Looking Ahead of Wall Street: IBM, Netflix, eBay

Despite the short week, investors still have a lot to look forward to as IBM (NYSE:IBM), Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX), and eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) are all scheduled to announce earnings reports.

IBM:

IBM is set to announce its fourth quarter fiscal 2014 earnings report on Tuesday, January 20th after market close. The company is expected to post earnings of $5.49 per share, down from $6.13 the same quarter last year.

In order to compete in the rise of cloud computing, IBM has recently been undergoing a massive structural reorganization. The company is expected to be divided into several different departments, including Cloud, Watson, and Analytics. The company’s restructuring will focus on software while hardware will be less of a priority.

Despite undergoing major restructuring, IBM was able to maintain its innovative edge over the past year as the company was granted more patents in 2014 than any other company, with over 7,500 patents filed under its name.

On average, the top analyst consensus for IBM on TipRanks is Hold.

Netflix:

Netflix is also scheduled to announce its fourth quarter fiscal 2014 earnings report on Tuesday, January 20th. The company is expected to post $0.44 earnings per share, down from $0.79 earnings per share the same quarter last year.

Netflix has been on the path of rapid global expansion and is currently available in more than 50 countries throughout North America, South America, and Europe. The company is now in the midst of becoming available in Australia and New Zealand in the beginning of March. In addition, there has been talk of Netflix bringing its service to Asia sometime in the near future.

Although Netflix has been rapidly gaining momentum in terms of global expansion, shares of the company have been dropping since its second quarter earnings as its results were not what investors had hoped for in regards to subscriber growth. There was no significant improvement in the third quarter as Netflix only added 3 million subscribers, short of their estimate of 3.7 million

On average, the top analyst consensus for Netflix on TipRanks is Moderate Buy.

eBay:

eBay is set to announce its fourth quarter fiscal 2014 earnings report on Wednesday, January 21st after market close. The company is expected to post $0.78 earnings per share, up from $0.71 earnings per share the same quarter last year.

Earlier in 2014, eBay announced it will be splitting from its online payment service PayPal by the end of 2015. In turn, PayPal will be spinning off into its own publicly traded company.

With that said, investors will be looking for more details regarding the PayPal spinoff as filings are expected to be finalized in the first half of 2015 and the actual separation is expected to happen in the second half on 2015.

In addition, eBay reported a rather disappointing third quarter fiscal 2014 earnings report in which the company faced increased competition from Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) in addition to offline retailers coming online, such as Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT). Investors will also be looking to see how these factors will affect eBay’s fourth quarter earnings.

On average, the top analyst consensus for eBay on TipRanks is Hold.