This week's round of results for tech firms revealed few winners as many traditional heavyweights fell below expectations, writes John Collins

This week's round of financial reporting from the major technology companies underlined that clear winners and losers are starting to emerge in key sectors of the industry.

Google and Apple confirmed their dominance of the markets for internet advertising and digital music players respectively, while heavyweights such as Intel, Microsoft and IBM had more mixed results.

For internet stocks, Google was the bright spot with revenues of $2.46 billion (€1.93 billion) for the second quarter, an increase of 77 per cent from a year ago and 9 per cent quarter on quarter. The company also said earnings benefited from a lower tax rate. While the company employs 880 in Dublin, it has previously acknowledged that its Irish operations are key to the company reducing its effective tax rate.

Google's strong results were in marked contrast to those of rival Yahoo, which also has a significant European operation based in Ireland. Despite meeting income expectations for the quarter, Yahoo's sales growth of 26 per cent was lower than analysts expected. It also said an upgrade to the software that runs its advertising systems would be delayed.

Apple defied expectations and continued to own the market for digital music players but also posted strong sales of its PCs. Revenues of $4.37 billion included sales of more than eight million iPods but also strong growth for its Macintosh computers with more than 1.3 million shipped. Analysts had expected sales of iPods to begin to slow as competitors made inroads but revenues were up 32 per cent from a year ago.

Microsoft had fourth-quarter revenues of $11.8 billion, which brought revenues for the year to $44.28 billion. Fines levied by the European Commission took the shine out of Microsoft's earnings, which were down 24 per cent to $2.83 billion. The software company managed to appease the market by announcing a major buyback of its stock, starting with an initial tender for $20 billion worth of shares.

Another bright spot was $10.9 billion in unearned revenues, which suggests orders for the new versions of flagship products Windows and Office, to be released later in the year, are exceeding expectations. The company's Dublin European Operations Centre is currently preparing international versions of both products.

IBM also saw revenues decline from a year ago - down 2 per cent to $20.7 billion - but it attributed this to the disposal of its PC division to Lenovo and currency fluctuations. Although it pleased analysts and investors, services revenues were lower than expected and a supply chain problem impacted sales of its high-end server computers. Software sales grew slightly for Big Blue and during the quarter it announced a €46 million investment in Dublin largely devoted to this side of the business.

Following two recent announcements of job losses at its operations around the world there was further bad news for Intel when it announced a fall in sales and profits in the second quarter, largely due to increased competition from AMD. European revenues were particularly badly hit - down 24 per cent to $1.4 billion compared to a year ago.

Despite the opening of the new $2 billion Fab 24-2 production facility in Leixlip last month, the firm is understood to be seeking about 50 voluntary departures from its Irish workforce. This is in line with the reduction of 1,000 managers worldwide announced recently, but some analysts said there may be further cost cutting at the chipmaker in the months ahead.