ZNGA – Page 3 – Daily Stocks News

Major Movers on January 7; ES, ILMN, NFLX, CBMX, VVUS, AMZN, NCT, BIDU, NSM, ZNGA

Shares of EnergySolutions Inc. (NYSE: ES) surged 8.28% to $3.72 after the company announced that it agreed to be acquired by a subsidiary of Energy Capital Partners II, LLC in a deal estimated at $1.1 billion. According to the deal, each shareholder of EnergySolutions will get $3.75 in cash for each share of common stock. The deal represents a premium of 20 percent over the average closing price of Energysolution’s stock in previous 30 days ended January 4 2013.

Illumina Inc. (NASDAQ: ILMN) shares plunged 7.66 percent after Roche Holding Chairman Franz Humer confirmed in an interview that the Company does not hold any plans to acquire the gene-sequencing-specialist.

Shares of movie steaming company Netflix Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX) climbed nearly 1.5 percent after the company announced a licensing agreement with Warner Bros. Television Group.

CombiMatrix Corporation (NASDAQ: CBMX) rallied on Monday. The stock gained almost 15 percent after the developer of cancer diagnostics and testing services for developmental disorders said that it anticipates higher-than-expected year-over-year growth in volume in prenatal testing for the fiscal fourth quarter and full year.

Shares of VIVUS Inc. (NASDAQ: VVUS) climbed 10.50 percent on Monday after the company reported that prescription of anti-obesity drug Qsymia, its key product, jumped almost 68 percent for a four week period ended December 21, compared to preceding four week period. The number of prescriptions in the latest period comfortably beat analysts’ expectations. The drug manufacturer said that it shipped 12,978 prescription of Qsymia in December up from 7,749 prescriptions in the four week period, ended November 23.

Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) shares gained around 3.30 percent after Morgan Stanley upwardly revised its rating on the stock to “overweight” from “neutral”.

Newcastle Investment Corp. (NYSE: NCT) shares leaped almost 5.50 percent on Monday. Newcastle Investment said that it intends to make a public offering of 40 million shares of common stock. The company also said that it plans to offer underwriters the option for 30 days to buy up to an additional 6 million shares of common stock.

Baidu.com Inc. (ADR) (NASDAQ:BIDU) shares fell almost 3 percent after analyst at Barclays slashed its rating on the stock t to” Equalweight”, citing concerns over earnings , lack of footprint in mobile computing, and Qihoo’s (QIHU) search success. Barclays which started its coverage on Baidu from October 2011 with “outperform” rating, cuts its price target last August.

Shares of Nationstar Mortgage Holdings Inc. (NYSE: NSM) jumped 11.50 percent after it entered in a deal to buy $215 billion worth residential mortgage servicing rights from Bank of America (NYSE: BAC).

Shares of social gaming company Zynga Inc. (NASDAQ: ZNGA) gained on Monday after the company confirmed that it has shuttered 11 of the 13 worst performing titles. Earlier in October 2012, the Company had said that it will pull-out underperforming13 titles by the end of January 2013 as it looked to slash costs and enhance efficiency as well as profitability by diverting resources in developing new titles. The Company has lost significant number of gamers for its once popular titles published in the Facebook platform due to growing competition from other gaming companies as well as lack of visibility in mobile.

Zynga Appoints New Chief Creative Officer (ZNGA)

It seems that departures and appointments of top executives has become a routine affair at Zynga Inc. (NASDAQ: ZNGA). Indeed, on Tuesday, the social gaming company announced that it has appointed Tim LeTourneau as its new Chief Creative Officer. LeTourneau will fill the position which was left vacant by Mike Verdu, who left Zynga in August to pursue his own entrepreneurial venture.

Prior to joining Zynga about two years ago, LeTourneau, worked at Electronic Arts for almost two decades.

LeTourneau was VP in-charge of FarmVille 2, which turned out to be as the most successful game launch in last two months, before becoming as the new Chief Creative Officer.

LeTourneau will now be responsible for supervising game designs across-the-board, moving away from his earlier role where looked after day to day operations of FarmVille 2. LaTorneau will directly report to Steve Chiang, who is President of Games while Maureen Fan has been appointed as FarmVille 2’s general manager.

Lately, Zynga has made many high profile hiring and acquisitions. For instance, recently it bought core game studio A Bit Lucky and also roped in John Tobias, a co-creator of Mortal Kombat-a series of fighting games.

Besides there have been many other high profile changes at top management level that did not received much attention. For instance: Allan Leinwand, left his job as CTO of Infrastructure in Zynga on September 10 to become VP and CTO at ServiceNow, a cloud computing service company. Allan’s departure was followed by Jeff Karp, who left Zynga on September 22. Karp was the Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer.

John Schappert, who worked as Chief Operating Officer, departed Zynga on August 8. At Present, Zynga’s CEO, Mark Pincus seem to have taken over Schappert’s role. Pincus is believed to be working in close co-ordination with David Ko and Steve Chiang for developing games.

Alan Patmore, who worked as the Studio GM, departed Zynga on August 23. He is now VP of Product at Kixeye. On August 28, Mike Verdu left his position as chief creative officer (which is now taken over by Tim Tuorneau).