stock Screener that investors might want to consider buying for 2020...
- Bloomberg
Energy Efficiency Is a Hot Problem for Big Tech’s Data Centers
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Electrons aren’t much of a growth industry in the U.S., the second-largest electricity market in the world after China. Electricity sales rose last year, after nearly a decade of being flat or falling slightly, but are still only up 3% since 2007. There is one market, though, where demand for electrons is booming: data centers. That power-hungry growth market, though, is also where some of the world’s biggest, most capitalized and most innovative companies are bringing their might to bear. Before getting into that innovation, though, there’s a crucial equation to consider: the power usage effectiveness ratio, or PUE. PUE is a measure of a data center’s energy efficiency — the ratio of total energy used divided by energy consumed specifically for information technology activities. The theoretical ideal PUE is 1, where 100% of electricity consumption goes toward useful computation. All the other stuff — power transformers, uninterruptible power supplies, lighting and especially cooling — uses power but doesn’t compute, and as a result raises a data center’s PUE. A 2016 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study listed what was, at the time, PUE for facilities at various scales: a server sitting in a room, a server in a closet, a “hyperscale” extremely large data center. The smaller the server, the higher its ratio and the lower its efficiency. For the smallest server spaces, the PUE is above 2, meaning that more than half of its energy use is for things other than computing. For hyperscale, the PUE is 1.2 — meaning that most of the energy is going to computation. Here are that same data, expressed a bit differently, to show a server or data center’s power consumption by use. Here you can see that the smallest applications used more power for cooling than for computation. But at hyperscale data centers, more than 80% of power consumption went to IT (servers, networking and storage), and only 13% went to cooling. But now, with so much computation happening in the cloud (and, in reality, in hyperscale data centers), it’s worth finding out what today’s PUEs are and just how close they can get to that theoretical ideal of 1.0. A recent Uptime Institute survey of 1,600 data center owners and operators found that 2019’s average PUE is 1.67, and that “improvements in data center facility energy efficiency have flattened out and even deteriorated slightly in the past two years.” That PUE means that 60% of data center electricity consumption is going to IT, and the rest to cooling, lighting and so on. However, some operators are doing much better than that. Google says that its data centers have a PUE of 1.1, with some centers going as low as 1.06. There’s some seasonality in play, particularly because most of Google’s data centers are in the Northern Hemisphere; its Singapore data center has the highest PUE and is the least efficient of its sites. That’s not surprising given Singapore is hot and humid year-round. One key way to lower the cooling demand for a data center is to cool only to the temperature at which the machines are comfortable, not to where humans are most comfortable. For Google, that’s a temperature of 80 degrees Fahrenheit. There’s another approach, and one that draws on computation itself: machine learning. Google unleashed its DeepMind machine learning platform on the problem of data center energy efficiency three years ago; last year, it effectively turned over control to its own artificial intelligence: In 2016, we jointly developed an AI-powered recommendation system to improve the energy efficiency of Google’s already highly-optimised data centres. Our thinking was simple: even minor improvements would provide significant energy savings and reduce CO2 emissions to help combat climate change.Now we’re taking this system to the next level: instead of human-implemented recommendations, our AI system is directly controlling data centre cooling, while remaining under the expert supervision of our data centre operators. This first-of-its-kind cloud-based control system is now safely delivering energy savings in multiple Google data centres.It seems likely that more of that sort of approach will be adopted by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM and other major cloud computing firms. Even with efficiency gains, data center electricity demand is voracious and growing; that growth has a number of implications for the power grid and for power utilities. The first is that many of these major consumers of electricity are also contracting for wind and solar power to meet their demand. The second is that, with many data centers clustering in locations such as Northern Virginia, data center loads are becoming a meaningful share of utility peak demand in a given service territory. Recent BloombergNEF research finds that data centers could make up 15% of Dominion Energy Inc.’s summer peak demand by 2024. Given that data center operators have every incentive to economize on electricity, utilities need to compete to provide service. Preferential — and confidential — contracts for power supply are one way to do that, with the result being that other rate payers bear the cost, as Bloomberg News reported last year. Gains in efficiency don’t mean that data center demand for electricity is going down. Their scale and growth is a testament to their power usage effectiveness. Their preferential contracts for electricity, on the other hand, feel like a testament to their effective usage of a different kind of power: buying power. Weekend readingChevron Corp.’s $10 billion to $11 billion impairment charge, related mostly to its Appalachian natural gas assets, “ushers in oil’s era of the sober-major.” Chevron has also called time on the Kitimat liquefied natural gas export plant in British Columbia, writing off years of development while also planning to sell its 50% stake. Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd. has launched the world’s first liquefied hydrogen carrier. Tesla Inc. has lost its third general counsel in the course of a year. Vancouver-based Harbour Air Ltd.’s electric seaplane has taken flight. I looked at the environmental implications of electrifying aviation last month. Stanford University has released its 2019 Artificial Intelligence Index Report. Venture capital fund Piva, funded by $250 million from Malaysia’s Petronas, has launched with a focus on energy and industry. Bloomberg Media will acquire CityLab, a news site covering “urban innovation and the future of cities.” Nomura Holdings Inc. will acquire sustainable technology and infrastructure boutique investment bank Greentech Capital Advisors. Hiro Mizuno, the chief investment officer of Japan’s $1.6 trillion Government Pension Investment Fund, has “embraced ESG principles so enthusiastically” that the fund will not award new mandates to managers without environmental, social and governance credentials. Considering the legacy of Xie Zhenhua, a key architect of the Paris Agreement and China’s climate negotiator for more than a decade. Greta Thunberg is Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. Get Sparklines delivered to your inbox. Sign up here.To contact the author of this story: Nathaniel Bullard at nbullard@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Brooke Sample at bsample1@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Nathaniel Bullard is a BloombergNEF energy analyst, covering technology and business model innovation and system-wide resource transitions.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Zacks
AMD Boosts Gaming Experience, Launches Radeon RX 5500 XT
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) unveils Radeon RX 5500 XT graphics card, which is expected to enhance user gaming experience.
- Zacks
Should WisdomTree U.S. LargeCap Fund (EPS) Be on Your Investing Radar?
Style Box ETF report for EPS
- Zacks
What's Next for GameStop (GME) Stock After Dismal Q3?
GameStop (GME) shares plummeted over 15% at one-point Wednesday as Wall Street widely sold off the stock after it reported its rough Q3 financial results.
- Bloomberg
FTC Eyes Suit to Block Facebook Plan to Merge Apps
(Bloomberg) -- U.S. antitrust enforcers are considering going to court to stop Facebook Inc.’s plan to merge technology systems so that users can communicate across the company’s apps, according to a person familiar with the matter.The Federal Trade Commission is studying whether to seek a court order to block the company’s effort to enable messaging among users of WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger, said the person, who declined to be named because the investigation is confidential.Facebook’s integration plan, announced in January, has come under criticism from those who say the move would make it harder to break up Facebook as part of any antitrust case against the company. The FTC, the U.S. Justice Department and a group of states are investigating whether Facebook has violated antitrust laws.FTC Chairman Joe Simons signaled he agreed with that view in an interview with Bloomberg in August. Asked how difficult a breakup of Facebook would be once the services had been well integrated, he said it would make the case “very messy.”“It’s hard,” he said. “It’s really hard.”Simons told Bloomberg at the time that he’s willing to go to court to seek a breakup of a tech company. Any decision by the FTC to sue would need a majority vote by the five-member commission.Facebook shares fell as much as 4% after the Wall Street Journal reported on the FTC’s deliberations. The shares fell 2.7% to $196.75 in New York.Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg wants to allow users of the messaging service on Instagram to chat with those using similar functions on WhatsApp and on the original Facebook site and app. Facebook says that would allow it to better view and control foreign election interference, the spread of terrorism and other content it deems bad. Currently users can’t communicate between services.The company has already begun to integrate messaging systems for Instagram, a photo app, with Facebook Messenger, Bloomberg has reported. The massive undertaking will stitch together the underlying technology and require corporate reorganization, but won’t change much about users’ interaction with the services.Critics including co-founder Chris Hughes have focused on Facebook’s ownership of the apps and its plans to knit them more tightly together. Such detractors have cast the integration as a source of danger to user privacy. They also say it would allow the company to further abuse its dominance and fend off enforcers’ attempts to curb its behavior.Facebook says it faces robust competition, even accounting for its ownership of the services.Many technological services are able to work together even when provided by different companies -- a concept known as interoperability. Users of Google’s email service, for instance, can easily communicate with friends who get their messages through Microsoft, and phones call one another regardless of wireless providers.Mobile chatting is not as well integrated, however. Those who study competition say that interoperability between rivals bolsters competition, but Facebook’s plan would allow the company’s apps to talk to one another rather than to outside services.The Justice Department has previously pushed back on the integration plan because it will involve encrypting Instagram and Messenger and make messages invisible to Facebook the way that already occurs on WhatsApp. The department, along with officials from Australia and the U.K., said in October that the company should pause its efforts until it can ensure lawful access to user communications. Facebook said in a letter released Tuesday that it rejected that call.The FTC’s investigation of Facebook, which became public in July, is examining in part whether the social media company’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp should be unwound even though they were previously approved by the agency.Advocates for aggressive antitrust action against Facebook, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, have argued both deals allowed Facebook to fend off emerging competition by acquiring platforms that posed a threat to its dominance. Warren has said she would seek to unwind both deals if elected president in 2020.(Updates with Facebook plan starting in fifth paragraph)\--With assistance from Kurt Wagner and Sarah Frier.To contact the reporters on this story: David McLaughlin in Washington at dmclaughlin9@bloomberg.net;Ben Brody in Washington, D.C. at btenerellabr@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Sara Forden at sforden@bloomberg.net, Paula DwyerFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Zacks
AMZN Stock: What to Know About Amazon Heading into 2020
Shares of Amazon (AMZN) have slipped 6% in the past six months, while the S&P 500 climbed 9%. So when will Wall Street and investors start to think about buying Amazon stock again?
- Zacks
Cisco Enters Chip Market: Should AVGO, INTC, ANET Take Note?
Cisco (CSCO) ups its game in networking chip market with Silicon One Q100, putting Broadcom, Intel, Arista Networks, and Juniper Networks at risk.
- Bloomberg
Aramco Closes Just Below $2 Trillion Goal in Second-Day Gain
(Bloomberg) -- Saudi Aramco shares rose for a second day, but the oil giant failed to hold on to the $2 trillion valuation that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had long targeted.The stock climbed 4.6% to close at 36.80 riyals in Riyadh, finishing at $1.96 trillion. Aramco earlier rose as much as 10%, the daily limit, in trading of 418 million shares, up from 31.6 million Wednesday.The gain, which follows a 10% surge on Wednesday, reflects the kingdom’s efforts to engineer a successful start to trading after international investors balked at the price in the initial public offering. Saudi Arabia encouraged local individuals to purchase and hold the stock through cheap loans and a bonus-share plan, while pushing wealthy families and regional allies to buy as well.The offering consisted of only 1.5% of Aramco’s stock, so that investors who didn’t get allocated shares in the IPO had to buy in the secondary market.“We were expecting this IPO to be a blockbuster, and the performance in the past two days shows that was the case,” said Vijay Valecha, chief investment officer at Century Financial Consultancy LLC in Dubai, who has high-net-worth individuals from the Gulf among his clients. “From the appetite we see for the stock, there is room for it to climb another 10% to 18% next week.”Aramco raised $25.6 billion in the deal, selling shares at 32 riyals each and overtaking Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc. as the most valuable listed company.The IPO has become synonymous with the crown prince and his efforts to reshape the economy of the world’s biggest oil exporter. But his insistence on the $2 trillion valuation deterred international investors, many of whom said the stock was too expensive given governance and geopolitical concerns.Analysts at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. said after the first trading day that it’s already time to cash out. In a Bloomberg survey last month, global money managers put Aramco’s fair value at between $1.2 trillion and $1.5 trillion.While hitting the target may vindicate Saudi officials, it could complicate any plans to sell part of Aramco’s shares abroad as originally envisaged by Prince Mohammed in 2016, when he said a dual listing could raise as much as $100 billion. Saudi officials met in recent weeks with international investors to sound them out on a possible listing of Aramco’s shares in Asia, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.Still, the IPO -- touted as part of a blueprint for life after oil for the kingdom -- is a watershed moment for a business that’s bankrolled Saudi Arabia and its rulers for decades.The debut was cheered by Saudi and Gulf investors, who see the stock price supported by Aramco’s guaranteed dividends, buying by index-tracking funds and the fact that the region doesn’t have any other listed major oil companies.Read: The Wall Street Bankers Who Burst Aramco’s $2 Trillion BubbleAramco’s “$2 trillion valuation is justified due to secured dividend streams,” Arqaam Capital analysts including Rita Guindy and Jaap Meijer wrote in a report on Wednesday in which they initiated coverage with a buy recommendation and price target of 39.20 riyals.Arqaam expects a gradual increase of 2% annually in the dividend, potentially being topped up by a special payout of $20 billion in the next three years.(Updates with closing price in second paragraph.)\--With assistance from Paul Wallace.To contact the reporter on this story: Filipe Pacheco in Dubai at fpacheco4@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Celeste Perri at cperri@bloomberg.net, Phil Serafino, Tom LavellFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Financial Times
Fintech: the rise of the Asian ‘super app’
Rice Basket Queen is the name of a stall run by Ruri Ruhyaty in a bustling suburb of Jakarta. A year ago it was typical of thousands of others. Ms Ruri would place her fish and vegetable dishes on banana ...
- Bloomberg
Nintendo Switch China Sales Could Reach 4 Million by March, Analyst Says
(Bloomberg) -- Only a few days after Nintendo Co.’s Switch made its long-anticipated entry into China, one analyst is making a bullish case for Mario and Zelda’s prospects in the world’s biggest gaming arena.Nintendo could sell as many as four million Switch units in China in the fiscal year ending March and 12 million units of software, London-based tech equity researcher Pelham Smithers wrote in a note to clients. That could add as much as 23 billion yen ($212 million) to the Kyoto-based company’s full-year operating profit, Smithers said.Nintendo and its local partner Tencent Holdings Ltd. began selling the Switch console in China on Dec. 10, a move that has excited Nintendo investors hopeful of tapping a new market. But the optimism has been tampered by the historically lackluster performance of Sony Corp.’s PlayStation and Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox consoles, which have had several years to crack the market where smartphones are the dominant gaming platform. Video game giants are also hampered by Beijing’s insistence on vetting all games, which limits the library available to fans and slows new releases. At launch, the Switch only had one state-approved game to play.“While the history of the game console in China is not a happy one, lack of success is not necessarily down to lack of interest on the part of the consumer,” Smithers wrote in the report. “After all: if China’s consumers didn’t play console video games, the authorities wouldn’t have bothered banning them in the first place.”Key Insights:Switch hardware sales in China may range between 2 million and 4 million units in fiscal 2019 and between 3 million and 6 million the following year. Software sales will range between 6 million and 12 million in the current period and 15 million and 30 million in the period ending March 2021.China could contribute between 11.6 billion yen and 23.1 billion yen to Nintendo’s operating profit this year and 27.8 billion to 55.6 billion yen in the next.Smithers forecasts a ratio of three game purchases for each hardware unit sold in both years.He also assumes Tencent takes a 30% share of software sales income, while all of the hardware revenue goes to Nintendo, and that the two companies split the marketing costs.Nintendo’s sales in China may be capped by the company’s unwillingness to significantly increase production volume of the console and risk building up unsold inventory.Nintendo’s signature device is selling for 2,099 yuan ($298), about the same as elsewhere around the world. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Mario Odyssey and Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe have been green-lit by the government. Nintendo is also preparing to introduce the Switch Lite -- a cheaper version of the console intended to boost the device’s mainstream appeal -- to China at a future date, development partner Tencent said in a social media post last week.Sales of the Switch might have topped 50,000 units on launch day, according to market researcher Niko Partners, which gathers data from online retailers. Some 20,000 units were sold via JD.com and another 10,000 through TMall, it said in a report. Niko Partners forecasts the sales will reach 100,000 units by the end of the year, far below the 1 to 2 million estimated by Smithers.This isn’t Nintendo’s first attempt to crack the market. Official console sales in China remain a fraction of the overall gaming arena, as region locks and delayed hardware releases push gamers toward imported options. Nintendo confronted similar challenges in attempts to enter China dating back to 2003. It tried to sell, via a joint venture, its Game Boy Advance, Nintendo 3DS and a peculiar China-only portable console called iQue Player. Rampant piracy and slow game launches made those products unappealing.Elsewhere, Nintendo’s Switch retains its popularity three years after its launch, in an industry where consoles are often revamped every half-decade or so. The company has so far stuck with a conservative outlook for 18 million Switch units this fiscal year. Smithers thinks full-year sales outside of China could range between 20 and 21 million.Read more: Nintendo Will Prove the Switch’s Longevity This Holiday SeasonThe company’s shares have climbed more than 50% this year on the anticipation of the Switch’s China debut, the release of a smartphone edition of the Mario Kart franchise and the launch of the cheaper Switch Lite. Nintendo is likely to revise upwards its full-year earnings forecasts when it reports results in January, which could tempt some investors to sell and lock in gains, Smithers wrote.“Even if it doesn’t, this quarter’s figures should impress,” he said.\--With assistance from Zheping Huang.To contact the reporter on this story: Pavel Alpeyev in Tokyo at palpeyev@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Peter Elstrom at pelstrom@bloomberg.net, Vlad Savov, Colum MurphyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Zacks
FedEx Q2 2020 Earnings Preview: Time to Buy Beaten Down FDX Stock?
Should investors think about buying beaten down FedEx stock before it releases its second quarter fiscal 2020 earnings results on Tuesday, December 17?
- Zacks
Microsoft (MSFT) Outpaces Stock Market Gains: What You Should Know
Microsoft (MSFT) closed the most recent trading day at $151.70, moving +0.38% from the previous trading session.
- Zacks
Buy Amazon (AMZN) Stock on the Dip Before a 2020 Rally?
Is now the time to buy Amazon stock on the dip heading into 2020 with AMZN stock down 6% in the last six months?
- Zacks
What the Tech?
Let's REALLY dive deep into the abyss which can be tech. Associate Stock Strategist Dan Laboe, Zacks' resident Tech geek joins us.
- Bloomberg
Cisco Enters Chip Market, Supplying Microsoft, Facebook
(Bloomberg) -- Cisco Systems Inc. has started supplying switch chips to major data-center operators, including Microsoft Corp. and Facebook Inc., opening up a new avenue to win orders from some of its largest networking-equipment customers.Cisco Silicon 1 is a switch semiconductor that’s already being used by Microsoft and Facebook in crucial networking equipment, the companies said Wednesday at an event in San Francisco. San Jose, California-based Cisco is now offering the chips, which it says are the fastest in the industry, to all of its customers, regardless of whether they buy its networking machinery. Previously Cisco’s chips were only available as components of its machines.The shift toward standalone chip sales is another departure from the business model that made Cisco one of the biggest companies in the technology industry. Cisco’s expensive proprietary combinations of hardware and software make up the backbone of much of the internet and corporate networks, and these products generate the bulk of the company’s revenue. The new initiative has the potential to attract business from customers who want to build their own machines instead of buying whole packages. It also puts Cisco in direct competition with its suppliers, Intel Corp. and Broadcom Inc., which also make switch chips that the networking equipment maker uses in some of its products.“From today -- and this is something that some of you never thought we’d do -- some of our customers will buy our silicon and build their own products if that’s what they choose to do,” Chief Executive Officer Chuck Robbins said at the event. “We really want our customers to consume this technology in any way they want.”As the internet infrastructure business moves away from suppliers who provide all the needs through locked-down combinations of hardware and software, Robbins has been pushing Cisco to adapt by becoming a bigger supplier of networking services and software. On his watch, software has risen to provide about 11% of revenue. Hardware still generates more than half of sales.Cisco shares rose less than 1% to $44.24 at 2:02 p.m. in New York. The stock gained 1.8% this year through Tuesday’s close.The move into selling components is an attempt to win orders from the hyperscalers, such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon.com Inc.’s AWS, a group that has increasingly turned away from Cisco’s offerings and equipped their data centers with computers and networking gear designed in house. Those big cloud-computing vendors contribute as little as 2% of Cisco’s total sales, according to Raymond James analyst Simon Leopold.Switch chips perform the crucial function of deciding where packets of data should go in a network of computers. They are designed to handle that task at great speed, and only a few companies have been successful in the market. Broadcom is the biggest provider of this type of chip as an individual component and has as much as 80% share, Leopold said. Intel took a bigger interest in the market in June when it bought startup Barefoot Networks.Cisco’s new offering will combine the attributes of both switch and routing chips, the company said. It’ll be able to move data very quickly and still be programmable, carrying the ability to have its function changed. Routing, directing traffic among networks, is typically conducted by groups of chips that bring other attributes but are unable to direct data fast enough for modern internet traffic loads. One chip providing all of the functions will simplify the operation of networks by eliminating the need for different layers of software, Cisco executives said.Offering up what was previously guarded as a proprietary advantage shows a flexibility at Cisco that has been increasing as Robbins works to transform the company. Analysts predict the build-it-yourself approach to networking, pioneered by the large cloud-service operators, over time will be copied by companies looking to reduce the cost of their data-center spending. That corporate market is one of Cisco’s biggest sources of revenue.Cisco’s equipment, including its chips, is designed by the company and manufactured by a third party, which it hasn’t identified.The company also announced a new router machine at the event, designed to better serve as the backbone for new fifth generation, or 5G, cellular networks. The Cisco 8000 will be based on the new chip. The company also unveiled plans for products that will support faster data transmission speeds over fiber-optic cables. Like the rest of the networking industry, Cisco is positioning itself to be a main provider of equipment for the predicted surge in internet traffic and data created by the proliferation of mobile systems.(Updates with comment from Cisco CEO in the fourth paragraph.)To contact the reporter on this story: Ian King in San Francisco at ianking@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.net, Andrew PollackFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Zacks
3 Semiconductor Stocks to Buy Right Now for 2020 on Chip Comeback
We found three semiconductor stocks with the help of our Zacks Stock Screener that investors might want to consider buying for 2020...
- Bloomberg
Software Analysts See More Volatility in an Uncertain 2020
(Bloomberg) -- High-multiple software stocks have struggled over the past few months as analysts reassess their growth prospects and valuations, and the group could see additional weakness in 2020, creating an environment where more-defensive legacy names are more favored, analysts said on Wednesday.“There is a greater level of concern that the global economy could enter into a recessionary environment next year,” wrote Gregg Moskowitz, an analyst at Mizuho Securities. As a result, “there may be an increased risk of a rotation to value stocks that could cause multiple compression among higher growth companies.”Despite a potential risk to stock multiples, the firm expects software demand to remain robust next year, particularly in the sub-sectors of cybersecurity and cloud computing. It added that “barring a significant recession,” many companies would “navigate these issues very well,” and views both Microsoft Corp. and Salesforce.com Inc. as well positioned.Salesforce was also singled out by Cowen, which named the company as one of its “best ideas” for 2020.Next year “could prove to be a volatile year for higher multiple stocks given trends we’ve seen over the last few months,” Cowen analyst J. Derrick Wood wrote. In contrast, he said, Salesforce looks like “an attractive defensive growth investment,” given its lower valuation and “positioning around high growth/high value segments of software.”A basket of high-multiple software stocks tracked by Goldman Sachs fell as much as 2.6% on Wednesday, and the index was on track for its sixth straight decline, its longest streak of declines since October 2018. Even with the recent decline, the index remains up more than 40% in 2019.Among the names falling on Wednesday was Slack Technologies, down over 6%, Coupa Software, off about 4% and Zscaler, which fell 3.5% despite bullish commentary from BofA. Atlassian Corp. sank 5.7%, while Domo Inc. was off 4.2%. Cornerstone OnDemand and HubSpot each fell more than 3%. Separately, Zendesk fell 1.7%, on pace for a fifth straight decline.UBS analyst Jennifer Swanson Lowe on Wednesday wrote that small- and mid-cap software-as-a-service companies were “working through the bumps,” even as the overall demand environment for software was “healthy” going into the end of the year.The comments followed a UBS conference, where companies like Zendesk, Hubspot and Domo “highlighted strong secular demand trends, but also scaling challenges,” according to a report. Lowe added that software pertaining to security, cloud computing and automation were among the categories with “strong market momentum.”A key catalyst for the software sector will come Thursday afternoon, when Adobe Inc. is scheduled to report its fourth-quarter results. In focus is whether the company is able to maintain revenue growth above 20%; Wall Street is currently expecting growth of 21%, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.“How investors react to Adobe’s earnings and commentary could presage how software companies and their underlying stock prices will behave in 2020,” wrote Richard Davis, an analyst at Canaccord Genuity.He said the 20% growth threshold “has taken on a near mythical importance,” and suggested that if companies fail to maintain this level, investors may start “changing their tune” on whether they are comfortable with growth that doesn’t come with operating leverage.To contact the reporter on this story: Ryan Vlastelica in New York at rvlastelica1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Catherine Larkin at clarkin4@bloomberg.net, Steven Fromm, Jeremy R. CookeFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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