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

by Scott Bicheno on 1 November 2010, 15:42

Tags: AMD (NYSE:AMD), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT)

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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.

 

Company Listing Share price 11/10/10 Share price 18/10/10 Share price 25/10/10 Share price 1/11/10 7-day change Market cap (bn)
AMD AMD 7.05 7.12 6.89 7.34 6.5% 4.95
Apple AAPL 294.07 314.74 307.47 300.98 -2.1% 275.69
ARM ARMH 18.36 18.86 18.42 17.68 -4.0% 7.79
Avnet AVT 27.51 27.63 28.80 29.78 3.4% 4.52
Cisco CSCO 22.48 23.36 23.48 22.86 -2.6% 127.68
Dell DELL 13.69 14.49 14.59 14.40 -1.3% 27.99
Google GOOG 536.35 601.45 612.53 613.70 0.2% 195.59
HP HPQ 41.15 42.82 42.87 42.04 -1.9% 95.34
IBM IBM 138.85 141.06 139.67 143.60 2.8% 178.40
Ingram Micro IM 17.41 17.76 17.79 17.66 -0.7% 2.77
Intel INTC 19.52 19.32 19.83 20.05 1.1% 111.64
Microsoft MSFT 24.57 25.54 25.38 26.67 5.1% 230.75
Nokia NOK 10.83 10.88 11.06 10.70 -3.3% 40.07
Nvidia NVDA 10.86 11.29 11.80 12.02 1.9% 6.90
Oracle ORCL 28.00 28.90 28.99 29.38 1.3% 147.70
Qualcomm QCOM 44.76 44.79 44.18 45.16 2.2% 72.49
Tech Data TECD 40.99 42.12 42.88 42.96 0.2% 2.00
Dow .DJI 11006.48 11062.78 11132.56 11118.49 -0.1% N/A
FTSE 100 .FTSE 5657.61 5703.37 5741.37 5675.16 -1.2% N/A
NASDAQ .IXIC 2401.91 2468.77 2479.39 2507.41 1.1% N/A


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