The Best And Worst Tech Stocks Of 2012 (So Far)

The Best (And Worst) Tech Stocks of 2012 ... So Far

After a strong first quarter on Wall Street, technology vendor stocks fell sharply in the second quarter, resulting in overall declines for the first six months of 2012 for more than half of the companies. By comparison, the Dow Jones and Nasdaq indices have increased 5.4 percent and 12.7 percent, respectively, during that period.

Hewlett-Packard

CEO: Meg Whitman

June 29, 2012: $20.11
Dec. 31, 2011: $25.76
2012 Change: -21.9%


HP shares increased almost two dollars a share in late May soon after the company reported second-quarter financials that beat Wall Street expectations. But, the impact didn't last long and HP shares even fell below $20 as late as June 28. HP is reportedly in the midst of workforce cuts and turmoil with its Autonomy business.

Juniper Networks

CEO: Kevin Johnson

June 29, 2012: $16.31
Dec. 31, 2011: $20.41
2012 Change: -20.1%


For the first time since last December, Juniper shares fell below the $20 mark on May 4 and continued to slide the rest of the quarter, wiping out solid gains the company made during the first quarter on Wall Street. Late in the second quarter, Juniper confirmed the release of a new QFabric data center system.

Lexmark International

CEO: Paul Rooke

June 29, 2012: $26.58
Dec. 31, 2011: $33.07
2012 Change: -19.6%


Lexmark shares lost more than $2 on April 24 after the company reported less-than-expected earnings results. This came after the company's stock only enjoyed a minimal uptick in the first quarter.

Quantum

CEO: Jon Gacek

June 29, 2012: $2.03
Dec. 31, 2011: $2.40
2012 Change: -15.4%


Quantum shares closed as low as $1.84 on June 1 after trading as high as $2.70 on April 3. In May, the company unveiled a new big data storage appliance, the StorNext M660.

Dell

CEO: Michael Dell

June 29, 2012: $12.51
Dec. 31, 2011: $14.63
2012 Change: -14.5%


Shares of Dell tumbled more than $2, or 17 percent, on May 23 after reporting first-quarter sales and earnings declines. There was much speculation during the quarter that Dell was looking to buy Quest Software, a rumor that became reality on July 2.

NetApp

CEO: Thomas Georgens

June 29, 2012: $31.82
Dec. 31, 2011: $36.27
2012 Change: -12.3%


Like many tech companies, NetApp's stock fell precipitously in late May ($4.04 on May 24) after the company reported its first-quarter financials, even though the channel continued to do NetApp right.

QLogic

CEO: Simon Biddiscombe

June 29, 2012: $13.69
Dec. 31, 2011: $15.00
2012 Change: -8.7%


May was also a cruel month for QLogic, a period in which the company's stock fell from $17.25 to $13.61.

Symantec

CEO: Enrique Salem

June 29, 2012: $14.61
Dec. 31, 2011: $15.65
2012 Change: -6.6%


Symantec shares fell $2.06 on April 24 after disappointing earnings and then continued to fall throughout much of the second quarter. Meanwhile, the company collaborated with Microsoft on Azure cloud disaster recovery.

Check Point Software Technologies

CEO: Gil Shwed

June 29, 2012: $49.59
Dec. 31, 2011: $52.54
2012 Change: -5.6%


Check Point shares fell below the $60 mark on April 24 and the $50 mark on June 18, erasing any gains the company had earned during the first quarter. Last month, the company introduced a new line of security appliances designed to fight distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

Cisco Systems

CEO: John T. Chambers

June 29, 2012: $17.17
Dec. 31, 2011: $18.08
2012 Change: -5.0%


Cisco shares fell more than $2 on May 10 after its earnings came out and, like other companies, shares continued to fall throughout May and June. During the quarter, Cisco also revealed several major changes to its top-level executive team, including the pending departure of Ned Hooper, Cisco's chief strategist and M&A expert, and the granting of more power for Padmasree Warrior and Pankaj Patel, who currently co-lead Cisco's engineering units.

Brocade Communications

CEO: Michael Klayko

June 29, 2012: $4.93
Dec. 31, 2011: $5.19
2012 Change: -5.0%


Brocade shares are down 5 percent through the first half of the year, despite new channel chief Regan McGrath saying 2012 will be the year of the channel for the company.

Panasonic

CEO: Joe Taylor

June 29, 2012: $8.10
Dec. 31, 2011: $8.39
2012 Change: -3.5%


While Panasonic shares are down slightly through the first half of the year, the company announced plans to arm VARs with more end-to-end solutions for vertical markets.

Western Digital

CEO: John F. Coyne

June 29, 2012: $30.48
Dec. 31, 2011: $30.95
2012 Change: -1.5%


Western Digital was a rare tech vendor that saw shares gain value in late June. After closing at $28.80 on June 28, the company's stock closed over $30 two days later. Meanwhile, Western Digital confirmed a new line of home networking routers.

Xerox

CEO: Ursula Burns

June 29, 2012: $7.87
Dec. 31, 2011: $7.96
2012 Change: -1.1%


Xerox shares fell below $8 on April 3 and closed as low as $6.90 on May 24. Long-term investors have fared better with the longtime tech stalwart.

Websense

CEO: Gene Hodges

June 29, 2012: $18.73
Dec. 31, 2011: $18.73
2012 Change: 0.0%


Websense shares fell below $20 on May 3 for the first time since mid-March and closed the first half of 2012 at exactly the same spot it began the year: trading at $18.73 per share.

FalconStor

CEO: James P. McNiel

June 29, 2012: $2.61
Dec. 31, 2011: $2.58
2012 Change: 1.2%


FalconStor becomes the first company to post a positive uptick for its stock in 2012, closing 3 cents per share higher than it ended 2011. Meanwhile, the company also closed the second quarter settling a criminal case stemming from bribes allegedly given to expedite the signing of business contracts.

Netgear

CEO: Patrick Lo

June 29, 2012: $34.51
Dec. 31, 2011: $33.57
2012 Change: 2.8%


After trading below $30 in early June, Netgear shares gained more than 10 percent in the remainder of the month to close the first half of the year up 2.8 percent. Meanwhile, the company also introduced its first unified storage array.

Motorola Solutions

CEO: Greg Brown

June 29, 2012: $48.11
Dec. 31, 2011: $46.29
2012 Change: 3.9%


Motorola Solutions announced last month it planned to acquire London-based Psion, a maker of ruggedized mobile computing products.

Advanced Micro Devices

CEO: Rory Read

June 29, 2012: $5.73
Dec. 31, 2011: $5.40
2012 Change: 6.1%


Just as its stock was starting to recover from a swoon early in the quarter, AMD announced it was tapping former Extreme Networks' executive as its new head of server solutions.

IBM

CEO: Virginia M. Rometty

June 29, 2012: $195.58
Dec. 31, 2011: $183.88
2012 Change: 6.4%


IBM's stock dropped slightly in the second quarter but is up more than 6 percent in 2012. Meanwhile, Mark Hennessy, general manager of IBM global business partners and midmarket, said Big Blue is adding hundreds of new managed services partners.

VMware

CEO: Paul Maritz

June 29, 2012: $91.04
Dec. 31, 2011: $83.19
2012 Change: 9.4%


VMware shares gained almost $7 on the last day of the quarter to regain some value lost earlier in the quarter after dropping below $100 in late May. Also in the second quarter, VMware said its vSphere virtualization platform now supports Apache Hadoop.

Intel

CEO: Paul Otellini

June 29, 2012: $26.65
Dec. 31, 2011: $24.25
2012 Change: 9.9%


Shares of Intel closed as low as $25.04 on June 4 before rebounding the rest of the month to close at 9.9 percent for the year, though they had been down since the end of the first quarter. In mid-June, Intel announced its first-generation Xeon Phi family of coprocessors, codenamed "Knights Corner."

SAP

CEOs: Bill McDermott (left), Jim Hagemann Snabe

June 29, 2012: $59.36
Dec. 31, 2011: $52.95
2012 Change: 12.1%


Investors didn't flinch after SAP announced it planned to acquire Ariba for $4.3 billion.

Oracle

CEO: Larry Ellison

June 29, 2012: $29.70
Dec. 31, 2011: $25.65
2012 Change: 15.8%


Oracle becomes the first company on this list (and only one of three total) to have a higher June 29 closing price compared to the end of March. Its $29.70 close was the company's highest since March 20. The better news for VARs was the company saying it planned to open more accounts to the channel.

CommVault Systems

CEO: N. Robert Hammer

June 29, 2012: $49.57
Dec. 31, 2011: $42.72
2012 Change: 16.0%


CommVault shares gained almost $6 during the last two weeks of June after having traded over $50 as late as May 24.

Microsoft

CEO: Steve Ballmer

June 29, 2012: $30.59
Dec. 31, 2011: $25.96
2012 Change: 17.8%


Microsoft shares fell briefly below the $30 mark in June before rising again at the end of the month. Microsoft's stock has been strong in 2012 as it prepares to launch Windows 8in the second half of the year.

EMC

CEO: Joe Tucci

June 29, 2012: $25.63
Dec. 31, 2011: $21.54
2012 Change: 19.0%


EMC shares ballooned almost 39 percent in the first quarter but lost some of that air in the second quarter. Still, as the company gained share in the controller-based disk storage market according to Gartner, its stock is up 19 percent for the year.

Lenovo Group

CEO: Yang Yuanqing

June 29, 2012: $17.30
Dec. 31, 2011: $13.15
2012 Change: 31.6%


As Lenovo's stock remained relatively stable in the second quarter, the company said VARS could double margins on new RD530 and RD630 ThinkServers.

CA Technologies

CEO: William McCracken

June 29, 2012: $27.09
Dec. 31, 2011: $20.22
2012 Change: 34.0%


CA shares fell slightly in the second quarter after a stellar first quarter on Wall Street. In channel news, the company said it would extend its partner program to include mainframe management software.

NetSuite

CEO: Zach Nelson

June 29, 2012: $54.77
Dec. 31, 2011: $40.55
2012 Change: 35.1%


On June 19, NetSuite shares crossed the $50 mark for the first time since early April. Shares kept climbing too, to close up $4.48 for the second quarter and 35 percent through the first half of 2012. Meanwhile, the company's channel chief Craig West told partners that cloud ERP is ready for liftoff.

Salesforce.com

CEO: Marc Benioff

June 29, 2012: $138.26
Dec. 31, 2011: $101.46
2012 Change: 36.3%


Salesforce.com lost $13.54 per share on May 10 and another $6 on June 11 to fall below $130 for the first time since February. But, it rebounded in late June to still post a respectable 36-percent increase since the beginning of the year. Also in June, the company announced a new partnership with Ingram Micro to be part of the distributor's Cloud Marketplace.

Red Hat

CEO: Jim Whitehurst

June 29, 2012: $56.48
Dec. 31, 2011: $41.29
2012 Change: 36.8%


During the second quarter, Red Hat started shipping a new release of its open-source JBoss application server that the company said sports a new cloud-ready architecture that makes it easier to develop and deploy public and private cloud systems.

Citrix Systems

CEO: Mark Templeton

June 29, 2012: $83.94
Dec. 31, 2011: $60.72
2012 Change: 38.2%


Citrix shares closed as low as $70.70 on May 31, its lowest mark since February. But, the company gained more than $13 per share in June, a month in which Citrix partnered with Cisco on a desktop virtualization program.

Apple

CEO: Timothy D. Cook

June 29, 2012: $584.00
Dec. 31, 2011: $405.00
2012 Change: 44.2%


Apple shares can seemingly do no wrong, but they did fall almost $16 per share in the second quarter. Still, considering where they started 2012, a 44-percent increase for 2012 is pretty good. Last month, Apple teased some new features in its upcoming iOS 6.

Seagate Technology

CEO: Steve Luczo

June 29, 2012: $24.73
Dec. 31, 2011: $16.40
2012 Change: 50.8%


Seagate was the top tech stock during the first quarter and continued that run in the second quarter. While its stock lost value in the second quarter, its year-to-date increase is still north of 50 percent.