revenue

Best Buy's fiscal second-quarter results fell short of expectations and the company cut its outlook amid "challenges to overall consumer spending and lower consumer electronics industry sales."

Specifically, Best Buy reported second-quarter earnings of $177 million, or 47 cents a share, down from 60 cents a share a year ago. Revenue was $11.34 billion, flat compared to the second quarter a year ago. Wall Street was expecting Best Buy to report second-quarter earnings of 53 cents a share on revenue of $11.47 billion.

In the second quarter, same-store sales were down 2.8 percent from … Read more

Sony took a loss in its fiscal first quarter due largely to the Japanese quake and to lower TV sales, forcing the company to lower its annual forecast.

For the quarter that ended June 30, the electronics giant reported today a net loss of 15.5 billion yen ($199 million), compared with a net profit of 25.7 billion yen a year ago. Revenue dropped 10 percent to 1.49 trillion yen from 1.66 trillion yen in the prior year's quarter.

The weak quarter prompted Sony to lower its forecast for the full year. For the fiscal year … Read more

After earlier predicting a profitable fiscal year, Sony now expects to lose a total of 260 billion yen ($3.2 billion) for the year, a change due in huge part to the effects of the Japanese earthquake.

In a statement (PDF) released today, the electronics giant revised its figures for its fiscal year ended March 31 from those originally offered in February. The forecast of a $3.2 billion loss is quite different than its earlier projection of a profit of 70 billion yen ($857 million) for the year.

Sony also slightly lowered its revenue forecast to 7.18 trillion … Read more

To prep for tough times ahead, Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker recently sent an e-mail to his top executives warning them to cut back on expenses and curtail their hiring plans, according to The Wall Street Journal and other publications.

"We must watch every penny and minimize all hiring," Apotheker wrote in the e-mail, according to the Journal story published today. "We have absolutely no room for profitless revenue or any discretionary expenditures."

In a conference call this morning to announce its quarterly earnings, HP didn't directly mention the internal memo or any plans for drastic … Read more

AOL saw its profits for the first quarter nosedive by 86 percent as the company struggled to swallow the costs of buying the Huffington Post.

For the quarter ended March 31, the online service watched its profits fall to $4.7 million from $34.7 million in the year-ago quarter. Revenue also fell, reaching $551.4 million, a 17 percent drop from $664.3 million a year ago.

AOL closed its $315 million purchase of the Huffington Post in March, integrating the media Web site with its AOL Media and AOL Local units. Buying the Huffington Post as well as … Read more

Pretax profits at the British chip architecture firm ARM Holdings have gone up by more than a third in the last year, the company reported today.

According to ARM's quarterly results, pretax profits stood at 50.8 million pounds ($83.7 million) in the first quarter of 2011, with revenues at 116 million pounds ($185.5 million)--a year ago, those figures were 37.6 million pounds and 92.3 million pounds, respectively. According to chief executive Warren East, the 35 percent profit rise coincided with a 33 percent increase in ARM-processor-based shipments "driven by growth in smartphones, … Read more

Apple now tops other handset makers in terms of revenue, according to new estimates.

With big iPhone sales during the quarter, Apple passed mobile giant Nokia in revenue, making it the world's largest handset vendor based on that metric, according to Boston-based Strategy Analytics.

"We estimate Apple's wholesale revenues for its iPhone handset division stood at $11.9 billion in the first quarter of 2011," said Strategy Analytics' Senior Analyst Alex Spektor in a statement, referring to U.S. dollars. "Apple overtook Nokia for the first time, which recorded a lower $9.4 billion of … Read more

Google's first-quarter revenues announced this afternoon were slightly better than what Wall Street was expecting, but earnings per share were lower than anticipated.

Analysts were expecting about 25 percent year-over-year revenue growth--about $6.32 billion. Google ultimately reported revenues of $6.54 billion once traffic acquisition costs were removed.

"We had a great quarter with 27 percent year-over-year revenue growth," Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette said in an investor release. "These results demonstrate the value of search and search ads to our users and customers, as well as the extraordinary potential of areas like display and … Read more

Apple's record sales and growth could continue for the next two years, pushing the company to becoming a $200 billion behemoth and eventually dwarfing the revenue of tech giants like IBM and Hewlett-Packard, according to one analyst.

That claim was made by Forrester Research's founder and CEO George Colony during an interview with Bloomberg earlier today. Colony suggested that the company's hardware successes with the iPad and iPhone had created a cycle where those same customers buy applications in the App Store, then continue to buy Apple's products to keep using the software.

But that ecosystem … Read more