Tesla stock motored up more than 8% Thursday after blowout fourth-quarter financial earnings and guidance late Wednesday. Several analysts have recently raised their Tesla stock price targets. Meanwhile, wire reports note that Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk has confirmed having “conversations” with Apple (AAPL) — that’s after a weekend report that said he met with Apple’s acquisitions chief last spring. Analysts have mostly talked about the
Facebook’s (FB) purchase of mobile messaging service WhatsApp for as much as $19 billion easily beats the price of any single acquisition ever done by a host of tech giants, including Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO). The lofty price tag stunned Wall Street, but analysts seemed generally in favor of the purchase. The deal translates to about 9% of Facebook ‘s (FB) market value. Investors changed their minds about the WhatsApp acquisition during the trading day Thursday. Facebook stock was down 3.5% in morning trading, but reversed course and ended the session up 2.3%. Shares hit a record high of 70.11 in the stock market today. Following its $1 billion purchase of Instagram in 2012, Facebook has shown a willingness to spend big on fast-growing social networking companies with little revenue but big user bases. With its agreement Wednesday , Facebook will pay $4 billion in cash and $12 billion in Facebook stock, plus $3 billion in options, for WhatsApp, a company with more than 450 million monthly active users. WhatsApp generated “a minuscule $20 million in revenue last year,” Forbes reported. Facebook will spend 35% of its $11.4 billion in cash on hand to make the deal happen. Compare that with Apple, which was sitting on $159 billion in cash and marketable securities as of Dec. 28. It has never made a billion-dollar acquisition. Apple’s largest deal to date is the purchase of NeXT in 1997 for about $400 million, which brought co-founder Steve Jobs back to Apple and provided the core for its new Mac operating system.
The more money you have the more likely you own an Apple (AAPL) iPhone. That’s one of the takeaways from a report Thursday by the NPD Group on 2013 smartphone sales trends in the U.S. Among smartphone buyers with annual incomes above $100,000, 65% bought an iPhone in 2013, compared with 19% for a Samsung handset. That income bracket accounted for 33% of Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone unit sales last year. IPhone purchase rates decline along with income, the study shows. Among iPhone buyers last year, 24% earned $60,000 to $100,000 a year, 23% earned $30,000 to $60,000, and 20% made less than $30,000 a year. The opposite is true with Samsung smartphone purchase rates. Among Samsung smartphone buyers in 2013, 18% made more than $100,000, 20% earned $60,000 to $100,000 a year, 27% earned $30,000 to $60,000, and 35% made less than $30,000 a year. But smartphone sales growth has slowed to a crawl among the most affluent consumers. The big growth is with the lower income brackets, NPD says. Smartphone sales among consumers making less than $30,000 a year grew at double the industry rate in 2013 and accounted for 31% of all smartphone sales, the largest share of any income demographic, up from 21% in 2011. Smartphone sales growth among affluent consumers, those with over $100,000 in income, rose just 4% in 2013. Affluent consumers made up 23% of buyers in 2013, falling from 31% in 2011, NPD says. “With the fastest-growing segments of the industry in the