Big Tech earnings:
Meta: With the market locking its eyes on user growth (following last week's Netflix disaster), numbers from Facebook parent Meta Platforms (FB) appeared impressive despite the slowest revenue expansion since the company went public. Daily active users rose 4% to 1.96B, topping expectations there, while monthly active users rose 3% to a generally in-line 2.94B. Shares of the social network soared more than 16% in AH trading on Wednesday.
Amazon: The e-commerce behemoth fell 9% in afterhours trading on Thursday after posting its slowest revenue growth on record, with an only 7.3% Y/Y expansion due to a drop in online shopping, inflation and supply chain problems. Along with a $7.6B write-down of its stake in Rivian, the results led to the company's first quarterly loss since 2015. Company loss was $3.8B (compared to a profit of $8.1B a year ago). A bright spot was company's cloud business, Amazon Web Services, which grew almost 37%.
Apple: The iPhone maker initially got a lift after a big earnings beat, before CFO Luca Maestri announced that supply chain issues could cost $4B to $8B in fiscal third-quarter revenue. The stock fell 2.2% during afterhours trading on Thursday in response, while CEO Tim Cook noted that Apple could recapture some of the demand lost due to the lockdowns, but some of it may be lost forever. The Cupertino, California-based company still earned $1.52/share on $97.28B in revenue, boosted by strength in the iPhone and an all-time high in Services, leading it to raise its dividend by 5% and boost its buyback by $90B
The largest U.S. oil companies reported earnings on Friday: ExxonMobil lost $3.4 billion for exiting its business in Russia in the first quarter, but it still posted sharply higher profits on high oil prices. Revenue at ExxonMobil soared 53% to $90.5 billion. Even with the charge for exiting Russia, net income doubled to $5.4 billion. Shares of ExxonMobil (XOM) were down about 1% in premarket trading on the report. ExxonMobil also announced it is increasing its share repurchases, and it now plans to buyback $30 billion of its own stock. Other major US oil company that reported on Friday was Chevron. Chevron (CVX) reported a $6.3 billion profit, up from $1.37 billion in the same quarter in 2021. Its revenues jumped to $54.37 billion from $32 billion last year. Chevron Chief Executive Mike Worth also said that the company was considering additional investments in renewable fuels and liquefied natural gas (LNG).
Markets Overall:
Stocks closed out their worst month in years, as investors battled a host of headwinds, including monetary tightening from the Federal Reserve, rising interest rates, worsening inflation, COVID lockdowns in China and the ongoing war in Ukraine. The Nasdaq fell 13.3% in April, its worst monthly performance since the financial crisis in October 2008, the S&P 500 sank 8.8% for its biggest monthly drop since the onset of the pandemic in March 2020, and the Dow was down 3.9%. The Nasdaq has dropped deeply into bear territory, now 24% off its high, with tech stocks enduring the worst of the April selloff. Next week, the Fed is expected to pull the trigger on its first half-percentage point rate hike since 2000, and it could begin to reverse its large-scale asset purchases used to help stabilize markets during the COVID crisis.
Earnings this week:
