Today: Facebook stock teases early IPO investors, Apple's (AAPL) Tim Cook meets with world's largest phone company, IBM stands behind its accounting methods in face of SEC investigation and Oracle (ORCL) moves to NYSE.
The Lead: Facebook briefly tops its IPO price, Apple talks China, Oracle's move
Early investors who bought
The sun rises behind the entrance sign to Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California, in this May 18, 2012 file photo. REUTERS/Beck Diefenbach/Files (BECK DIEFENBACH)
Facebook shares at its IPO price of $38 got a brief window to break even Wednesday. Shares of Facebook topped its $38 IPO price on Wednesday -- by 31 cents -- then plummeted to a $36.83 closing price. But don't shed too many tears for Facebook shareholders. As the Merc's Brandon Bailey points out, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg — who owns about 485 million shares of Facebook stock — saw his net worth has increase by nearly $5 billion over the past week.
Wall Street has given Facebook a warm reception following Facebook's earnings report last week that showed marked improvement in the company's efforts to building a thriving mobile advertising business.
-- In Beijing, Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook met his counterpart at China Mobile, the world's largest phone company, for the second time this year to discuss possible cooperation. Cook visited China Mobile Chairman Xi Guohua at the company's headquarters Tuesday morning, according to a China Mobile statement. A Chinese spokeswoman for Apple told Bloomberg she had no information on Cook's agenda in China.
China Mobile, with 740 million subscribers representing 63 percent of China's users, is the only one out of three Chinese carriers not to offer Apple's iPhone.
The meeting comes as Apple said it will investigate allegations by advocacy group China Labor Watch that factories run by Taiwanese supplier Pegatron Corp. use underage workers, pay insufficient wages and force employees to work overtime.
-- Facing a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, IBM said in a filing Wednesday that it stands by its accounting methods over how it reports revenue from offsite cloud services.
IBM learned of the SEC probe in May and is cooperating, the company said in its filing. IBM books its revenue from cloud services under generally accepted accounting principles, said Ed Barbini, a spokesman for Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM.
"IBM's reporting of cloud revenue is the result of a rigorous and disciplined process, and we are confident that the information we have provided has been consistently accurate," Barbini told Bloomberg News.
Michael Cusumano, a management professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, told Bloomberg that the SEC investigation highlights the confusion about how cloud revenue should be accounted for.
"This is a murky area where the rules aren't really established," Cusumano said. "Companies treat cloud-computing revenue in different ways."
About half of publicly traded software companies since 1990 have had to restate revenue because of misclassification of sales and product returns, or because they categorized ongoing payments for tech-support services as a sale of a product license, Cusumano said.
The investigation may be the first in a series of probes into companies in the same industry as the SEC tries to clear up confusion and differences in standards, said Jack Ciesielski, owner of investment firm R.G. Associates Inc. in Baltimore and the publisher of the Analyst's Accounting Observer.
-- With the ringing of the closing bell Wednesday at the New York Stock Exchange, Oracle marked its move to the NYSE, which it sees as more friendly to Silicon Valley tech companies trying to raise capital.
The NYSE is attracting more transfers and IPOs, and is helping companies raise more capital than any other exchange, according to Oracle.
As for why move from the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index to the NYSE, Oracle CEO Mark Hurd said in a statement, "We just thought that NYSE was doing a lot of exciting, innovating things. We want to be a part of that and we feel it's great for our shareholders."
SV150 market report: SunPower beats expectations
San Jose-based SunPower (SPWRA), the second-largest U.S. solar manufacturer, beat Wall Street expectations with its Wednesday earnings report but its shares fell 1.63 percent in after-hours trading.
SunPower reported net income of $19.6 million, or 15 cents a share, compared with a net loss of $84.2 million, or 71 cents, a year earlier. SunPower's earnings were 48 cents a share, which beat analysts estimates by 37 cents, as SunPower continues to benefit from higher prices in Europe and surging demand in Japan.
Up: Facebook, Electronic Arts (ERTS), Advanced Micro Devices, Juniper, Nvidia, Salesforce, Applied Materials, Cisco (CSCO), Apple, Symantec, eBay (EBAY), NetApp, Yahoo (YHOO), Tesla, Zynga, Yelp, LinkedIn, Netflix (NFLX), Intuit (INTU).
Down: Google (GOOG), Workday, Intel (INTC), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Adobe (ADBE), SolarCity, VMware, Gilead.
The SV150 index of Silicon Valley's largest tech companies: Down 2.08, or 0.16 percent, to 1,286.48.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index: Up 9.90, or 0.27 percent, to 3,626.37
The blue chip Dow Jones industrial average: Down 21.05, or 0.14 percent, to 15,499.54
And the widely watched Standard & Poor's 500 index: Down 0.23, or 0.01 percent, to 1,685.73
Bloomberg News and other wire services contributed to this report. Contact Dan Nakaso at 408 271-3648. Follow him at Twitter.com/dannakaso.