Apple , Google , Meta and Microsoft presented their quarterly earnings with mixed results.
From San Francisco to Seattle, US tech companies worry the market with slower-than-expected growth and lukewarm forecasts, a sign that tech giants are also suffering from a weak economy and competition from new entrants.
“This week will go down in earnings history as one of the worst for Big Tech, even as a turning point,” analyst Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities said on Thursday.
Microsoft, driven by cloud computing, posted strong quarterly results on Tuesday but issued a warning about the growth of its Azure platform for this sector.
Apple beats expectations for Q3 results but iPhone sales disappoint
Apple beat market expectations with $90 billion in revenue and $20.7 billion in net profit in the third quarter, but sales of its flagship iPhone disappointed the market.
In the fourth quarter of its fiscal year, the third of the year, the Californian group sold smartphones for 42.6 billion dollars, below the 43 billion expected by analysts.
Its shares fell slightly in off-hours electronic trading on Wall Street to settle at $143.60, close to their closing price for the day.
Alphabet’s (Google) turnover in Q3 disappoints the market
Alphabet, the parent of Google, had a turnover of 69.1 billion dollars in the third quarter, up 6% from the same period last year, but it is the lowest revenue growth since 2013 and the result disappointed the market. .
The net income of the Californian group thus reached 14,000 million dollars in the period considered, well below the market consensus.
Its shares fell almost 6% during after-hours electronic trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
Between July and September, the world’s number one online advertiser posted slight revenue growth to $54.5 billion.
But advertising revenue from its online video platform YouTube fell 2% to $7 billion in the period under review, when the market expected a small gain.
The results account for advertisers’ budget cuts in the face of inflation and the rise in the cost of money.
“It was a tough quarter for digital advertising. The macroeconomic headwinds were strong enough for Google to cut hiring to shore up profits,” Insider Intelligence’s Evelyn Mitchell summed up.
Meta (Facebook) Earnings Collapse
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, recorded a sharp drop in its net profits in the third quarter to 4,400 million dollars (-52% over the same quarter of last year), in a context of stagnation in the number of users and cut of advertising budgets.
Shares of the Californian group lost more than 12% on Wall Street on Wednesday in after-hours electronic trading, after the quarterly results were announced.
Invoicing, meanwhile, was 27.7 billion dollars in the period, down 4%, as expected by the market.
Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Meta, quoted in a statement, acknowledged that the company faces “short-term revenue challenges”, but assured that the firm’s fundamentals are “in place to return to stronger growth”.
The company indicated that the number of employees in the world (87,000 people as of September 30) would not change between now and the end of next year.
A year ago, Facebook became Meta and projected a glorious future of the metaverse, a parallel universe heralded as the future of the internet.
Like Google (Alphabet), Meta suffers from inflation and rising interest rates, which leads many advertisers to revise their marketing budget downwards.
– With information from AFP –