HEXUS.sharewatch: AMD and Microsoft up on strong business spend

The global recovery, such as it is, was initially powered by consumers. We went back to the shops while large companies stayed cautious for a lot longer - choosing to extend IT refesh cycles even further while they waited to see what new macroeconomic horrors awaited us.

But this couldn't continue forever; once IT obsolescence started to affect productivity too much it became a false economy to scrimp on tech spend. Furthermore, as it looked increasingly unlikely that we were about to embark on another Great Depression, the justification for delaying the inevitable became weaker.

Even so, many pundits were predicting a slow-down in the second half of this year, but that's turned out to be primarily a consumer phenomenon. It's as if consumers said "we've given it our best shot, now it's your turn corporate sector", and many of the tech company earnings announcements in the past few weeks have confirmed that corporate spend remains strong.

Two of the companies to have seen their stock apparently benefit from this in the past week were AMD and Microsoft. The latter beat expectations with its quarterly results late last week, and the unturn in business spend it expected to combine with a new generation of CPU architecture from AMD to make its mid-term future look a bit more rosy.

On the other side of the coin, investors continue to indicate that ARM's shares may be somewhat overpriced, while Nokia's recent rally has lost steam, perhaps due to the latest market research confirming its market share continues to decline.