Eyes are on Facebook’s first earnings report
After a disappointing Wall Street debut, all eyes will be on Facebook on Thursday when it makes its first quarterly earnings report as a public company.
The world's largest social network is under a lot of pressure to show strong numbers and, more importantly, to show that the company has strong business potential. Shareholders and Wall Street will be paying particular attention to this first earnings report since Facebook's initial public offering didn't go quite as planned.
When the company went public in May, the stock was first offered at $38 per share and was expected to shoot up to $50, $60 or even $90 per share. The stock didn't meet those expectations, and didn't hold its opening price.
At noon today, Facebook's stock was trading at $28.64 a share on the Nasdaq. Read more...
Nokia ‘giving away phones at cost’
Nokia's financial results for the second quarter of 2011 are due tomorrow, and the company has already warned investors of very bad news coming. Yesterday, it issued a peek into just how tough things have got in 2011. Nokia said its smartphone profit margins were down to 6.2 per cent in Q1 2011, with margins of 16.4 per cent on basic phones.
In other words, Nokia's bargain basement models, sold to emerging markets and typically making use of very old technology, make it more money than its premium "flagship" models which boast its "state of the art" features.
"There are no very big cuts per model, but the scale – across the portfolio – is unseen for a very, very long time," Reuters quotes one unnamed source at a European operator as saying. Read more...