Qualcomm, Amazon, and BIDU Reward Investors, NCC and Ford Disappoint

First the good news:  Amazon, Qualcomm and BIDU are partying like it's 1999.  Qualcomm, announced it had settled a legal spat and reached a licensing agreement with Nokia after three years of litigation.  The company also raised its full year guidance by, what looks like two cents.  In June, Qualcomm forecast full-year earnings of $2.09 to $2.13 a share and it raised guidance to $2.11 to $2.13.  This was apparently worth over $10 billion in additional market capitalization.  Go figure.

In other happy technology news, Amazon and Baidu.com (touted as China's Google) both posted solid earnings results.  Amazon's earnings doubled, although some of the boost in earnings came from favorable exchange rates.  Although North American sales grew 35% over the prior year, down from a 38% growth rate in last year's second quarter, international sales jumped 47% compared to 31% last year.  Media sales accounted for 59% of the company's total revenue compared to 64% last year, indicating that the company is becoming more diversified.  Baidu.com said second-quarter profit soared 87% over the year-earlier period on healthy growth in the number of marketing customers and revenue per customer.  Baidu.com, known as China's Google is actually besting Google on its home turf, with 60% of China's internet search market.  Apparently China has 221 million people online.  Potential growth in China, if all the billion or so people decide to come online is clearly awesome.  This is why Baidu.com is such an exciting stock to many investors.  The stock also routinely makes $40 moves, which makes it a favorite among traders with strong stomachs.

In horrible earnings news, Ford posted a second-quarter loss of $8.7 billion as it wrote down the value of truck plants and loans to buyers of pickups and SUV's by $8 billion.  Even excluding the unexpected writedown, Ford lost 62 cents a shares, nearly triple what analysts were expecting.  The company is "confident" it has enough liquidity.  But the company was also confident it would become profitable this year a mere three months ago before vehicle sales fell off the cliff.  

National City, reported a $1.76 billion loss, or $2.45 a share for the second quarter.  The company increased its provision for loan losses due to a surge in delinquencies, charge-offs, and non-performing assets.  You can read the gory details here.