Sramana's  Instablog

As the global recession continues to affect the sales of computers, leading computer manufacturer Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) with annual revenue of $61.1 billion yesterday reported 63% dip in its first quarter profit with PC sales declining 34%. Let us take a closer look.

Q1 revenue was down 23% to $12.34 billion missing analyst estimate of $12.7 billion. Net income was down 63% to $290 million or $0.15 per share. Excluding charges, EPS was $0.24 beating analyst estimate of $0.23.

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Earlier this week, SanDisk Corp. (NASDAQ:SNDK), the leading flash memory chipmaker with annual revenue of $3.35 billion, renewed its patent licensing agreement with Samsung that was to expire in August of this year. Last year, Samsung was trying to acquire SanDisk, which is struggling with huge losses. Also last year, there was speculation that Seagate might acquire SanDisk. Let’s take a closer look at both companies’ performances.

In the new licensing deal with Samsung, the royalty rate has been reduced by about 50%. Samsung paid $350 million in royalties to SanDisk in 2008, according to analyst estimates. Last year, Samsung withdrew its $5.85 billion takeover bid and as per a recent interview with CEO Eli Harari.

Last week, Intuit (NASDAQ:INTU) the leading accounting and tax software maker with annual revenue of $3.1 billion, reported a strong third quarter in which it beat estimates, driven by strong sales in Consumer Tax and growth in the small business customer base despite the tough economy. In the past few weeks there have been expressions of optimism in the news media and signs from companies such as Intel and Cisco that the economy is recovering. Let’s take a look at ADP’s and Intuit’s results for any such signs. Read the full article »

EMC (NYSE:EMC) and VMWare (NYSE:VMW) recently announced their quarterly results. While they failed to meet some expectations, both companies’ managements were reasonably happy with their performances in this poor economy. Read the full article »

Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA) was optimistic last quarter about its performance in the troubled economy, and the recently announced Q1 results are proof that this optimism wasn’t entirely unfounded. Q1 revenues of $8.84 billion grew 5% over the year and beat the market’s expected $8.76 billion. EPS of $0.27 was higher than the Street’s expected $0.23 and grew 11% over the year.

Early in the month, Cisco said that the networking industry is showing signs of stabilizing despite an 18% slump in sales. 3Com too has been showing signs of pulling off a turnaround. Nortel, however, filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. And Brocade is likely an acquisition target. Let’s now analyze the performance of the remaining networking networking players of which F5 is the strongest, and Alcatel-Lucent the weakest.

On April 22, F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:FFIV), a leader in the niche of application delivery networking with annual revenue of $650 million, reported its second quarter results. Q2 revenue was down 7% y-o-y and 3% q-o-q to $154.1 million. Net income was up 7% to $19 million. Q1 analysis is available here.

Read the remaining of this analysis on sramanamitra.com.