BlackBerry (BBRY) reports earnings before the market open Tuesday, with analysts taking a wait-and-see approach as the former smartphone king expands aggressively into software. BlackBerry will be reporting earnings for its fiscal Q1 ended May 30. The consensus estimate on revenue, among analysts polled by Thomson Reuters, is $682.6 million. That would be down 29% from the year-earlier period and mark the eighth quarter in a row of double-digit
Apple (AAPL) didn’t make MIT’s “smartest companies” list, but emerging smartphone rival Xiaomi did. Gene mapper Illumina (ILMN) is tops among smartest companies, says the university, followed by electric car maker Tesla Motors (TSLA); Google (GOOGL); Samsung, another Apple rival; and cloud software provider Salesforce.com (CRM). How do editors at MIT’s Massachusetts Technology Review explain the rankings, which also pass over Facebook (FB)? Here’s how: “Familiar names such as Apple and Facebook aren’t on this list because reputation doesn’t matter. We’re highlighting where important innovations are happening right now,” wrote executive editor Brian Bergstein. “We didn’t count patents or Ph.D.s; instead, we asked whether a company had made strides in the past year that will define its field. The biggest of these strides happened at Illumina, which is driving down the price of DNA sequencing to levels that will change the practice of medicine.” Unlike the trailblazing iPhone, the…
China e-commerce leader Alibaba Group (BABA) is boosting spending on its non-e-commerce ventures and cutting ad prices, moves that will drag down the company’s take rates and gross profit margin in upcoming years, said Pacific Crest Securities in a research note released late Sunday. Pacific Crest lowered its gross margin estimates for Alibaba in fiscal years 2016 and 2017, but the investment bankremains “positive” about the company’s prospects in