Here are some things going on this morning in your world of tech:
Shares of Zynga (ZNGA) continue their dramatic slide, falling $2.02, or almost 40%, at $3.06, following the company’s report last night of lower-than-expected Q2 results and a reduced outlook for the year on delays in games and problems with trends in usage at Facebook (FB).
Facebook shares this morning are also off in sympathy, falling $1.90, or 6.5%, to $27.44.
Price targets and estimates are going down across the board, and the stock was cut to Hold or the equivalent by about six different analysts this morning.
Citigroup’s Neil Doshi, cutting his rating from Buy to Neutral, and cutting his price target to $4 from $12, writes, “While we are positive on the LT prospects of Social/Mobile gaming [�] near-term fundamentals have started to crack, as 2H:12 Bookings & EBITDA are expected to decline Y/Y. Our call hasn�t worked, so we�re moving to the sidelines [�]”
Shares of Sprint-Nextel (S) are up 44 cents, or 13.1%, at $3.81 after the company this morning reported revenue that topped analysts’ expectations, but missed on the bottom line. The company sold 1.5 million units of Apple‘s (AAPL) iPhone in the quarter, it said, somewhat fewer than the 3.7 million AT&T (T) reported selling on Tuesday, and the 2.7 million Verizon Communications (VZ) reported last week.
The company raised its outlook for full-year Ebitda from a prior $3.7-3.9 billion to a range of $4.5 to 4.6 billion. Jennifer Fritzsche with Wells Fargo, who has an Outperform rating on the shares, writes this morning, following the company’s conference call, that the company said with respect to its massive “Network Vision” upgrade that it has seen “a 10%-20% jump in voice minutes over night once new sites were launched” and that the cost of Network Vision in terms of dilution is projected now at $800 million vs. a prior estimate of $1.1 billion.
Shares of disk drive maker Western Digital (WDC) are up $7.52, or 23%, at $40 after the company last night beat Q2 estimates and the Street’s full-year expectations. Price targets are going up pretty much across the board today. Needham & Co.’s Richard Kugele, reiterating a Strong Buy on the stock and a $61 price target, writes this morning “and Boom Goes The Dynamite,” with the company’s “execution machine” getting down to work despite “macro headwinds, a ‘meh’ PC environment, and whatever tablets are or aren’t doing to consumer perceptions.”
Chip stocks generally are going berserk this morning. LSI (LSI), which last night reported better-than-expected Q2 results but a Q3 forecast below consensus, is rising by $1.20, or almost 20%, at $7.25 this morning.
The stock has gotten one upgrade, so far, that I can see, from CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets’s Srini Pajjuri, who raised his rating on the shares to Outperform from Underperform, and raised his price target to $7.25 from $6.50, writing that despite lingering concerns about hard disk drives using LSI parts, the “the Flash business is tracking well ahead of our expectations and legacy Networking headwinds are mostly behind.”
Shares of The New York TImes (NYT) are higher by 82 cent,s or 12%, at $7.88 after the company this morning reported Q2 revenue and earnings per share slightly ahead of analysts’ estimates.
The times said paid digital subscriber count rose 13% from March’s level to 532,000 at quarter’s end, marking the one-year anniversary of the company’s having raised the paywall.
It’s the kind of “rumor and speculation” that Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer was referring to on Tuesday night: The First Financial Daily of Shanghai this morning has an article, regurgitated by the Want China Times, saying that Apple will “postpone” its iPhone 5 because of shortages in parts from chip maker Qualcomm (QCOM), which is known to have struggled with capacity constraints this year on chips with 28 nanometer features. The article doesn’t not mention any specific time frames, or what the extent of the delay would be.
Then again,�Brad Reed�of�Boy Genius Report�this morning writes that a couple blogs, App4Phone, and PhoneArena, are claiming that the next iPhone will be “released” on September 21st, citing unnamed sources.
Apple shares this morning are down 89 cents at $574.08, having given up earlier gains. Qualcomm shares are up 89 cents, or 1.6%, at $58.17.
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