WORLD TOP COMPANIES UNDER FINANCIAL PRESSURE...

Amazon reports first quarterly net loss in years

AGENCIES 

Posted: Friday, Oct 26, 2012 at 1828 hrs IST

San Francisco: Amazon.com Inc reported its first quarterly net loss in more than five years on Thursday as the world's largest Internet retailer spent heavily and suffered from an economic slowdown in Europe.

Amazon shares slipped slightly to $220.75 in after-hours trading after the results.The company said its third-quarter net loss was $274 million, or 60 cents a share, versus net income of $63 million, or 14 cents a share, in the third quarter of 2011. Part of the loss related to an impairment charge from Amazon's investment in daily deal company LivingSocial.

Third-quarter revenue was $13.81 billion, up 27 percent from a year earlier, Amazon also said.Amazon was expected to lose 8 cents a share in the third quarter on revenue of $13.9 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. The last time Amazon reported a quarterly net loss was in the third quarter of 2003, according to Thomson Reuters data……..http://www.financialexpress.com/news/amazon-reports-first-quarterly-net-loss-in-years/1022443/0

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Apple's weak margin outlook surprises analysts

AGENCIES 

Posted: Friday, Oct 26, 2012 at 1840 hrs IST

At least three brokerages cut their price targets on Apple Inc by up to $50 a share after the iPhone maker surprised analysts by forecasting lower gross margins for the current quarter.

Apple shares edged lower 0.1 percent to $608.85 in premarket trading.

For the December quarter, Apple forecast revenue of $52 billion, below estimates of $55 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. It expects margins of 36 percent, far lower than analysts' expectations of 43 percent.

Analysts focused on the decline in margins and played down the significance of a fall in iPad sales in the last quarter, as users waited for the iPad mini, and they did not expect this to continue.

Apple's forecast decline in gross margin, even assuming it was deliberately aiming low, still pointed to an unusual decline, Evercore Partners analysts Rob Cihra and Edison Yu said in a research note. Evercore cut its price target on the stock : At least three brokerages cut their price targets on Apple Inc by up to $50 a share after the iPhone maker surprised analysts by forecasting lower gross margins for the current quarter……..http://www.financialexpress.com/news/apples-weak-margin-outlook-surprises-analysts/1022450/0

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Apple warns of holiday earnings drop

AGENCIES

Posted: Friday, Oct 26, 2012 at 1543 hrs IST

New York: Apple has a new iPhone, two new iPads and three new PCs as it heads into the holiday quarter, the biggest selling season of the year. But, paradoxically, it expects these new gadgets to bring down its profits compared to last year. The reason: the new gadgets are expensive to make, Apple executives said Thursday, and the company is not interested in cutting corners for the sake of short-term returns.

On top of the holiday-quarter warning, the company reported earnings for its just-ended quarter that missed Wall Street's expectations for the second quarter in a row – something that hasn't happened in more than a decade……http://www.financialexpress.com/news/apple-warns-of-holiday-earnings-drop/1022381/

  

Citigroup fined $2 million over facebook IPO

Associated Press | Updated On: October 26, 2012 22:36 (IST)New York: The top securities regulator in Massachusetts has fined Citigroup $2 million, charging that an analyst there leaked confidential information about Facebook's initial public offering.

Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin announced the charges Friday. Citi agreed to the settlement without admitting or denying wrongdoing.

Citi was part of the team of banks that helped underwrite the deal that made Facebook a public company in May. When a bank helps underwrite such a deal, it has information about a company that the broader investing public does not have. The bankers who underwrite the deal are not supposed to act on that information or share it with any favored clients, because it would give them an unfair advantage over the public.

The arrangements can also bring accusations of conflicts of interest; banks not only help companies go public or do other deals, they also have units that provide research on the companies. The research is supposed to be impartial, but the banks have a stake in how a company does if it is helping it with underwriting.

According to Galvin's office, a junior analyst in Citigroup's San Francisco office was assigned to help research Facebook. On May 2, the junior analyst sent an email to two employees at the technology website TechCrunch.com, with proprietary information about Citigroup's research on Facebook.

"I am ramping up coverage on FB and thought you guys might like to see how the street is thinking about it (and our estimates)," the junior analyst wrote.

A TechCrunch employee wrote back: "There's no way I can publish this doc from an anonymous source, right?"

A minute later, the junior analyst replied: "My boss would eat me alive."

The analyst and the TechCrunch employee were friends, according to Galvin's office, and had gone to Stanford together.

Citigroup fired the junior analyst in September. The bank told Galvin's office that the junior analyst acted alone. In addition to agreeing to the $2 million fine, Citi also agreed to review its policies for overseeing analysts' communications, and to strengthen compliance training for the analysts.

Euro zone rot spreads

Euro zone rot spreads to Germany, China mending

By Jonathan Cable

LONDON | Wed Oct 24, 2012 6:04pm IST

(Reuters) - The euro zone's biggest member Germany is being sucked into the bloc's worsening economic quagmire, business surveys suggested on Wednesday, as similar data signalled the slowdown in China may be abating.

The slump that began in Greece and spread to other smaller euro zone economies was clearly gripping the core in October, marking the worst month for the 17-member bloc since it emerged from recession more than three years ago.Markit's Composite Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI), which polls around 5,000 businesses across the 17-nation bloc and is viewed as a reliable growth indicator, fell to 45.8 this month.

That was the lowest reading since June 2009, confounding consensus expectations in a Reuters poll for a rise to 46.4. The index has now been below the 50 mark that separates growth from contraction since February. Similar PMI data for China suggested the world's second biggest economy, a key world exporter, is slowly recovering from its weakest period of growth in three years, with new orders and output at their highest in months. A comparable PMI for the United States due at 1258 GMT is also expected to rise, showing a modest acceleration in growth.

GERMAN PLUNGE

The manufacturing PMI for Germany - another major exporter and Europe's economic powerhouse - plunged to 45.7 from 47.4, also confounding expectations for a rise and well below even the lowest forecast polled by Reuters. The rate of decline was even worse in France.

"(It) reinforces concern that the economic downturn in the region may be deepening and widening," said Martin van Vliet, senior economist at ING. The data were published just before European Central Bank President Mario Draghi was due to appear before German lawmakers for a grilling over whether his plans to buy euro zone sovereign debt might trigger inflation or compromise ECB independence. They also coincided with the latest numbers from Germany's Ifo institute showing business sentiment in the country dropped sharply to its lowest in more than 2-1/2 years, the sixth consecutive monthly fall.

"Any hopes of a rebound appear to have been dashed for now. Germany is heavily dependent on exports so a global slowdown is going to impact on Europe's growth motor," said Peter Dixon at Commerzbank. Germany has been mostly resilient to the three-year old sovereign debt crisis. But economic data in recent months have shown the rot is spreading.

The euro zone economy contracted 0.2 percent in the second quarter and is predicted to have shrunk 0.3 percent in the third, meeting the technical definition of recession. While official data implies a similar decline in the third quarter just ended, Markit said the PMIs suggest the downturn will accelerate into the current quarter - a far gloomier prediction than in a Reuters poll last week.

"We are more downbeat than the official data. The PMIs are running at levels in the third quarter and start of the fourth quarter historically consistent with GDP falling at about 0.6 percent," said Chris Williamson at data collator Markit. Bad news has been flowing out of company boardrooms too. Carmaker Volkswagen reported a fall in nine-month operating profit on Wednesday and sportswear maker Puma (PUMG.DE) reported sales in the region dropped in the third quarter. Heineken NV (HEIN.AS), the world's third-largest brewer, reported a stronger than expected increase in third-quarter revenue, but sold more beer everywhere except western Europe.

Markit's measure of services business expectations sank to its lowest reading since February 2009, at the nadir of the last recession and when world stock markets were tumbling.

STABILISATION IN CHINA

But it was a different story for China, where the HSBC Flash Manufacturing PMI rose to a three-month high of 49.1 in October but remained below the key 50 mark. "(This) adds to recent signs of stabilisation of the Chinese economy, thus underpinning our view that the slowdown in activity is bottoming out," said Nikolaus Keis at UniCredit.

A Reuters poll taken after last week's GDP data showed economists anticipating a modest rebound in growth in Q4 to 7.7 percent from Q3's below-target 7.4 percent. Even that figure would not be enough to lift full year expansion from an expected 13-year low, however. (Editing by Catherine Evans)

http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/10/24/economy-global-wrapup-idINDEE89N06420121024