SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Tech stocks ended up putting in a broadly upbeat market performance Thursday, as notable gains from SanDisk Corp, Netflix Inc. and newly public Chinese Internet company Weibo Corp. paced the sector's advance and help withstand losses from bellwethers such as IBM Corp. and Google Inc.
SanDisk (SNDK) shares climbed more than 9% to close at $82.99 a day after the memory and storage-chipmaker reported upbeat quarterly sales and earnings.
Weibo (WB) shares rose 19% to end the day at $20.24. The company that is considered the Twitter of China went public Thursday when it sold 16.8 million U.S.-listed shares at $17 each, which was at the low end of an expected range of $17 to $19 a share.
Twitter (TWTR) shares rose 1.3% to close at $45.01 as the company said it would allow advertisers to offer application-install ads on mobile devices .
Gains also came from Netflix (NFLX) , up 4.3% to close at $345.74; Groupon Inc. (GRPN) , which rose 4.4% to end the day at $7.41 a share, as well as Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) and Apple Inc. (AAPL) .
IBM Corp. stood out among decliners as investors turned against Big Blue following a disappointing quarterly earnings report.
IBM (IBM) fell by $6.39 a share, or more than 3%, to close at $190.01 after the company said late Wednesday that it earned $2.38 billion, or $2.29 a share, for its first quarter ended in March. During the same period a year ago, IBM earned $3.03 billion, or $2.70 a share. Revenue declined by 4% to $22.5 billion.
Excluding one-time items, IBM would have earned $2.54 a share, which was in line with estimates of analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters, who had also forecast IBM to report $22.91 billion in revenue.
The results showed IBM's lowest quarterly revenue since it reported $21.71 billion in the first quarter of 2009. The main source of IBM's sales drop was the company's hardware sales, which declined 23% from a year ago to $2.4 billion. The company has been moving more into software and cloud-based services and is in the middle of selling its low-end server business to Lenovo Group.
Still, such moves have yet to spur meaningful sales or earnings improvements at IBM. Analyst Brian Marshall, of ISI Group, said the company "has a long history of proactively discarding unattractive businesses" such as hard-disk drives, printers and PCs, but that Chief Executive Virginia Rometty and Chief Financial Officer Martin Schroeter need to take more dramatic action in order to transform the company.
"Unfortunately, the pace of change in tech has only accelerated and we believe the focus now needs to turn to building attractive new multi-billion dollar business lines rather than shedding old ones," Marshall said.
The Nasdaq Composite Index (COMP) reversed course from its early losses and rose 9 points to close at 4,095. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOX) ended the day with a gain of almost 2%.
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