HP Soars, Rackspace Dives: Tech Winners & Losers
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- HP (HPQ) shares jumped 14.09% to $19.51 after the company reported first-quarter results that surprised Wall Street analysts.
Though HP's first-quarter revenue fell to $28.4 billion from $30 billion a year earlier, that was still good enough to beat Wall Street's expectations. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters were expecting sales of $27.79 billion. Earnings also came in higher than consensus, with HP generating 82 cents per share, well above the 71 cents Wall Street was expecting.
HP Investors Heave Sigh of Relief, but Challenges Remain
Second-quarter and full year guidance was also surprisingly strong. For the second quarter, HP expects to earn between 80 cents and 82 per share, above the 77 cent estimate. For the full year, Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP expects to generate earnings of $3.40 to $3.60 a share, well above Wall Street's estimate of $3.32.
Shares of cloud computing company Rackspace (RAX) slumped 2.28% to $54.07 after the company lowered its prices for cloud bandwidth and content delivery network (CDN) by 33%, responding to increasingly price-sensitive customers. Shares had traded as low as $50.75 after the announcement. San Antonio, TX.-based Rackspace also said it will be implementing tiered pricing for its open cloud product portfolio, starting with Cloud Files, its object storage service. These pricing changes will take place over the next several weeks, starting Feb. 22. The price will change from $0.18 to $0.12 per GB. "The Rackspace Open Cloud is built upon a simple pricing model with no hidden costs or extra charges," John Engates, Chief Technology Officer at Rackspace, said in the press release. "This simple and straightforward pricing approach is a key part of how we help customers take advantage of the real value of the Rackspace Open Cloud, particularly for the next generation of bandwidth and content-centric web applications, which must deliver quality user experiences on a mobile and global basis."
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