This week, the US technology sector ushered in the quarterly test, microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon four technology giants have handed over the answer. The successive announcements of high-scoring players and low-scoring players have also caused investors' moods to fluctuate with this financial report one after another.
At present, Google, a large advertiser, rarely "dumb fire", and the revenue growth rate has dropped to a new two-year low. Meta and Amazon seem to have exchanged scripts this time, the plot of the two companies last quarter was reversed in this quarter, and Amazon's stock price plunged in a straight line after today's earnings report, setting the largest decline in history after a single day.
In contrast, the two "big brothers" of Apple and Microsoft have played much more steadily. Although Apple's stock price jumped up and down because of the news at today's earnings conference, the overall volatility was not large. Microsoft even in the case of a thousand shares plummeting on Tuesday, with super output to turn the tide with its own strength.
Amazon Thunderstorm lost 3.8 billion yuan, and its stock price plunged by more than 12% after hours.
The state of the tech giants has not been stable in recent quarters, and it seems that every time the earnings report there is always a big thunder, the last time was Meta, and this time it is Amazon's turn.
After us stock market today, Amazon released its first quarter 2022 financial report. According to the earnings report, Amazon's net sales in the first quarter were $116.444 billion, basically in line with market expectations, but only 7% year-on-year, the lowest growth rate for Amazon since 2001; a net loss of $3.8 billion, the first quarterly loss since 2015; a loss of $7.56 per share in the quarter, while the market expected positive earnings per share of $8.37.
Arguably, this is Amazon's most ugly earnings report in recent years. Therefore, after these data were issued, they also directly let the stock price that was still up more than 4% on the day jump downwards, and once plummeted by more than 12% after hours, and the market value of 100 billion yuan evaporated instantly.
Amazon's after-hours stock price performance today
Amazon's loss this time is mainly due to investment in electric vehicle company Rivian, which lost a total of $7.6 billion in the past quarter because of Rivian's investment, directly pulling the overall profit into negative.
On this point, in fact, Silicon Star people have been warned in advance in Amazon's financial report analysis in the last quarter. While Amazon made a hefty profit of $14.3 billion last quarter, $12 billion of that was made from investing in Rivian.
It can be said that Amazon's last two quarters have been into and out of Rivian. Rivian's stock price peaked at $130 last quarter, and now it's only about $30.
Silicon Star people in the last quarter's earnings analysis article about Amazon's profit growth warning
But aside from the huge losses caused by this investment, the performance of Amazon's major businesses is also worrying. First of all, the e-commerce business has shown obvious growth weakness under the Conflict between Russia and Ukraine and the pressure of the supply chain, and there has been a decline in sales in many markets. At the same time, the growth rate of subscription services and third-party services has declined. The advertising business, which was first disclosed last quarter, did not continue to soar in the quarter, falling back to 25% from 33% in the previous quarter.
The performance of aws cloud services, which is the most concerned by the market, was also decent in the quarter, with revenue of $18.44 billion and a year-on-year growth rate of 37% basically in line with market expectations, failing to save Amazon from fire.
AWS growth is based on Amazon's Q1 financial report
At the earnings conference, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy also expressed disappointment with the quarter's performance, saying that "key areas of the business are moving in the wrong direction", and for the next quarter's performance, he once again gave pessimistic guidance, expecting second-quarter revenue to be between $116 billion and $121 billion, less than the market's expectation of $125.5 billion.
In the next quarter, Amazon will hold More than 20 Prime Member Days around the world, and it remains to be seen whether large-scale promotions can pull Amazon out of the mud.
Apple: This time it is very stable, but it is difficult to say whether the follow-up is stable
Today's financial report is also Apple, compared to Amazon's bloody storm, Apple's performance is as stable as ever, and the situation is obviously much gentler.
According to the earnings report, Apple's second-quarter revenue of $97.27 billion exceeded the market's expectation of $93.98 billion; earnings per share of $1.52, exceeding market expectations of $1.43; gross margin of 43.7%, exceeding market expectations of 43.1%.
From the perspective of each sub-business, the sales of major product lines have not received much shadow from the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and supply chain. Among them, iPhone product revenue was $50.57 billion, an increase of 5.5% year-on-year; Mac revenue was $10.44 billion, an increase of 14.73% year-on-year; iPad revenue was $7.65 billion, down 1.9% year-on-year; service revenue was $19.82 billion, an increase of 17.28% year-on-year.
Apple's revenue and profit growth, picture from AppleInsider
This time, both the main financial indicators and the shared business line indicators exceeded market expectations, and from the perspective of completion, this is a very good financial report. In addition, Apple also announced that it will authorize an additional $90 billion for stock repurchases and raise its dividend by 5% to $0.23 per share, which greatly boosted market confidence. After the release of earnings data, Apple's stock price rose more than 4% at one point.
But then, Cook's words instantly made the market look bad, frightening the stock price to turn around and turn down to the next degree.
Cook said that although Apple's sales were strong in the quarter, Apple could not stand alone during the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain crisis and the Russo-Ukrainian war, which is expected to cost Apple nearly $8 billion. In addition, it is worth noting that Apple's revenue growth rate in the quarter was only 8.59% year-on-year, which is the first time that Apple has not achieved double-digit growth in the past six quarters.
This quarter, Apple still did not give guidance on the next quarter's performance in an uncertain environment, which also made everyone a little worried about whether Apple can maintain a strong sales momentum.
Resisting the downward pressure of the market, Microsoft once again offered a "huge hard" financial report
This week, the U.S. stock market suffered a "blood Tuesday", the three major stock indexes collectively plummeted, of which technology stocks became the leading sector in the market, the Nasdaq fell as much as 3.95%, Tesla fell by more than 12%, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and other high-weighted stocks also fell by more than 3%.
Just when the market panic peaked, "honor student" Microsoft stood up with an excellent financial report.
According to the earnings report, Microsoft's third-quarter revenue was $49.36 billion, up 18% year-on-year, higher than analysts' expectations of $49.04 billion, which is also Microsoft's sixth consecutive quarter of revenue of more than $40 billion; profit of $16.7 billion, an increase of 8% year-on-year; net income per share of $2.22, higher than analysts' expectations of $2.19. Judging from the main financial indicators, Microsoft has given an answer that exceeded market expectations.
From the perspective of sub-businesses, the continued strong revenue growth momentum of the "intelligent cloud" business is the main reason for the market confidence. In the quarter, revenue from the "smart cloud" business, which includes Azure, GitHub, server products, and cloud services, was $19.05 billion, higher than market expectations of $18.9 billion and up 26 percent year-over-year. Among them, Azure and other cloud services increased by 46% year-on-year, unchanged from the previous quarter's growth.
The growth rate of Microsoft's various businesses, the picture comes from CNBC
From the perspective of other business lines, there is almost no drag this time, and all business sectors continue to maintain positive growth, driving Microsoft's stock price to rise by more than 6% after hours, reversing the decline of technology stocks on the day.
The Productivity and Business Processing business, which includes Office products for business and individual consumers, LinkedIn, and Dynamics, recorded revenue of $15.8 billion, up 17% year-over-year, in line with market expectations, with Linkedin continuing to maintain its upward momentum, up 34% year-on-year; and "More Personal Computing" business revenue, including Windows, Xbox, and Surface computers, $14.52 billion, up 11% year-on-year. Higher than market expectations of $14.33 billion.
Although overall, Microsoft's performance in all aspects this time is very qualified. However, it is worth noting that in the quarter, except for Azure, server products and Windows commercial products and cloud services, the growth rate of other segments was flat with the previous quarter, and the growth rate of other segments slowed down. In addition, operating expenses increased 10% year-over-year in the quarter, the largest increase in nearly three years.
For the performance expectations for the next quarter, Microsoft still gave a very optimistic guidance, saying that it is full of confidence in the development of each sharing business. Microsoft also announced that it will return $12.4 billion to shareholders in the form of share repurchases and dividends in the third quarter.
Google rare "thunderstorm", revenue growth rate hit a two-year low
Also on the same day as Microsoft is Google. From the perspective of people in recent years, Microsoft and Google are becoming more and more similar, because the development of both companies is steady and progressive, step by step, the main revenue-generating business firmly occupies the top of the industry and almost no one matches it, such as intelligent cloud and other business growth lines are also developing rapidly. But this time, Microsoft remained solid, but Google unexpectedly outperformed expectations.
According to Google's fourth quarter 2021 financial report released on Tuesday, total revenue in the first quarter was $68.011 billion, an increase of 23% compared with $55.314 billion in the same period of the previous year; but net profit was $16.436 billion, down 8.3% from US$17.930 billion in the same period last year; diluted earnings per share were $24.62, compared with $26.29 per diluted share in the same period last year. Not only are all the main indicators lower than market expectations, but the revenue growth rate is also the lowest in the past two years.
Excerpted from Google's earnings report
Overall, the most important factor affecting Google's performance this time is mainly due to the slowdown in online advertising business and the reduction in profits caused by the sharp increase in research and development expenditure.
In the last quarter, when many companies that rely on advertising to eat were hit hard by Apple's new privacy regulations, Google relied on a standalone Android system to generate $61.24 billion in revenue, leading the way among a number of advertising agencies, making people feel that Google can fully withstand the storm of the advertising industry. However, Google's advertising performance this quarter seems to indicate that the entire advertising industry is in trouble, and Google is not alone.
The advertising business as a whole, which includes search, YouTube and other ad networks, recorded $54 billion in revenue, up 22 percent year-over-year but down nearly 11 percent sequentially. Among them, the continued slowdown in Youtube's revenue is particularly noteworthy, with Youtube's revenue growing by only 14.39% in the quarter, the lowest growth rate in the past five quarters.
In addition, this quarter's high spending directly cut the scale of Google's profits this time. Although in terms of revenue, the intelligent cloud business revenue of $5.821 billion in the quarter was not bad, not only 43.8% year-on-year, but also continued to maintain positive growth sequentially. But its spending is also rising at the same time, and the cloud computing unit is still in the red, with an operating loss of $931 million in the quarter, almost the same as last year. That said, cloud computing, though larger, has not contributed much to Google's profits.
In addition to the increase in spending on cloud computing, Google's "burning money" fire in other bets is getting hotter and fiercer. Google's R&D costs increased by more than $1 billion in the quarter compared to the same period last year, from $7.485 billion to $9.1 billion.
Affected by these factors, Google's stock price plunged more than 6% at one point in after-hours trading on the day.
But in this financial report, it is not without good news. Among them, the "other bets" business began to improve and grew rapidly. Revenue was $440 million for the quarter, compared to $198 million in the year-ago quarter and $181 million in the previous quarter, which may reveal the sign that Google's years of hard work are finally coming to fruition. Earlier this month, Waymo's driverless taxis have already taken their license plates and began to test the waters of commercial use.
In addition, Google also announced a $70 billion Class A and Class C stock repurchase program at the earnings conference, which will be implemented in due course depending on factors such as overall business and market conditions.
After watching the earnings performances of the four major technology giants this quarter, which one are you most optimistic about in the next quarter? Welcome to leave a message to discuss!