By Rex Crum, MarketWatch
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Tech stocks began to show some
signs of life Tuesday, with Apple Inc. and Facebook Inc. among the
gainers following new, upbeat views from Wall Street analysts.
Apple (AAPL) rose 1.4% to $538.21 after Andy Hargreaves of
Pacific Crest Securities raised his rating on the company to
outperform, or the equivalent of buy, from sector perform and set a
price target of $635 a share on Apple's stock. In a research note,
Hargreaves based much of his upgrade on prospects for iPhone sales
and the next model of the iPhone, which is likely to come out later
this year.
Hargreaves said a larger-screen version of the so-called iPhone
6 is "likely to drive estimates higher" for Apple, and could add as
much as $4 a share to the company's per-share earnings in its 2015
fiscal year "if 35% of iPhone customers choose a larger iPhone when
they upgrade and Apple is able to capture 10% of the large-format
Android market."
Facebook (FB) edged up by 45 cents a share to $72.50. Analyst
Ken Sena of Evercore Partners, raised his price target on
Facebook's stock to $64 a share from $60, mostly due to the
enterprise value opportunities from its acquisition of
WhatsApp.
Fusion-io Inc. (FIO) rose more than 5% to $12.29 a share.
Pacific Crest analyst Brent Bracelin said the flash-memory storage
technology company is seeing more interest in its products from
tech resellers and partners.
Gains also came from online retailer Zulily Inc. (ZU), IBM Corp.
(IBM), Netflix Inc. (NFLX), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Amazon.com
Inc.
The Nasdaq Composite Index (RIXF) rose almost 19 points to 4,353
and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOX) also edged into
positive territory.
More tech news from MarketWatch:
Google's gigabit gambit isn't going away
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