Technology companies dominated late trading after a slew of earnings releases surprised investors.
Shares of Facebook leapt after the bell Wednesday when it easily topped Wall Street’s most optimistic estimates for both revenue and earnings in the fourth quarter. The company reported it earned 79 cents per share on $5.84 billion in revenue, breezing past the 68 cents a share on $5.37 billion in revenue expected by Thomson Reuters consensus estimates. Even shares of social media competitors likeLinkedIn and Twitter traded higher Wednesday after the bell.
But fellow technology giant eBay saw shares tumble in extended trading after it failed to grow sales during the critical holiday quarter. The company also guided weaker for the next quarter, predicting net revenue between $2.05 billion and $2.10 billion and adjusted EPS of 43 to 45 cents per share. The company’s revenue was $2.32 billion in the fourth quarter, flat with a year earlier. Net income fell to $477 million, or 39 cents per share, from $1.02 billion, or 82 cents per share, for the e-commerce company, Reuters reported.
PayPal, just a few months after its spinoff from eBay, posted sunnier results, and shares popped after the bell. The financial technology company posted fourth-quarter earnings per share of 36 cents on revenue of $2.56 billion. Analysts had expected PayPal to report earnings of about 35 cents a share on $2.51 billion in revenue, according to a consensus estimate from Thomson Reuters.
iPhone supplier InvenSense was also under pressure after Applereported Tuesday that it sold 74.8 million iPhones in the quarter, missing expectations of about 75.46 million, according to StreetAccount. Apple shares closed down almost 7 percent, though they edged higher after hours.
ServiceNow’s stock plunged after hours, falling more than 15 percent at one point in the evening. The enterprise cloud company guided for slightly slower sequential revenue increases for the coming quarter, projecting an increase of between 42 and 44 percent in the first quarter of 2016, versus the 51 percent currency-constant revenue increases reported in Wednesday’s fourth-quarter earnings.
Network security company Juniper Networks was under pressure in extended trading. The company’s chief financial officer Robyn Denholm, said in a Wednesday earnings announcement she would leave the company. The company also issued “prudent” guidance, citing uncertainty of the near term global macro environment and potential lumpiness in customer investment patterns.
[“source-gsmarena”]
