The Best (And Worst) Technology Stocks Of February

Most Tech Stocks Return Single-Digit Price Gains In February

It may have been a cold February throughout most of the country, but the roster of tech stocks followed by CRN generally stayed warm during the month -- and a couple were hot. All but a handful increased in price during the month, most in the low single digits.

That was in keeping with the broader market indexes. The Down Jones Industrial Average closed at 16,321.71 on Feb. 28, up 3.97 percent for the month, and the NASDAQ Composite closed at 4,308.12, up 4.98 percent.

Here's a look at the winners and the losers, based on the difference in their stock closing prices between Jan. 31 and Feb. 28.

Lenovo Group

CEO: Yang Yuanqing
Dec. 31, 2014: $26.74
Feb. 28, 2014: $21.54
Change: -19.45%

In the last year Lenovo has become the worldwide No. 1 PC vendor, with significant gains in the server and smartphone markets. It is acquiring IBM's x86 server business for $2.3 billion and Motorola Mobility from Google for almost $3 billion. So why was Lenovo's stock the worst performer on our list in February?

Investors seemed to have been spooked by the acquisition of the money-losing Motorola ($1.1 billion in pretax losses in 2013). But analysts say the market may be taking a short-sighted view of Lenovo, and that's pushed its share price down, rather than looking at its long-term prospects.

Quantum

CEO: Jon Gacek
Jan. 31, 2014: $1.25
Feb. 28, 2014: $1.17
Change: -6.4%

On Jan. 29, data storage technology developer Quantum reported that revenue for its third fiscal quarter, ended Dec. 31, 2013, was down 8 percent from the same period one year before. The company also reported a $2.4 million loss for the quarter.

NetApp

CEO: Tom Georgens
Jan. 31, 2014: $42.34
Feb. 28, 2014: $40.41
Change: -4.46%

Data storage system maker NetApp reported results for its fiscal third quarter, ended Jan. 24, in February. Revenue was down more than 1.2 percent from the same period one year earlier to $1.61 billion, while net income soared 21.5 percent to $192.1 million.

QLogic

CEO: Prasad Rampalli
Jan. 31, 2014: $11.57
Feb. 28, 2014: $11.42
Change: -1.31%

Struggling QLogic hired Rampalli, previously senior vice president of cross business unit engineering at EMC, as its new president and CEO in December. He replaces Simon Biddiscombe, who stepped down in May. CFO Jean Hu had served as interim CEO at the network infrastructure technology company.

Seagate Technology

CEO: Stephen Luczo
Jan. 31, 2014: $52.86
Feb. 28, 2014: $52.19
Change: -1.27%

In late January, hard disk and storage technology manufacturer Seagate reported sales of $3.53 billion for its second fiscal quarter ended Dec. 27, down 3.8 percent from the same period a year earlier. Net income for the quarter was down 13 percent to $428 million.

Cisco Systems

CEO: John Chambers
Jan. 31, 2014: $21.91
Feb. 28, 2014: $21.80
Change: -0.50%

In February, Cisco, citing ongoing weakness in its service provider business and emerging markets, reported steep drops in both sales and earnings for its second fiscal quarter ended Jan. 25. Revenue was down 7.8 percent to $11.2 billion, while net profits for the quarter were $1.4 billion, down 54 percent.

CommVault Systems

CEO: N. Robert Hammer
Jan. 31, 2014: $69.07
Feb. 28, 2014: $68.88
Change: -0.28%

For its third fiscal quarter, ended Dec. 31, data management system vendor CommVault reported revenue of $153.3 million, up nearly 20 percent year-over-year. Net income climbed more than 44 percent in the quarter to $17.6 million.

Symantec

CEO: Steve Bennett
Jan. 31, 2014: $21.41
Feb. 28, 2014: $21.48
Change: +0.33%

Symantec, which is in the midst of a major overhaul of its product line and go-to-market strategy, is the first company on this CRN "Watch List" to report share price gains in February.

In late January, the company reported that sales in its third fiscal quarter, ended Dec. 27, were $1.71 billion, down 5 percent from the same period a year earlier, while net income was up 31 percent to $283 million.

Juniper Networks

CEO: Shaygan Kheradpir
Jan. 31, 2014: $26.61
Feb. 28, 2014: $26.74
Change: +0.49%

Juniper is coming off a rough year after losing a number of high-ranking executives. Kheradpir, previously chief information and technology officer at Verizon, took the reins as Juniper's CEO on Jan. 1.

At the company's partner conference in January, Kheradpir outlined his vision for the network equipment vendor, centered around hybrid cloud ecosystems and highly intelligent networks.

Intel

CEO: Brian Krzanich
Jan. 31, 2014: $24.54
Feb. 28, 2014: $24.76
Change: +0.90%

Intel's processor sales have been hit by the slowdown in the PC market, while the company has sought to catch up with rivals in the market for chips for mobile devices.

In late February, the company unveiled 64-bit atom processors and announced agreements with manufacturers Asus, Dell, Foxconn and Lenovo to use Intel chips in upcoming mobile products.

Western Digital

CEO: Steve Milligan
Jan. 31, 2014: $86.17
Feb. 28, 2014: $86.99
Change: +0.95%

For its second fiscal quarter, ended Dec. 27, Western Digital reported sales of $3.97 billion, up 3.9 percent from the same period one year before. Earnings were $430 million, up more than 28 percent from one year earlier.

Microsoft

CEO: Satya Nadella
Jan. 31, 2014: $37.84
Feb. 28, 2014: $38.31
Change: +1.24%

Microsoft, of course, has been undergoing many changes as it transforms itself into a services and devices company. More immediately, the biggest change was the naming of Satya Nadella as the software giant's new CEO, who in February took over for the departing Steve Ballmer.

Xerox

CEO: Ursula Burns
Jan. 31, 2014: $10.85
Feb. 28, 2014: $10.99
Change: +1.29%

Xerox reported sales of $5.57 billion in its fourth fiscal quarter, ended Dec. 31, 2013, down 3 percent from the same period one year earlier. Net income for the period was down 9 percent to $306 million.

For all of fiscal 2013, Xerox reported sales of $21.44 billion, down 1 percent from fiscal 2012, and a 3 percent decline in net income to $1.16 billion.

Brocade Communications

CEO: Lloyd Carney
Jan. 31, 2014: $9.34
Feb. 28, 2014: $9.57
Change: +2.46%

Networking technology vendor Brocade reported revenue of $564.5 million for its first fiscal quarter, ended Jan. 25, down 4.1 percent from the same period one year earlier. Net income, however, was $80.9 million compared with the $21.3 million loss one year before.

Google

CEO: Larry Page
Jan. 31, 2014: $1,180.97
Feb. 28, 2014: $1,215.65
Change: +2.94%

Google reported revenue of $16.86 billion for its fiscal fourth quarter, ended Dec. 31, a surge of 16.9 percent. Net income was $3.38 billion, up nearly 17 percent year-over-year.

For all of fiscal 2013, Google reported revenue of $59.83 billion, up 19.2 percent from fiscal 2012, while net income rose more than 20 percent to $12.92 billion.

Hewlett-Packard

CEO: Meg Whitman
Jan. 31, 2014: $29.00
Feb. 28, 2014: $29.88
Change: +3.03%

Bolstered by increases in sales for personal systems and industry-standard servers, HP reported sales for the first fiscal quarter, ended Jan. 31, of $28.2 billion, above the Wall Street consensus of $27.19 billion, but down 1 percent from the prior-year period.

The report, released Feb. 20, said HP's Personal Systems business was up 4 percent overall, with commercial sales up 8 percent and consumer sales down 3 percent. The company's Enterprise Group reported a sales increase of 1 percent, with industry-standard servers up 6 percent for the quarter, and networking sales up 4 percent.

Check Point Software Technologies (tie)

CEO: Gil Shwed
Jan. 31, 2014: $65.43
Feb. 28, 2014: $67.42
Change: +3.04%

Security technology developer Check Point reported a 5 percent increase in sales to $387.1 million for its fourth fiscal quarter ended Dec. 31. For all of fiscal 2013, sales grew 4 percent to $1.39 billion.

Salesforce.com (tie)

CEO: Marc Benioff
Jan. 31, 2014: $60.53
Feb. 28, 2014: $62.37
Change: +3.04%

Salesforce recently reported that revenue in its fourth fiscal quarter, ended Jan. 31, was $1.15 billion, up 37 percent from the same period a year earlier. And revenue for the full fiscal 2014, ended Jan. 31, surpassed the $4 billion mark ($4.07 billion), a 33 percent gain over fiscal 2013.

Stockholders also were likely pleased when, during the Feb. 27 earnings announcement, Salesforce executives said they expect sales in the current quarter to grow 35 percent to 36 percent year-over-year, and revenue for all of fiscal 2015 to grow in the range of 29 percent to 30 percent.

Motorola Solutions

CEO: Greg Brown
Jan. 31, 2014: $63.80
Feb. 28, 2014: $66.20
Change: +3.76%

Motorola Solutions reported a 2.6 percent sales increase in its fourth quarter, ended Dec. 31, to just over $2.5 billion. Earnings edged up 2 percent to $343 million.

For all of fiscal 2013, the communications company's sales were flat at $8.7 billion. But earnings for the year were up almost 25 percent to $1.1 billion.

CA Technologies

CEO: Michael Gregoire
Jan. 31, 2014: $32.09
Feb. 28, 2014: $33.5
Change: 4.39%

It's been a year since Michael Gregoire took the company's CEO reins and launched efforts to boost CA Technologies' financial performance.

In late January the company reported sales of $3.43 billion for the first three quarters (ended Dec. 31) of fiscal 2014, down nearly 2 percent from the same nine-month period in fiscal 2013. But net income was up more than 13 percent during that three-quarter period to $807 million.

Red Hat

CEO: James Whitehurst
Jan. 31, 2014: $56.50
Feb. 28, 2014: $58.99
Change: 4.41%

Red Hat will detail its fourth-quarter and fiscal 2014 results on March 27. For the first three quarters of the fiscal year, ended Nov. 30, the software developer's revenue increased more than 15 percent to $1.13 billion. Even more impressive was the 24 percent growth in net income during the nine months to $133.2 million.

IBM

CEO: Virginia Rometty
Jan. 31, 2014: $176.70
Feb. 28, 2014: $185.20
Change: 4.81%

The gain in IBM's share price is somewhat surprising, given the company's somewhat lackluster financial performance in the last year. For fiscal 2013, ended Dec. 31, IBM reported sales of $99.75 billion, down almost 5 percent from fiscal 2012. And net income was just short of $16.5 billion, down 0.7 percent year-over-year.

In late January, IBM struck a deal to sell its low-performing x86 server business to Lenovo for $2.3 billion: IBM's higher stock price might be Wall Street's approval of a leaner company more focused on software and services and less on hardware.

SAP

CEOs: Bill McDermott/Jim Hagemann Snabe
Jan. 31, 2014: $76.42
Feb. 28, 2014: $80.29
Change: 5.06%

SAP has been aggressively expanding beyond on-premise software into cloud computing and its HANA in-memory database software. It's also been growing its channel business and is close to reaching its goal of generating 40 percent of software sales through the channel.

For its fiscal year, ended Dec. 31, SAP reported total revenue of 16.82 billion Euros (about $23 billion), up 4 percent from fiscal 2012. And after-tax profit surged 18 percent to 3.33 billion Euros (about $4.6 billion).

Apple

CEO: Tim Cook
Jan. 31, 2014: $500.60
Feb. 28, 2014: $526.20
Change: 5.12%

It's been about 18 months since Apple's share price hit $700 before falling back below $400. Could it reach those heights again this year, as some Wall Street analysts are saying?

For the company's first fiscal quarter, ended Dec. 28, Apple reported sales of $57.6 billion, up more than 5 percent year-over-year. But net income was flat at just over $13 billion.

BlackBerry

CEO: John Chen
Jan. 31, 2014: $9.45
Feb. 28, 2014: $10.0
Change: 5.82%

Is there hope for BlackBerry? After a disastrous 2013, the once high-flying company's stock was as low as almost $6 a share as recently as November.

The stock has been slowly but steadily rebounding as John Chen, named CEO in November, has been working to turn the company around. But he has his work cut out for him: In a recent interview with the Financial Times, he put his chances of returning the company to profitability at 50-50.

Oracle

CEO: Larry Ellison
Jan. 31, 2014: $36.90
Feb. 28, 2014: $39.11
Change: 5.99%

Oracle's hardware operations have been something of a drag on Oracle's financial performance in recent years. Total revenue in the company's second fiscal quarter, ended Nov. 30, was $9.28 billion, up 2 percent year-over-year, but hardware product sales were down 3 percent. And the quarter's net income of $2.55 billion was down 1 percent.

Oracle will report the results of its third fiscal quarter on March 18.

VMware

CEO: Pat Gelsinger
Jan. 31, 2014: $90.14
Feb. 28, 2014: $96.05
Change: 6.56%

The king of virtualization technology is getting ready to expand its product lineup by unleashing its long-anticipated vSAN storage technology. Could that be a factor in the February increase in the vendor's stock price?

NetGear

CEO: Patrick Lo
Jan. 31, 2014: $31.91
Feb. 28, 2014: $34.18
Change: 7.11%

For its fourth quarter, ended Dec. 31, NetGear reported revenue of $356.6 million, up 14.6 percent over the same period one year before. But net income dropped more than 40 percent to $11.4 million.

For all of 2013, revenue grew 7.7 percent to $393.6 million, while net income fell 36.2 percent to $55.2 million.

Lexmark International

CEO: Paul Rooke
Jan. 31, 2014: $39.19
Feb. 28, 2014: $42.14
Change: 7.53%

Printer maker Lexmark has been transitioning from a hardware-centric company to one focused more on software and solutions. While the company's sales have lagged, it has greatly boosted its profitability. For the fourth quarter, ended Dec. 31, Lexmark reported revenue of just over $1 billion, up 4 percent from the same period one year earlier. Net income soared more than 250 percent to $94 million. For all of fiscal 2013, sales declined 3.4 percent to $3.67 billion, while net income grew 143 percent to $261.8 million.

Advanced Micro Devices

CEO: Rory Read
Jan. 31, 2014: $3.43
Feb. 28, 2014: $3.71
Change: 8.16%

At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, AMD debuted its next-gen Kaveri processors for its 2014 A-Series products for PC system builders, showing the company isn't ceding that market to Intel.

For its fourth quarter, ended Dec. 28, AMD reported sales of $1.59 billion, up almost 9 percent from the same quarter one year before. Net income almost doubled to $89 million.

But for all of fiscal 2013, ended Dec. 28, AMD reported a 2.3 percent decline in sales to $5.30 billion and an $83 million loss.

EMC

CEO: Joe Tucci
Jan. 31, 2014: $24.24
Feb. 28, 2014: $26.37
Change: 8.79%

While data storage system giant EMC has maintained revenue and sales growth, the company has been undergoing an internal restructuring -- including employee cutbacks -- in the current quarter.

For the fourth quarter, ended Dec. 31, EMC reported 11 percent growth in revenue to $6.7 billion, while net income rose 17 percent to $1.0 billion. For all of fiscal 2013, sales grew 7 percent to $23.2 billion, while net income grew 6 percent to $2.9 billion.

NetSuite

CEO: Zach Nelson
Jan. 31, 2014: $105.18
Feb. 28, 2014: $115.09
Change: 9.42%

Growth, rather than profitability, is what cloud application developer NetSuite is focused on, and shareholders apparently agree with that strategy.

For the fourth quarter, ended Dec. 31, NetSuite reported sales growth of 35 percent to $115 million and 34 percent sales growth for all of fiscal 2013 to $414.5 million. But net losses were $20.2 million and $70.4 million for the quarter and fiscal year, respectively.

Panasonic

CEO: Joe Taylor
Jan. 31, 2014: $11.35
Feb. 28, 2014: $12.59
Change: 10.93%

Executives at the Panasonic System Communications Company of North America, Panasonic's B2B operations, have developed plans to accelerate channel growth around the convergence of mobile, telephony, security, audio/video, and office products such as scanners, displays and projectors.

Citrix Systems

CEO: Mark Templeton
Jan. 31, 2014: $54.07
Feb. 28, 2014: $60.05
Change: 11.06%

At the end of January, Citrix CEO Mark Templeton announced plans to retire within the next year and the company has begin searching for a replacement. Templeton joined Citrix in 1995 and has been the cloud and virtualization technology company's CEO since 2001.

For its fourth quarter, ended Dec. 31, Citrix's net income grew 22 percent year-over-year to $138.6 million. Revenue grew more than 8 percent during the quarter to $802.4 million.

FalconStor

CEO: Gary Quinn
Jan. 31, 2014: $1.50
Feb. 28, 2014: $1.73
Change: 15.33 %

FalconStor has been near the bottom of our tech vendor stock roundups recently, so recording the next-to-highest gain in stock price for February marks quite a turnaround for the company.

In February, the company announced its return to profitability on a non-GAAP basis to $0.8 million in its fourth fiscal quarter ended Dec. 31. But the company still reported a loss from operations of $1 million on a GAAP basis in the quarter, and revenue for the period was down 35 percent to $14.6 million.

FireEye

CEO: David DeWalt
Jan. 31, 2014: $72.99
Feb. 28, 2014: $85.64
Change: 17.33%

High-flying security technology developer FireEye went public in September with a lot of fanfare. But the continued growth in FireEye's stock price, the fastest among the tech companies followed by CRN, shows that the company's IPO was not a case of overhype. For the fourth quarter, ended Dec. 31, FireEye reported sales of $57.3 million, up more than 80 percent from the same period one year before. The company reported a $2.5 million loss, an improvement from the $12.6 million loss one year earlier. Sales for all of 2013 nearly doubled to $161.6 million, but the net loss for the year stood at $120.6 million.