Weekly Wrap Up
In corporate news, General Motors (GM: Charts, News, Offers) reported another increase in earnings, triple year over year. Visa (V: Charts, News, Offers) also reported impressive earnings, also announcing a $1 billion share buyback. More Market News
Economic News
There was more bad news than met the eye to Friday’s jobs report, even beyond the bump up in the unemployment rate.
While the top-line number of 244,000 jobs created sounded great when it came off the tape, the internals were somewhat weaker. In particular, the household survey, which is an actual head count, suggested that the job creation barely kept up with the expansion of the labor force. (Source: CNBC) Click here to read the full article
Oil dropped below $110 per barrel Wednesday after a government report showed that supplies of petroleum products are growing as demand weakens in the U.S.
Industry reports on the job market and the service sector also raised concerns about the health of the U.S. economy.
Benchmark crude for June delivery lost $1.81 to settle at $109.24 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. In London, Brent gave up $1.26 to settle at $121.19 per barrel on the ICE Futures exchange. (Source: Washington Post) Click here to read the full article
U.S. factory orders surged in March, posting a fifth straight monthly increase that showed a healthy manufacturing sector well placed to support economic recovery.
The Commerce Department said on Tuesday new orders for manufactured goods rose 3 percent to a seasonally adjusted $463 billion, well above Wall Street economists’ forecasts for a 1.9 percent pickup.
In addition, February orders that had been reported as dropping by 0.1 percent were sharply revised to instead show a 0.7 percent increase. (Source: InvestorGuide) Click here to read the full article
Business News
It wasn’t long ago that a first-quarter profit of $3.2 billion would have been cause for a major celebration at General Motors (GM: Charts, News, Offers).
But after G.M. reported those earnings on Thursday, the assessment from company executives and industry analysts was that the nation’s biggest carmaker could still perform much better.
“We are certainly holding ourselves to a higher standard,” Dan Ammann, G.M.’s chief financial officer, said in an interview. We expect improvements.” (Source: New York Times) Click here to read the full article
Visa (V: Charts, News, Offers) reported a fiscal second-quarter profit of $881 million, or $1.23 a share, it reported Thursday after the close.
That compares with a profit of $713 million, or 96 cents a share, in the year-earlier period for the world’s largest electronic payments firm. Revenue rose 15% compared with $2 billion in the second quarter of 2010.
Analysts on average expected Visa to report $1.20 per share on revenue of $2.23 billion, according to those surveyed by Thomson Reuters. (Source: The Street) Click here to read the full article
Technology Focus
In the wake of the Sony PlayStation Network outage, Sony (SNE: Charts, News, Offers) has taken down another arm of its online gaming offerings.
Sony Online Entertainment is is now inaccessible; a note on the service’s Web site says Sony was forced to “take the SOE service down temporarily.”
“In the course of our investigation into the intrusion into our systems we have discovered an issue that warrants enough concern for us to take the service down effective immediately. We will provide an update later today (Monday),” the note continued. (Source: PC Mag) Click here to read the full article
Intel has advanced its chip manufacturing technology with three-dimensional transistors that could make PCs, smartphones and tablets faster and more power-efficient.
The company said Wednesday that it will implement three-dimensional transistors when making chips using its latest 22-nanometer manufacturing technology.
The new chip technology, called tri-gate transistors, replaces flat, two-dimensional streams of transistors with a 3D structure, said Mark Bohr, an Intel senior fellow. A flat, two-dimensional planar gate is replaced with a thin, three-dimensional fin that rises up vertically from the silicon substrate. (Source: PC World) Click here to read the full article
Your Money
he launch and hysteria over the iPad2 has triggered an avalanche of articles on how Steve Jobs and his Apple have been extraordinarily successful, again. As someone who has been close to Steve, especially during the trying period of developing the Macintosh, I had a front-row seat for observing the inception of his “secret sauce” of product development and leadership. (Source: Sources of Insight) Click here to read the full article
If there’s one message I have stressed more than any other over the last few years, it is that it is not good enough to be pretty good at everything. The most successful companies, products, and brands have figured out how to become the most of something – not just adequate, but downright amazing.
If there’s one pushback I’ve received more than any other over the last few years, it is that I am setting an unreasonably high bar. “We’re not cutting-edge like Google or Facebook, our company is old-fashioned,” some executives reply. “This is not a glamorous industry,” others protest, “don’t expect us to be like Apple or Nike.” (Source: Harvard Business Review) Click here to read the full article
