You would think that champagne bottles would be popping if you owned stock in a company that announced it had $19.90 billion in revenue and a net profit of $4.97 billion for its last fiscal quarter, which is what Microsoft reported for its second quarter 2013 calendar earnings on Thursday.
Instead, those financial results failed to meet the expectations of analysts, who were expecting higher numbers from the team at Redmond. As a result, Microsoft"s stock price took a beating today on the NASDAQ stock market. After going down as much as 12.2 percent in trading, the price recovered a little bit at the end of the day to settle at $31.40 a share. That"s down $4.04, or 11.40 percent, from Thursday"s close. It"s also the biggest single day dip in its share price in 13 years.
Part of the reason for the downturn might have been the one time $900 million charge Microsoft put into its revenues Thursday because of the new price cuts on the Surface RT tablet. Indeed, the Internet seems to be full of editorials and analysts reports today proclaiming that Surface RT, and Windows RT as a whole, is a big failure.
Microsoft seems to know it needs to make some changes, which is why it announced a major corporate reorganization earlier this month. On Thursday, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood tried to make the best of the company"s current situation, stating, "We know we have to do better."
Source: Yahoo Finance | Image via Yahoo