Big Blues on Wall St. (GE; IBM; Motorola)

[notiCIas]

Big Blues on Wall St.

U.S. stocks set to open lower as IBM results set off negative reaction; GE restates results since '01 lower, Motorola earnings plunge.

January 19 2007: 7:41 AM EST


NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Concerns about technology issues, reflected in a negative reaction to IBM's results and a restatement at GE could plague U.S. stocks when markets open Friday.

At 7:37 a.m. ET, Nasdaq and S&P futures were lower.

Oil rebounded. U.S. light crude rose 13 cents to $50.61 a barrel in electronic trading, after falling below $50 a barrel Thursday for the first time since May 2005.

Treasury prices were slightly lower, with the 10-year note yield edging up to 4.75 percent from 4.74 percent late Thursday.

IBM (Charts) posted better than expected earnings after the bell Thursday. But for the third time this week, an topping forecasts wasn't enough for investors who had taken the stock of a tech bellwether higher on hopes of even better results.

Shares of Dow component IBM fell more than 5 percent in after-hours trading, following the direction of shares of Intel and Apple after their better than forecast results earlier in the week.

General Electric (Charts) announced it was restating results since 2001 a total of $342 million lower due to a Securities and Exchange Commission decision on the accounting of some of its interest rate swaps. But it also reported fourth quarter results and guidance for this quarter and 2007 that were in line with forecasts.

Shares of the Dow component were off 0.8 percent in pre-market trading.

GE also announced after the close Thursday that it had agreed to pay $8 billion to some of the diagnostics units of Abbott (Charts).

Motorola (Charts), the world's No. 2 mobile phone maker, said Friday fourth-quarter revenue rose but its profit fell sharply due to weakness in its handset business. The company had warned about the results earlier this month.

Citigroup, another Dow component and the nation's largest financial services firm, reported an earnings gain that was slightly better than forecasts. Shares were up 0.4 percent in pre-market trading after the announcement.

The real estate arm of investment bank Morgan Stanley (Charts) agreed to pay $6.6 billion, including debt, to acquire the hotel real estate investment trust CNL Hotels & Resorts, the companies announced early Friday.

Telecom AT&T (Charts), which is also a Dow component, announced early Friday that clients who pay at least $110 a month will be able to make unlimited calls between their mobile and home phones.

In overseas markets, Asian markets closed mixed, with indexes falling in Japan and Taiwan and gaining in Hong Kong and Australia. Major indexes were lower in Europe in early trading.

The dollar was lower against the euro and little changed against the yen.