Excess inventory sold by several dozen big companies--including Home Depot, Dell Financial Services, IBM and Sharper Image--accounted for 4%-plus of gross merchandise sales in the first quarter, up from about zilch a year earlier.
Evercore Partners analyst Kirk Materne this afternoon trimmed his EPS estimates for Microsoft for the next couple of quarters to reflect the current shortage of hard-disk drives that has resulted from the recent Thai floods, plus lower gross margin assumptions to reflect increased investment in services and online and a greater revenue contribution from the entertainment and devices segment.
