Cisco Systems led the Dow Jones industrial average slightly higher Thursday after the technology company reported higher sales. Mixed corporate earnings and economic reports kept the major stock indexes flipping between slight gains and losses.
Stocks rose sharply on Wall Street on Wednesday, pushing the Standard & Poor's 500 index to an all-time high.
Stocks fell on Wall Street Friday after the government reported that U.S. employers added the fewest jobs in nine months in March and more people gave up looking for work.
WB Construction & Sons Inc. is a 10-employee, minority-owned firm that received $7.5 million in five stimulus contracts from the federal government, but it did not do close to that much work.
Cisco Systems plans to establish two network training centers in Myanmar, as global technology companies begin to move into one of the least-connected places on Earth.
Renewed worries about Europe overshadowed an encouraging U.S. jobs report, and stocks flipped between slight gains and losses on Thursday.
Cisco's latest quarterly report provided further evidence that spending on technology gear is rising modestly in most parts of the world, despite persisting concerns about a still-shaky economy.
Belkin, a maker of smartphone cases and computing accessories, said Thursday that it is buying the home networking business unit of Cisco, including the Linksys router brand.
Cisco Systems Inc. isn't content to be the world's largest maker of computer networking gear. It says it wants to become the "No. 1" supplier of information technology to big businesses by broadening its offerings of services and software.
