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Apple vs. Samsung verdict: How Wall Street is reacting
It's the first full day of Wall Street trading since Friday's Samsung patent infringement verdict, and the markets and analysts are reacting pretty much as expected. AAPL opened trading today at $679.99 a share (up about 2 percent), peaked briefly at $680.87, and is currently moving around the $677 mark. As you'd expect, Samsung's stock is taking a hit. In Monday trading in Seoul, Samsung shares fell by 7.7 percent. Bloomberg pointed out that today's drop in the value of Samsung's stock was the worst since October 28th, 2008. In the long term, most analysts are raising or maintaining their price targets for AAPL. For example, Merrill Lynch's Scott Craig bumped his price target to $770 (up from $720), while Oppenheimer & Co's Ittai Kidron went all bullish, raising his price target from $680 to $800. What about the other big players in the smartphone arena? Google (GOOG), which was the target of Steve Jobs' famous "going thermonuclear" rant, took a big drop this morning and has been wobbling around the $670 per share mark -- down about $8 per share, although there has been a steady rise in share price during the day. Google may see fewer manufacturers willing to use its Android smartphone/tablet OS in the future for fear of Apple legal retribution. On the other hand, shares in Microsoft (MSFT) were up slightly, an indication that the street sees the Windows Phone 8 OS as a safe and litigation-free alternative and also views the licensing agreements in place between Apple and Microsoft as a positive sign. Nokia (NOK), which is partnering with Microsoft to release a number of Windows Phone 8 smartphones, was the biggest beneficiary of the verdict news, up almost 9.6 percent at one point in early trading today.
