Intel to kick off a tepid tech earnings season
Jeremy Hobson: Yahoo has its fifth CEO in five years. The company Has selected a woman named Marissa Mayer, who has spent the last 13 years as an executive at Google. In fact, she was Google’s 20th employee. And now she is said to be the 20th female CEO in the Fortune 500.
She’s seen as one of the tech industry’s top talents, according to Lindsey Turrentine, who is the editor-in-chief of CNET Reviews.
Lindsey Turrentine: Yahoo’s very serious about sticking it out. This is sort of Yahoo saying, “No, we mean it. We’re here; we’re going to fix our problems. She does really understand how to get to the meat of a problem, and then work incrementally to solve it. And that should be really promising for anybody who’s upset about Yahoo’s performance.
Turrentine says she expects Yahoo to continue to make its money on advertising. And we’ll get a sense of how much money the company has been making when Yahoo reports earnings later today.
Intel will also be telling us about its quarterly performance today — a very different business from Yahoo’s.
But as our New York bureau chief Heidi Moore reports, all the tech companies are keeping their eye on potential danger far from Silicon Valley.
Heidi Moore: What does, say, the Greek election and the bailout of Spain have to do with the profits of companies around Silicon Valley?
It’s more related than you may think, says Andy Bartels. He’s an analyst with Forrester Research.
Andy Bartels: Well, Europe is in a recession right now. That shrinkage in their economy then impacts their spending on technology.
As technology earnings kick off this week, we can expect to hear more about the European crisis hurting American tech companies’ profits down the line. Here’s Ambrish Srivastava, an analyst with BMO Capital Markets.
Ambrish Srivastava: People start tightening their budgets, so we know for sure that demand is weakening in Europe – but we’re all interconnected at the end of the day, so that is having some impact in the U.S. as well.
The dollar is also stronger compared to the euro, which makes it more expensive for Europe to buy our technology.
Europe isn’t the only soft spot. Srivastava just came back from Asia, where tech insiders expect a slowdown in sales there too.
In New York, I’m Heidi Moore for Marketplace.
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