Slide show: Tech vendor stocks fight back in Q1

Change: 11.5%

Apple shares slipped below US$200 as late as Feb. 23 but steadily rose during March, including an increase of US$8 per share on March 5, when the company announced that the iPad would hit stores on April 3.

Western Digital lost more than US$4 per share on Jan. 22 despite announcing fourth-quarter earnings of US$1.85 per share, compared to earnings of 6 cents per share in the year-ago quarter.

Change: 4.6%

Dell shares fell nearly a US$1 per share on Jan. 22 and reached a low close of US$12.90 a week later before beginning a long slow climb back to the US$15 mark. The company announced in late March that it was launching a new set of products and services for cloud computing

Change: 15.2%

Xerox shares topped the US$9 mark in January, but then fell to US$8.38 as late as Feb. 9 before rebounding in March. The company's stock closed at US$10.11 on March 23 before settling back down a shade. On March 30, Wall Street had little reaction to the news Anne Mulcahy was retiring as chairman and a board member.

Change: 2.3%

3Com shares edged up slightly, a quarter after HP announced it planned to buy the networking vendor for US$2.7 billion. HP expects the acquisition to close in the third quarter of 2010.

Microsoft shares dipped as low as US$27.93 on Feb. 12, but began a slow climb back after the company announced a 13 cent dividend on Feb. 16. It appears Wall Street is waiting for businesses to warm up to Windows 7, which may be happening sooner than later, according to a Dimensional Research study.

Change: 9.3%

Intel's shares dipped as low as US$19.02 on Feb. 4, before cracking the US$22 mark on March 16, when the company ushered in its new 32-nanometer Gulftown class of processors, including six-core Xeon 5600 series processors that should lead to more energy-efficient servers.

EMC shares got a bump in mid-March, jumping to a high of US$18.94 on March 23 before falling 50 cents per share on March 29. Earlier that month, EMC made headlines for hiring Jeremy Burton, a former Symantec and Oracle executive, as its first-ever chief marketing officer.

Mar. 31, 2010: US$6.00 Dec. 31, 2009: US$4.15 Change: 44.6%

Novell's shares had steadily risen for the first two months of the quarter, but then they increased more than US$1.25 per share on March 2 after the company got a US$1.8 billion offer from private equity firm Elliott Associates, a 48-percent premium at the time of the announcement.

Quantum's shares closed as high as US$3.06 on Jan. 28 but fell 50 cents the next day after another disappointing outlook.

Change: 8.7%

Like several other companies, Cisco's shares rose steadily through the quarter. The networking giant's stock didn't register much movement after announcing solid second quarter results on Feb. 3. For the quarter ended Jan. 23, Cisco posted US$1.85 billion in earnings, at 32 cents per share, up from US$1.5 billion, at 26 cents per share, from the same quarter a year ago.

Change: 6.8%

Panasonic made a splash in the first quarter with the introduction of its 3D HDTV, but the buzz didn't reach Wall Street, where the company's stock didn't register much after the announcement. Still, Panasonic's shares increased nearly 7 percent in the quarter, hitting several hills and valleys along the way.

SAP shares reached US$50.64 on Jan. 11 before falling to US$42.81 a month later. Since then, the company's stock has steadily rose, cracking the US$48 mark on March 29. Earlier in March, SAP said it had hired Mike Coleman, a former Hewlett-Packard executive, to manage volume channel operations.

Like many other companies in the first quarter, Hewlett-Packard's stock was up and down, dipping to US$47.03 on Feb. 4 before cracking the US$53 plateau on March 23. Former Lenovo channel chief Stephen DiFranco officially took a similar position with HP in March, becoming the company's vice president and general manager of HP's SPO Americas.

March 31, 2010: US$23.47 Dec. 31, 2009: US$22.46 Change: 4.5%

CA shares dipped as low as US$21.52 on Feb. 8 but have been over the US$23 mark since St. Patrick's Day. On March 18, the company unveiled major enhancements to its ARCserve data protection software brand. ARCserve 15 will have two key components: ARCserve Backup for a complete disk-to-disk-to-tape offering; and ARCserve D2D, a more lightweight version with disk-to-disk protection, according to the company.

Mar. 31, 2010: US$36.08 Dec. 31, 2009: US$25.98 Change: 38.9%

Lexmark shares jumped more than US$2 per share on Feb. 2 and another US$2 the next day after the imaging company posted stellar fourth-quarter earnings of US$1.16 per share before one-time charges.

Analysts had expected net income of US$70 cents per share.

IBM's stock was steady between US$120 and US$130 during the first quarter, even after former executive Robert Moffat pleaded guilty to insider trading. On a brighter side, maybe the Moffat case was offset by Wall Street's impressions of the company's new cloud-based development services for partners and customers, unveiled March 16.

Change: 4.8%

Oracle offered investors a 5 cent dividend per share in January, but the stock tumbled more than two dollars per share by the end of the month. It reached the US$25 mark again in mid-March, where it's remained ever since. In late March, the company detailed its plans to emphasize direct sales of Sun Microsystems' products to large customers and leverage the channel for midmarket accounts.

Compellent's stock plummeted more than US$5 per share on Feb. 12 after the company announced that fourth-quarter earnings were 4 cents per share, far off the 9 cents per share expected by analysts. Typically, about 500,000 shares are traded daily, but more than 5 million hit the market that day. The stock reached its quarterly nadir on Feb. 24 at US$15.40 and has since regained some momentum.

Seagate is the last company highlighted here to show a stock increase in the first quarter, a modest rise of 0.4 percent. The company's stock increased more than US$1 per share, to US$21.35 on March 1, but two days later it had dipped to US$19.63. The company's shares dipped March 26 after an analyst wrote that disk drive pricing had become more aggressive.

Symantec shares fell more than 5 percent from the end of 2009, but the decline is even worse from Jan. 19 when the stock was at a 2010 high of US$19.14 per share. The company's shares tumbled US$1.20 on Jan. 28 after the security giant said its fourth fiscal quarter outlook would miss analysts' expectations.

Check Point shares posted a modest gain during the quarter, despite falling 5 percent after posting its fourth-quarter financials on Jan. 28, which included a 25 percent increase in revenue and a 27 percent increase in net income compared to the year-ago quarter.

Mar. 31, 2010: US$22.77 Dec. 31, 2009: US$17.46 Change: 30.4%

Websense didn't enjoy the benefit of a one- or two-time spike in its stock price. Instead shares steadily rose throughout the quarter, reaching a high closing price of US$24.17 on Mar. 18 before settling back down a bit.

McAfee stock declined slightly in the first quarter, but it has rebounded sharply after hitting a low of US$36.94 on Feb. 4. A week later, the company revealed major enhancements to its 2010 consumer products line, including expanded threat protection and up to 325 percent faster scans.

AMD lost Wall Street momentum to its rival Intel during the first quarter but rebounded somewhat during the quarter. AMD shares reached a low of US$7.19 on Feb. 4 before hitting the US$9 mark again on March 16 after announcements that the companies were both rolling out a new round of server processors.

Change: 11.7%

Lenov had a rollercoaster quarter on Wall Street, reaching a high of US$15.20 per share on Jan. 15 and then falling to US$13.07 less than two weeks later. Shares oscillated between US$13 and US$14 during March.

Change: 20.3%

Netgear's shares gained more than US$2 per share on Feb. 10, a day after announcing a US$7.9 million profit for the fourth quarter, a swing from a US$7.3 million loss in the year-ago quarter. The company's shares increased nearly that amount again from Feb. 26 to Mar. 2 too, around the time it introduced two new high-performance ReadyNAS solutions for virtualised environments.

Mar. 31, 2010: US$30.68 Dec. 31, 2009: US$26.67 Change: 15%

Juniper's stock didn't move a lot for much of the first two months of the quarter, but rose steadily in March, hitting the US$30 mark on March 15. In February, Juniper announced a new software group organised around the company's Junos platform.

Motorola's stock fell almost 10 percent in the first quarter, but it could have been worse. Shares were trading for as low as US$6.15 on Jan. 29. A day earlier, shares fell nearly a dollar after it issued a warning that profits would miss Wall Street's estimates.

Red Hat shares were up and down during the quarter, hitting between US$27 and US$31. Most recently, shares fell US$1.80 per share on March 25 after the company said that its 2011 earnings outlook would be short of analysts' expectations.

Change: 14.2%

SonicWall saw its stock jump by nearly US$1 per share on Feb. 12 after its fourth-quarter earnings increased 43 percent to 9 cents per share, despite nearly flat revenue. It stayed around the US$9 mark for much of March after it announced a new enterprise firewall and virtual security appliances.