Daily Cuppa: Reportapalooza
Microsoft, Google, Intel, Nokia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) all decided to release their second quarter results overnight. Here's the run down as you get ready for the weekend.
Microsoft reported its first ever quarterly loss as a public company, making a US$492 million loss on a revenue of US$18.06 billion.
This was mainly because the company took a US$6.2 billion charge, as its purchase of online ads company aQuantive wasn't worth as much as first thought, due to Google's stranglehold on the market.
Other than that, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that the company had "the most exciting launch season" in history coming up, with the pending launch of Windows 8, the Surface and the latest version of Office.
Google reported a strong second quarter earnings of US$2.79 billion. Google's revenue for the quarter was US$12.21 billion.
It was the first results for Google since the company completed its acquisition of Motorola Mobility. Motorola revenues came in at US$1.25 billion for the quarter.
Nokia is struggling on the other hand, reporting a second quarter loss of US$1.74 billion. Sales are down 26 per cent on this quarter, since last year. The handset maker only sold 600,000 devices in the US in the quarter, but did manage to sell 2.6 million in the Asia Pacific region. Nokia shares have dropped 84 per cent since the company decided to go to Windows Phone; Nokia also shed 10,000 employees in the last quarter. It's all pretty grim.
Intel reported flat Q2 earnings of US$14 billion, with most of the growth for the quarter coming from the company's datacentre revenues. Intel is banking on its investments in ultrabooks, as well as Intel-based tablet and phone releases set for the second half of this year, to pull in the money for the rest of the year.
Intel rival AMD reported a slower second quarter, pulling in revenues of US$35 million. The company has blamed weak consumer spending and lower demand for desktop processors in China and Europe for the slower quarter.
In other news, Microsoft has completed its acquisition of social networking service Yammer, which the company aims to sell standalone, as well as bundling in with the Office suite.
Oracle has also flagged that it doesn't intend to permanently fix a zero-day flaw in Oracle Database, because the "amount of code change required, potential for significant regression issues and inability to automate the application of a fix" make it much too complex to patch at this stage.