Wall Street Beat: AT&T, Cisco shine as clouds loom

Mixed economic news and forecasts of weak IT spending for at least the beginning of next year caused IT investor confidence to waver this week, though upbeat analyst presentations from Cisco and AT&T and online e-commerce figures brought some cheer to the holiday season.

Macroeconomic news is making technology investors uneasy. Wednesday morning, the U.S. Federal Reserve Board cut its federal funds rate in an attempt to allay fears that turmoil in the housing market would wreak further havoc in financial markets. But the move (a cut of 25 basis points) was not as great as some market observers hoped for and sent the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index into a decline.

Uncertainty in the U.S. is depressing IT spending forecasts. “The economic slowdown we see happening in the U.S. will in fact translate over to slower growth in the U.S. IT spending market,” said Andrew Bartels, principal analyst at Forrester Research, on a Thursday conference call with media and analysts.

The good news, Bartels said, is that globally, IT capital spending should remain strong, U.S. spending should pick up again by the fourth quarter of 2008, and a real recession will likely be avoided.

ComScore, meanwhile, had good news about online spending. Almost $19 billion was spent online during the holiday season up to midweek, an 18 percent increase compared to the same period in 2006, the market research company said.

Companies that appear ready to supply the infrastructure for e-commerce and Web 2.0 multimedia services gave investors something to cheer about this week.

AT&T, which is melding the telecom services and infrastructure of the former SB Communications, BellSouth, and the old AT&T, gave a presentation that impressed analysts Tuesday, convincing many that the communications giant is poised to leverage a wide range of assets.

In a research note, Christopher King of investment firm Stifel Nicolaus said that AT&T has “the premier set of assets in the telecom industry.” Independent analyst Jeff Kagan noted in an e-mail report that “10 years ago, the company was only into the local phone business and was just getting into long distance and DSL. Today, it is a full featured company offering local and long-distance telephone, wireless, high-speed internet, and even television.”

The presentation came a day after AT&T announced that it has expanded its 40G IP/MPLS backbone network to more than 50,000 miles in the U.S.

AT&T shares closed at $39.46 Tuesday, up by $1.56, and continued to move up over the next few days.

Cisco’s analyst presentation on Tuesday also drew good reviews. The company has a good track record of predicting trends and executing product strategy accordingly. The company announced, for example, that it will debut next year its Entertainment Operating System (EOS), a platform for multimedia content for online communities. Its unified communications product strategy and expected enhancements to its software offerings should also make its product suite more central to the corporate data center.

Lehman Brothers sent out a research note saying that the company is well-positioned to offer products supporting the new generation of Web technologies. Cisco shares rose $0.46 to close at $28.08 Tuesday, and continued to move up during the week.

In a shaky economy not all companies and sectors will perform well, and big questions surrounded chip maker AMD at its analyst presentation Thursday. The problematic launch of its Barcelona quad-core chips, which are still experiencing production delays, has shaken confidence that the company can make an effective counterpunch against Intel.

Company CEO Hector Ruiz said that the company should break even by the second quarter of 2008, helped by — among other things — new graphics chips. But analysts are worried that may be too little, too late, to stop a market share slide. With product sales in doubt, the promise of cost controls was not enough to win over investors. AMD shares declined by $0.13 to close at $8.84 Thursday.