North American markets look to be headed lower Thursday, pressured by disappointing earnings news from the technology sector.

Late Wednesday, online auctioneer eBay said fourth-quarter net income rose 44%, but this narrowly missed Wall Street expectations.

A big drop in profit at Lucent Technologies, a weaker-than-expected forecast from Qualcomm and a lower earnings outlook from Sony added to the gloom.

In this morning’s earnings news, Ford announced a US$104 million profit, helped by strong gains in its financial-services operation.

Citigroup’s net income rose 12%, helped by volume growth in core consumer franchises, and the company raised its dividend by 10%. SunTrust posted higher profit, too.

In today’s economic news, Canadian manufacturers managed to chalk up a modest 0.2% increase in shipments in November to $50.0 billion.

In its monthly survey of manufacturing, StatsCan said both the backlog of unfilled orders and new orders received weakened for the fourth consecutive month in November.

Technology stocks pulled Canadian markets into the red Wednesday, while U.S. markets were plagued by mixed corporate results.

The S&P/TSX finished down 14.42 points or 0.16% to 9,120.35, while the S&P/TSX Venture composite index lost 3.02 points or 0.17% to 1,793.73.

In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average slid 88.82 points or 0.84% to 10,539.97. The Nasdaq composite index lost 32.45 points or 1.54% to 2,073.59 and the S&P 500 was off 11.35 points or 0.95% to 1,184.63.

The Canadian dollar was down 0.24 of a cent to US81.45¢ in late trading as the December consumer price index suggested the Bank of Canada will leave interest rates alone next week. Statistics Canada reported that the annual inflation rate eased to 2.1% last month.