Wall Street Beat: Downturn continues to slam IT bellwethers

Earnings season is winding down, but tech companies of all stripes including Cisco, Lenovo, AOL, Panasonic, Motorola, Hynix and Applied Materials continue to report fourth-quarter sales declines, curb forecasts and, in some cases, announce massive layoffs.

The common wisdom has been that vendors with global footprints and a diverse product line are in the best position to weather the worldwide economic storm, but even mighty Cisco, the dominant network equipment supplier that has a wider product portfolio than any company in that sector, reported a weak quarter and cut its forecast.

Cisco said Wednesday that revenue for the quarter ended Jan. 24 declined 7.5 percent from the year-earlier period to US$9.1 billion, as earnings plunged 27 percent to $1.5 billion. Now that most big vendors have reported earnings, a poor quarter was expected, so the biggest shock is that Cisco now expects revenue to decline by as much as 20 percent in the current quarter.

Executives tried to put a good face on the news.

"This downturn, in my opinion, is both the biggest challenge of our lifetime but also represents the biggest opportunity to transform our company as well as our economy through a series of bold steps," said CEO John Chambers on a conference call.

But not even market leaders can escape the downturn in demand, he acknowledged.

"We are not immune to the challenging economic environment," Chambers added.

Hardware vendors have been especially hard hit, which was expected since it is widely acknowledged that PC upgrades are among the first items to be cut from business budgets. Lenovo Wednesday reported a quarterly loss of $97 million on revenue that declined 20 percent from one year earlier, to $3.6 billion.

CEO William Amelio resigned, to be replaced by Lenovo Chairman Yang Yuanqing as the company refocuses on its China market in the face of sagging sales in Europe and the U.S., as well as Asia-Pacific outside of China.

The suffering hardware market is curbing demand for component and chip makers. Hynix Semiconductor announced Thursday its fifth quarterly loss in a row. The Korea-based DRAM maker said its loss deepened to 1.33 trillion Korean won (US$964.4 million) from 462 billion won during the same period in 2007.

The slowing demand has a chain-reaction effect among suppliers for component makers. For example, chip manufacturing equipment company Applied Materials warned Monday that it expects revenue to fall 35 percent for the quarter ending Jan. 25, to about $1.33 billion.

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