Tech Shares Up As Outperformance Seen Continuing - Tech Roundup

Shares of tech companies rose amid bets that the sector's outperformance will continue. Five stocks -- Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google's parent Alphabet and Amazon.com -- have driven the outperformance of the Nasdaq 100 index over other broad indexes since the beginning of the year and should keep this trend in place going forward, said analysts at brokerage Goldman Sachs, in a research note. "Despite a slowdown in China, our Hardware team remains optimistic about Apple's upcoming product cycle and growth in services revenues. Our Software analysts forecast strong advertising revenue growth and exposure to the best secular trends in technology (mobile search, enterprise cloud computing) will drive 19% sales growth for Alphabet in 2018. The team is also upbeat on Microsoft on the back of expense discipline and potential upside to out-year EPS. Our Internet analysts view Facebook as well-positioned in one of the best secular growth markets and expects 2018 consensus top-line estimates will climb from the current 28% towards their 30% forecast. [Goldman] believes consensus underestimates the revenue benefit to Amazon from the ongoing shifts to cloud computing and online retailing."

-Rob Curran, rob.curran@dowjones.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 08, 2017 16:44 ET (20:44 GMT)