It ain't easy to impress Mr. Market these days. A few days ago, Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE:AMD) surpassed every reasonable expectation -- and got taken out behind the woodshed for a solid beating. Rule Breakers pick Polycom (NASDAQ:PLCM) may not have impressed, but it certainly didn't deserve a 17% haircut.
And today, there's storage giant EMC (NYSE:EMC) reporting as hale and sound a quarter as one could hope for. Revenue of $3.52 billion is a respectable 8% sequential uptick and far ahead of management guidance, which pointed to no more than 5% higher sales. Non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.23 represent a 28% quarter-over-quarter jump, putting EMC essentially even with the year-ago profit.
But EMC's shares are 2.8% cheaper after that seemingly impressive report. Life just isn't fair sometimes.
And it's no sector effect this time. Competitors IBM (NYSE:IBM) and NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP) are outperforming the S&P 500 today with positive returns. Compounding the problem is VMWare’s (NYSE:VMW) unexciting earnings report. EMC still maintains a majority stake in VMWare, so when VMWare doesn’t perform up to its usual high-growth standards, it causes some added pain at its parent company.
Perhaps we're watching investors take some profits and run. After all, EMC gave shareholders a market-beating 38% return on their investment over the last six months. That's pretty exciting for a stock with an average beta, big market cap, and rare price-change revolutions. Now, a 3% discount doesn't exactly make for an ideal buy-in point, but CEO Joe Tucci believes that his company is "strategically aligned with the major technology shifts and well positioned to play a pivotal role in the IT industry for the next decade." That’s a sentiment I can agree with. This stock deserves a second look from any long-term investor who wants to ride the long-term trend toward companies needing to house infinity-minus-one bits of data.
Have any thoughts on EMC’s quarter or on technology in general? Sound off in the comments section below.
