Cisco, H-P Tablet, Slate: Weekly Tech Recap
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The talking heads of Cisco (CSCO) - Get Report and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) - Get Report couldn't distract investors long enough to remedy tech stocks' bad week.
Tech watchers put lots of hope into bellwether
Cisco and its fiscal fourth quarter earnings
report Wednesday, but they seemed less than impressed when greeted with the company's cautious outlook.
Recognizing waning IT spending,
said the decrease in customers' tech orders in late June and early July was "a mixed signal pattern that we haven't seen before."
Cisco CEO John Chambers |
Cisco reported a nice profit and beat EPS by a penny, but it just missed revenue predictions, coming in at $10.84 billion instead of the $10.88 billion analysts wanted. "We had very good results with 27% growth in revenue for the quarter,"
CFO John Calderoni told TheStreet
. "But we did have a couple of weeks that really just signal that there is a little bit of concern in the overall environment with what's happening from an economic standpoint."
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Cisco's results, which sent its stock down 10%, had a domino effect for the rest of the sector, deepening the tech selloff and helping the
by more than 65 points.
A barrage of analysts downgraded Cisco Thursday. On Friday, chip makers like
Broadcom
and
Marvell
(MRVL) - Get Report
felt the sting instigated by Cisco and saw their shares drop in intraday trading Friday.
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Cisco's share price, down more than 11% since last week, closed flat on Friday at $21.36. Broadcom closed down nearly 3% to $31.93, Marvell closed down 1.02% to $14.51, and the Nasdaq shed 17 points to 2173.
After a tablet-developing hiatus, H-P's back in the game. "H-P is very excited about the slate category," an H-P spokesman said in an email to
TheStreet
late Friday. "H-P plans to use webOS from its recent Palm acquisition as well as Windows 7 from Microsoft for this category. WebOS products will span across smartphones, slates, netbooks and printers. Deployment of the Windows 7 slate will target the specific needs of select enterprise markets."
Friday's blogosphere chatter of H-P's slate device, code-named Hurricane and reportedly launching in the first quarter of 2011, was probably a welcome relief from the H-P headlines that dominated earlier in the week.
Since dismissing its
,
H-P's board said it was surprised by Hurd's
attempts to defend his reputation,
Oracle
(ORCL) - Get Report
chief
Larry Ellison slammed H-P's board
for how it handled Hurd's resignation, a Connecticut law firm filed a
shareholder derivative lawsuit against H-P
and -- lastly -- the Department of Justice is asking H-P to provide internal records in an international bribery investigation.
Still no comment from
on when it expects to name its new CEO.
H-P's stock, which is down 3.35% since last week, gained 0.77% to close at $40.45 Friday.
Motorola
(MOT)
and Dell both crashed the new gadget department this week. The
in the U.S. While sleek and intriguing for a tablet, the $300/$549
, with a 5-inch screen, doesn't have much of a chance to be an iPad killer -- no one knows whether the Streak is supposed to be a big smartphone or a small tablet.
Motorola is continuing its successful Droid movement; it rolled out the
on Wednesday, a slider that offers twice the speed and memory of the original Droid phone.
Dell closed slightly up -- 0.17% -- Friday to $12.01 and despite good Droid 2 reviews, Motorola closed down nearly 5% to $7.64.
Lastly,
Research In Motion's
(RIMM)
new BlackBerry Torch quietly arrived at
AT&T
(T) - Get Report
stores this week, but lines around the block -- which existed for the Droid X, iPhone 4 and various other smartphones -- were virtually non-existent. While our tests conclude that the
will more than satisfy current BlackBerry users, it will be a while before RIM catches up with Apple or various Android partners in terms of innovation and consumer wont.
RIM closed down 1.42% at $53.40.
Tech's Week Ahead
Tune in Thursday to
TheStreet
, when we'll be live-blogging the results of a tech-heavy earnings day: H-P, Dell, Marvell and even small business supporter
Intuit
(INTU) - Get Report
all report quarterly earnings after the bell.
-- Written by James Rogers in New York.
