Avid traders knew this week would be a busy one in earnings land. 🌈 ✨ More than a fourth of the S&P 500 and 40% of the Nasdaq-100 were expected to report this week, including many of the U.S.’s largest non-financial firms.
Things got off to a slow, turbulent start with Microsoft and Google’s reports on Tuesday. Microsoft handily beat analyst estimates, but headed south after its report. And Google, well… it missed on top and bottom lines. Initially, that scared investors.
Yesterday, Facebook/Meta, PayPal, and Pinterest put investors back in order, however. All three companies posted worthy beats. 💪 Investors stopped chewing on their finger nails with hopes that Thursday’s earnings would solidify the case that Q1 2022 was a positive one for these titans of industry.
Ultimately, it looks like that is (mostly) the case. There were concessions to be made, but Apple, Amazon, Intel and Twitter rounded out a generally successful earnings season for “Big Tech” today. However, inflation and supply chain constraints offered to be the bear 🐻 of bad news for most companies.
Amazon was the worst-off today, losing 12.7% in after-hours trading. The company narrowly beat revenue expectations, notching $116.4 billion in the quarter. However, Amazon’s earnings per share came in 9.6% below expectation at $7.56/share. They faulted inflation and higher wages for the miss. Those figures mean that Amazon’s costs “rose by 5% of sales“ or “$3 million an hour, every hour of every day, during the last 90 days…“ in the quarter. Check out the company’s earnings report here.
If you’re willing to look beyond Amazon, the grass was looking greener for the rest of today’s big reports. ☀️ Apple posted a monster beat, coming in at $97.28 billion in revenue (vs. $93.89 billion expected) and $1.52/share in EPS (vs. $1.43/share expected.) The company’s Services, Other Products, and Mac revenue businesses all posted double-digit YoY growth. Revenue for the company at-large was up 8.59%. Apple took the impetus to authorize $90 billion in new share buybacks, but the stock fell 4.4% after hours. Check out Apple’s report here.
Our last eye-opening earnings report was Intel, which has had a rough go since Apple abandoned Intel’s hardware for its own M1 chip. Over the last year, Intel has lost a fifth of its value in the market. The semi giant beat, but offered little future excitement in its guidance. Intel erased most of its intraday gains today and fell more than 4% after hours. Read more in the company’s IR report.
Twitter was also top-of-mind today when it reported earnings. However, the response to the company’s earnings was minimal given that the platform is being bought out by Elon Musk. Twitter said it would no longer provide guidance after noting that it missed estimated revenue figures. The company also revealed that Twitter miscounted its daily users for three years straight, so that’s pretty comical. Overall, kind of a trainwreck in Twitterland. 🔥 You can read the company’s insights here.
Overall, these reports weren’t so bad. Even though the bulk of Big Tech reports are over, we will check back in on overarching takeaways next week, and we’ll keep an eye out for more big reports to come (including a handful scheduled for tomorrow, which you can check out in the Stocktwits earnings calendar.) 📅