Ford (NYSE: F ) is under a lot of pressure to successfully revive its luxury Lincoln brand. It has been able to fix so many other company issues that caused massive losses and can now finally spend time fixing the Lincoln brand. Unfortunately for Ford, the brand needs fixing: The Lincoln MKZ ��which had a lot of pre-sale hype ��has completely stumbled out of the gate. Hands down, Ford and Lincoln failed its dealers so far.
Meanwhile,�General Motors (NYSE: GM ) is enjoying great success with its Cadillac line, with a 49% rise in sales for March. If you're counting, that makes it six consecutive months of gains for GM's luxury line. Let's take a look at how Ford is trying to fix its MKZ flop, and explain how very important this is to Ford investors.
Photo source: Ford Motor Co.
Super Bowl mulligan
The Lincoln MKZ had received more interest than any other Lincoln vehicle since the '90s. Dealers where promised the flashy new sedan would arrive by the end of December 2012. Turns out that didn't happen, and dealerships missed sales for Christmas, New Year's Day, Presidents Day, St. Patrick's Day, and Easter. Suffice it to say that the $7.4 million spent on the Super Bowl ad was a waste ���s was the spot during the Grammy's. Part of the reason for this massive MKZ delay was due to the very successful Fusion.
Top Paper Stocks To Own For 2015: Commercial Metals Co (CMC)
Commercial Metals Company, incorporated on August 29, 1946, and its subsidiaries manufacture, recycle and market steel and metal products, related materials and services through a network, including steel mini mills, steel fabrication and processing plants, construction-related product warehouses, a copper tube mini mill, metal recycling facilities and marketing and distribution in the United States and in international markets. The Company Americas Division operates utilizing three segments: Americas Recycling, Americas Mills and Americas Fabrication. The Company�� International Division operates utilizing two segments: International Mill and International Marketing and Distribution, which includes all marketing and distribution operations located outside the United States, as well as two United States-based trading and distribution divisions, CMC Cometals, located in Fort Lee, New Jersey and CMC Cometals-Steel, located in Irving, Texas. In October 2013, Commercial Metals Company completed the sale of Howell Metal Company, to Mueller Copper Tube Products, Inc., a subsidiary of Mueller Industries, Inc.
Americas Recycling
The Americas Recycling segment processes scrap metals for use as a raw material by manufacturers of new metal products. This segment operates 33 scrap metal processing facilities with 16 locations in Texas, eight in Florida, two locations in Missouri and one location in each of Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Tennessee. The Company purchases ferrous and nonferrous scrap metals, processed and unprocessed, from a range of sources in a range of forms for its metals recycling plants. Sources of metal for recycling include manufacturing and industrial plants, metal fabrication plants, electric utilities, machine shops, factories, railroads, refineries, shipyards, ordinance depots, demolition businesses, automobile salvage firms and wrecking firms.
The Company's scrap metal recycling plants typically consist of an o! ffice and warehouse building equipped with specialized equipment for processing both ferrous and nonferrous metal located on several acres of land that the Company uses for receiving, sorting, processing and storing metals. Several of the Company's scrap metal recycling plants use a small portion of their site or a nearby location to display and sell metal products that may be reused for their original purpose without further processing. Americas Recycling operates five shredding machines, three in Texas, one in Florida, and one in Oklahoma capable of pulverizing obsolete automobiles or other sources of scrap metal. The Company sells scrap metals to steel mills and foundries , aluminum sheets and ingot manufacturers, brass and bronze ingot makers, copper refineries and mills, secondary lead smelters, specialty steel mills, high temperature alloy manufacturers and other consumers.
Americas Mills
The Americas Mills segment includes the Company's domestic steel mills, including scrap metal shredders and processing facilities that directly support these mills and the domestic copper tube minimill. The Company conducts its Americas Mills operations through a network, which includes five steel mills, commonly referred to as minimills, that produce one or more of reinforcing bar, angles, flats, rounds, small beams, fence-post sections and other shapes; two scrap metal shredders and processing facilities that directly support the steel minimills, and The Company operates five steel minimills, which are located in Texas, Alabama, South Carolina, Arizona and Arkansas.
The Company's Texas minimill manufactures a line of bar size products, including reinforcing bar, angles, rounds, channels, flats, and special sections used primarily in building highways, reinforcing concrete structures and manufacturing. It sells primarily to the construction, service center, energy, petrochemical, and original equipment manufacturing industries. The Company's South Carolina minimill manufac! tures a l! ine of bar size products, which primarily includes steel reinforcing bar. The minimill also manufactures angles, rounds, squares, fence post sections and flats. The South Carolina minimill ships its products to customers located in the Southeast and mid-Atlantic regions, which include the states from Florida through southern New England.
Americas Fabrication
The Americas Fabrication segment consists of the Company's rebar fabrication operations, fence post manufacturing plants and construction-related and other product facilities. The Company conducts its Americas Fabrication operations through a network include steel plants that bend, cut, weld and fabricate steel, primarily reinforcing bar; warehouses that sell or rent products for the installation of concrete; plants that produce steel fence posts, and plants that heat-treat steel to strengthen and provide flexibility. The Company's Americas Fabrication segment operates 49 facilities that the Company considers to be engaged in the various aspects of steel fabrication.
The Company conducts steel fabrication activities in 16 locations in Texas, five each in California and South Carolina, three in Florida, two each in Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Virginia, and one each in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, Tennessee and Utah. Fabricated steel products are used primarily in the construction of commercial and non-commercial buildings, hospitals, convention centers, industrial plants, power plants, highways, bridges, arenas, stadiums, and dams. Generally, the Company sells fabricated steel in response to a bid solicitation from a construction contractor or the project owner. The Company sells and rent construction related products and equipment to concrete installers and other construction businesses.
The Company has 23 locations in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma, where the Company store and sell these products which, with the exception of a s! mall port! ion of steel products, are purchased from third-party suppliers. The Company operates plants in Chicora, Pennsylvania, Struthers, Ohio and Pell City, Alabama which manufactures armor plate for military vehicles, high strength bar for the truck trailer industry and special bar quality steel for the energy market.
International Mill
The Company's International Mill segment includes the Company's minimill and recycling operations in Poland and its fabrication operations. The Company's subsidiary, CMC Zawiercie S.A. (CMCZ), owns a steel minimill and conducts its operations at Zawiercie, Poland. CMCZ, along with the Company's international recycling and fabrication operations, constitute the International Mill segment. CMCZ operates equipment similar to the Company's domestic steel minimills. The Company operates three rolling mills, one wire-rod mill and two bar mills including a specialty rod finishing mill. In addition, the Company operates a fabrication facility in Dabrowa Gornicza, Poland, that produces welded steel mesh, cold rolled wire rod and cold rolled reinforcing bar.
International Marketing and Distribution
International Marketing and Distribution includes international operations for the sales, distribution and processing of steel products, ferrous and nonferrous metals and other industrial products. In addition, the Company's International Marketing and Distribution segment includes the Company's United States based trading and distribution divisions, CMC Cometals and CMC Cometals Steel. The Company's International Marketing and Distribution business buys and sells primary and secondary metals, fabricated metals, semi-finished, long, flat steel products and other industrial products. The Company sells its products to customers, primarily manufacturers, in the steel, nonferrous metals, metal fabrication, chemical, refractory, construction and transportation businesses. This segment also operates a recycling facility in Singapore.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By John Kell and Lauren Pollock var popups = dojo.query(".socialByline .popC"); ]
Commercial Metals Co.(CMC) said its fiscal second-quarter earnings surged as results in the steelmaker and recycler’s international mills business offset impacts from rising materials costs at its Americas units. Results missed expectations, but shares edged up 2.6% to $19.43 premarket.
- [By Laura Brodbeck]
Tuesday
Earnings Expected: IHS Inc. (NYSE: IHS), Commercial Metals Company (NYSE: CMC), Franklin Covey Company (NYSE: FC), Micron Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: MU), Apollo Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: APOL) Economic Releases Expected: French consumer confidence, German unemployment rate, Brazilian CPI, Canadian trade balanceWednesday
Top 5 Stocks To Buy For 2014: Xilinx Inc (XLNX)
Xilinx, Inc. (Xilinx), incorporated on February 5, 1984, designs, develops and markets programmable platforms. These programmable platforms have a number of components, including integrated circuits (ICs) in the form of programmable logic devices (PLDs), including Extensible Processing Platforms (EPPs); software design tools to program the PLDs; targeted reference designs; printed circuit boards, and intellectual property (IP), which consists of Xilinx and various third-party verification and IP cores. In addition to its programmable platforms, Xilinx provides design services, customer training, field engineering and technical support. The Company�� PLDs include field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), complex programmable logic devices (CPLDs) that its customers program to perform logic functions, and EPPs. Xilinx�� products are offered to electronic equipment manufacturers in end markets, such as wired and wireless communications, industrial, scientific and medical, aerospace and defense, audio, video and broadcast, consumer, automotive and data processing. The Company sells its products globally through independent domestic and foreign distributors and through direct sales to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) by a network of independent sales representative firms and by a direct sales management organization. In January 2011, the Company acquired AutoESL Design Technologies, Inc. In August 2012, the Company acquired embedded Linux solutions provider PetaLogix.
Product Families
The 7 series devices that comprise the Company�� 28-nanometer (nm) product families are fabricated on a high-K metal gate 28-nm process technology. These devices are based on an architecture, which enables design and IP portability and re-use across all families, as well as provides designers the ability to achieve the appropriate combination of I/O support, performance, feature quantities, packaging and power consumption to address a range of applications. The 7 series devices consist of! three families: Virtex-7 FPGA, Kintex-7 FPGAs and Artix-7 FPGAs. The Zynq-7000 family is the family of Xilinx EPPs. The Virtex-6 FPGA family consists of 13 devices and is the sixth generation in the Virtex series of FPGAs.
Virtex-6 FPGAs are fabricated on a high-performance, 40-nm process technology. There are three Virtex-6 families: Virtex-6 LXT FPGAs, Virtex-6 SXT FPGAs and Virtex-6 HXT FPGAs. The Spartan-6 family is the PLD industry�� 45-nm high-volume FPGA family, consisting of 11 devices in two product families: Spartan-6 LX FPGAs and Spartan-6 LXT FPGAs. The Virtex-5 FPGA family consists of 26 devices in five product families: Virtex-5 LX FPGAs for logic-intensive designs, Virtex-5 LXT FPGAs for high-performance logic with serial connectivity, Virtex-5 SXT FPGAs for high-performance DSP with serial connectivity, Virtex-5 FXT FPGAs for embedded processing with serial connectivity and Virtex-5 TXT FPGAs for high-bandwidth serial connectivity. Prior generation Virtex families include Virtex-4, Virtex-II Pro, Virtex-II, Virtex-E and the original Virtex family. Spartan family FPGAs include 90-nm Spartan-3 FPGAs, the Spartan-3E family and the Spartan-3A family. Prior generation Spartan families include Spartan-IIE, Spartan-II, Spartan XL and the original Spartan family.
Design Platforms and Services
The Company offers three types of programmable platforms. The Base Platform is the delivery vehicle for all of its new silicon offerings used to develop and run customer-specific software applications and hardware designs. The Base Platform consists of FPGA silicon; Integrated Software Environment (ISE) Design Suite design environment; integration support of optional third-party synthesis, simulation, and signal integrity tools; reference designs; development boards and IP. The Domain-Specific Platform targets one of the three primary Xilinx FPGA user profiles: the embedded processing developer; the DSP developer; or the logic/connectivity developer. The Market-S! pecific P! latform enables software or hardware developers to build and run their specific application or solution. Built for specific markets, such as automotive, consumer, aerospace and defense, communications, audio, video and broadcast, industrial, or scientific and medical, the Market-Specific Platform integrates both the Base and Domain-Specific Platforms.
During April 2012, Xilinx introduced the Vivado Design Suite. Vivado supports Xilinx 7 series FPGAs and Zynq EPPs. Xilinx and various third parties offer hundreds of no charge and fee-bearing IP core licenses covering Ethernet, memory controllers Interlaken and PCIe interface, as well as domain-specific IP in the areas of embedded, DSP and connectivity, and market-specific IP cores. The Company also offers development kits, including hardware, design tools, IP and reference designs. Xilinx offers a range of configuration products, including one-time programmable and in-system programmable storage devices to configure Xilinx FPGAs. These programmable read-only memory (PROM) products support all of the Company�� FPGA devices. Xilinx and certain third parties have developed and offer a ecosystem of IP, boards, tools, services and support through the Xilinx alliance program. Xilinx also works with these third parties to promote its programmable platforms through third-party tools, IP, software, boards and design services. Xilinx engineering services provide customers with engineering, ranging from hands-on training to full design creation and implementation.
The Company competes with Altera Corporation, Lattice Semiconductor Corporation and Microsemi Corporation.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Michael Flannelly]
Programmable logic solutions provider Xilinx, Inc. (XLNX) was upgraded by analysts at Pacific Crest early on Monday, as the company should benefit from the LTE upgrade in China.
The analysts upgraded XLNX from “Sector Perform” to “Outperform” and see shares reaching $55. This price target suggests an 18% upside to the stock’s Friday closing price of $46.54.
Xilinx shares were inactive during pre-market trading on Monday. The stock is up 29.78% year-to-date.
- [By Monica Gerson]
Xilinx (NASDAQ: XLNX) is estimated to post its Q2 earnings at $0.53 per share on revenue of $588.28 million.
Universal Forest Products (NASDAQ: UFPI) is projected to post its Q3 earnings at $0.54 per share on revenue of $625.77 million.
- [By Wallace Witkowski]
Xilinx Inc. (XLNX) �shares dropped 4.3% to $44.90 on moderate volume after the company reported fiscal second-quarter earnings.
- [By Matt Egan]
It's also been an ugly day for chip maker Xilinx (XLNX). The company's shares plummeted 16% on disappointing revenue and a gloomy outlook for the current quarter.
Top 5 Stocks To Buy For 2014: Dycom Industries Inc.(DY)
Dycom Industries, Inc. provides specialty contracting services in the United States and Canada. The company?s services include engineering services, which comprise the design of service area concept boxes, terminals, buried and aerial drops, transmission and central office equipment, administration of feeder and distribution cable pairs, and fiber cable routing and design for telephone companies; and make-ready studies, strand mapping, field walk-out, computer-aided radio frequency design and drafting, and fiber cable routing and design for cable television multiple system operators. The company also provides construction, maintenance, and installation of splice fiber, copper, and coaxial cables to telephone companies; installation and maintenance of customer premise equipment, including set top boxes and cable modems to cable television multiple system operators; and premise wiring services, which include installation, repair, and maintenance of telecommunications infrast ructure within improved structures to various corporations, and state and local governments. In addition, Dycom offers underground utility locating services, such as locating telephone, cable television, power, water, sewer, and gas lines to various utility companies. Further, it provides construction and maintenance services for electric utilities and others, which include installing and maintaining overhead and underground power distribution lines, as well as maintenance and installation of underground natural gas transmission and distribution systems. The company was founded in 1969 and is based in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Ben Levisohn]
Shares of Harsco have gained 4.7% to $26.43 today at 1:16 p.m., outpacing other construction & engineering companies. Dycom (DY) has advanced 0.5% to $30, KBR Inc. (KBR) has ticked up 0.1% to $33.03, Worthington Industries�(WOR) has risen 2.8% to $38.85�and Tutor Perini (TPC) has rallied 3.6% to $22.46.
- [By Seth Jayson]
Dycom Industries (NYSE: DY ) reported earnings on May 21. Here are the numbers you need to know.
The 10-second takeaway
For the quarter ended April 27 (Q3), Dycom Industries beat expectations on revenues and beat expectations on earnings per share.
Top 5 Stocks To Buy For 2014: Nintendo Co Ltd (NTDOY.PK)
Nintendo Co., Ltd. is a Japan-based company mainly engaged in the leisure machine business. The Company operates in two business segments. The Leisure Machine segment is engaged in the development, manufacturing and sale of portable and console game machines as well as game software. The Others segment is engaged in the manufacture and sale of poker cards and karuta (Japanese-style playing cards), the sale of Pokemon (a Japanese animation character) goods, the management of intellectual property rights and the provision of electronic registration services of home use console machines, among others.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Sneha Shah]
6) Xbox 720 - Microsoft will announce the new version of its blockbuster Xbox game console next month. Its main competitors, Sony (SNE) and Nintendo (NTDOY.PK), have already announced their new game consoles. Xbox has been a tremendous success for Microsoft and has allowed it to gain millions of subscribers for its Xbox LIVE service.
- [By Philip Saglimbeni]
The good news for Microsoft is that consumers are a fickle bunch and can be swayed rather quickly. The upcoming E3 conference in June is a perfect time for Microsoft to announce a barrage of new games for Xbox One and to provide potential customers with a better understanding of what they can expect at launch for the new system. With Nintendo Co. Ltd. (NTDOY.PK) having backed out of the premiere game conference, it will be Microsoft and Sony facing off directly. In an atmosphere filled with nothing but gamers, big expectations and the potential for even bigger headlines, it won't be much of a competition unless Microsoft chooses to battle Sony in the actual video game department. I expect Microsoft will soon come out swinging with popular blockbuster series announcements but as of right now the console is not effectively convincing the gaming masses and is losing valuable time in its increasingly short release window. Microsoft, you're on notice, put your game face on!
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