By Benjamin Pimentel, MarketWatch
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Technology stocks held on to modest gains on Thursday, even as shares of Amazon.com retreated after Goldman Sachs warned of potentially weaker-than-expected fourth quarter sales.
Amazon /quotes/zigman/63011/quotes/nls/amzn AMZN -5.68% shares slipped a fraction to close at $173.86 after Goldman Sachs analyst Heather Bellini said in a Wednesday note that data from comScore suggest the company’s sales grew by 38% from the year-earlier period, below the current consensus of 40%.
“While the comScore numbers are just one data point which does not capture international sales or break out individual companies’ sales, taken alone they seem to suggest the potential for downside risk to consensus forecasts,” Bellini wrote.
The note appeared to offset Amazon’s own announcement that 2011 turned out to be a strong year for its Kindle family of products.
“Throughout December, customers purchased well over 1 million Kindle devices a week,” the company said in a release.
However, Baird analyst Colin Sebastian said in a note that “unlike prior year releases, Amazon did not provide peak day order and unit sales for the 2011 holiday period.”
“Previously, Amazon consistently reported strong growth in these metrics,” Sebastian added, although he also noted that “the bulk of e-commerce holiday spending data was positive, and we continue to believe there is some upside potential from our fourth quarter revenue estimate of $17.5 billion.”
Shares of eBay Inc. /quotes/zigman/76117/quotes/nls/ebay EBAY -0.52% also fell 0.2% to close at $30.36, while Google Inc. /quotes/zigman/93888/quotes/nls/goog GOOG +0.39% edged up 0.4% to close at $642.40.
Yahoo Inc. /quotes/zigman/59898/quotes/nls/yhoo YHOO -3.00% also saw its shares trade up 2.2% to close at $16.13, apparently on media reports that Alibaba has hired the prominent Washington DC lobbying firm Duberstein Group as it explores a possible bid for the beleaguered Internet firm.
Overall, the tech sector managed to stay in positive territory as the Nasdaq Composite Index /quotes/zigman/12633936 COMP -0.02% gained 0.9% to close at 2,614. The Morgan Stanley High Tech 35 Index /quotes/zigman/6015481 MSH -1.61% was up 1.1%, while the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index /quotes/zigman/1468249 SOX -0.69% gained 0.9%.
Major tech issues were broadly higher, including Intel Corp. /quotes/zigman/20392/quotes/nls/intc INTC +1.09% , Hewlett-Packard /quotes/zigman/229301/quotes/nls/hpq HPQ -3.17% , IBM Corp. /quotes/zigman/230066/quotes/nls/ibm IBM -0.50% Microsoft Corp /quotes/zigman/20493/quotes/nls/msft MSFT +0.35% and Dell Inc. /quotes/zigman/27952/quotes/nls/dell DELL +1.59%