Topic: Growth Stocks

Wall Street Stock Forecaster Hotline – Friday, July 10, 2015

Article Excerpt

MICROSOFT CORP., $44.61, Nasdaq symbol MSFT, paid $9.5 billion for Nokia’s mobile phone operations in April 2014. If you exclude the cash this business held, the purchase price was $8.0 billion. Nokia is the only major phone maker using Microsoft’s Windows Phone software. Microsoft believed this purchase would help it sell more of its phones and encourage developers to write more apps for the platform. However, sales of Windows Phone devices continue to suffer in the face of intense competition from the iPhone and Android-powered devices. Smartphones running Windows account for just 3% of global sales. As a result, Microsoft will write down the handset business by $7.6 billion. This is a non-cash charge, so it won’t hurt the company’s cash holdings, which were $95.4 billion, or $11.76 a share, on March 31, 2015. The company also launched a restructuring that includes job cuts at the smartphone business. As a result, it expects to pay $750 million to $850 million in severance and other…