U.S. equities were booming on Thursday as airlines and marine transport stocks soared 4.2% and 3.9% respectively, while utilities fell 1.7%. The S&P 500 Index gained 0.7%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average surged 0.8% and the Nasdaq Composite was 0.8% higher by day’s end.
Several companies made headlines after hours, including Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD), EXACT Sciences Corporation (NASDAQ:EXAS) and International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM).
Here’s what went down;
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD)
Advanced Micro Devices admitted that its chips may have a vulnerability.
About a week ago, the company said that there was almost no risk of AMD chips being affected by a variant of the Spectre vulnerability. However, the company changed its tune on a Thursday statement.
“While we believe that AMD’s processor architectures make it difficult to exploit Variant 2, we continue to work closely with the industry on this threat. We have defined additional steps through a combination of processor microcode updates and OS patches that we will make available to AMD customers and partners to further mitigate the threat,” AMD said.
The company added that it will make optional microcode updates for its customers and partners for Ryzen and EPYC processors starting this week. More updates will come over the coming weeks.
AMD stock fell 2.9% after the bell on Thursday.
EXACT Sciences Corporation (EXAS)
Exact Sciences took a hit following the company’s public offering announcement.
The company said it is underwriting a public offering of $500 million aggregate principal amount of convertible senior notes due 2025 in a registration statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Exact Sciences added a 30-day option for the underwriter to purchase an additional $75 million aggregate principal amount of notes. The proceeds from the offering will be used to fuel general corporate and working capital purposes.
“BofA Merrill Lynch is acting as sole book-running manager for the offering. An automatically effective shelf registration statement relating to these securities was filed with the SEC on June 6, 2017,” the press release added.
EXAS stock fell 4.8% after hours.
International Business Machines Corp. (IBM)
IBM is making organizational changes by reassigning and cutting workers.
The tech giant announced that 30,000 of its workers will be reassigned to other departments in 2018, while a further 10,000 will lose their jobs through attrition with no replacements planned.
There are an additional 5,000 IBM workers who haven’t been reassigned or cut from the company, but they could still meet either fate. Many employees have lost morale over the workforce reductions that have happened in recent years.
The reassigned workers will help to fulfill the company’s plans to have 20% of its staff onshore, 20% in nearshore locations and 60% offshore altogether. The move comes following more than five years of losses, despite the company turning a profit in the latest quarter.
IBM stock slips a fraction of a percentage after the market closed Thursday.
As of this writing, Karl Utermohlen did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.
