Tech Sector: Alarms Sound Due To Quarterly Reports

Apple's recent quarterly results were foreseeable, as the company continues its previous trend of ever-increasing sales records. At the same time, however, there's still concern that the coming quarter may witness a substantial decline in the Mac department – in part, due to the massive success of the MacBook Pro M1 Pro and Max released last year, but also due to the increasingly cloudy weather on the market. Other tech giants have seen considerably less luck than Apple, with both current numbers and prognoses for the future looking much rougher – particularly given that very few other companies can rely on as diverse a portfolio as Apple.

Amazon – Shipping At High Losses
For those paying attention to Amazon's stock prices, the company's stock prices plunged from US$110.51 to US$95.59, clearly indicating that something has gone wrong. The company's hosting business with AWS did, however, manage to mitigate some of the damage – although the company documented a loss of US$2.5 billion due to shipping costs for its products sold online. According to the prognoses, the Christmas season isn't expected to change much will likely be a weak one for sales. Although the new Prime Day at the beginning of October did go quite well according to the company, the company's enthusiasm for the future looks a little bit different.





Microsoft – Cloud Weaknesses
Microsoft also witnessed a significant decrease in stock prices – from US$250 to US$224. Although the quarter wasn't a terrible one for the company, the current weakness of the PC market and low sales numbers also contributed. Whilst the Mac conquered itself a bigger portion of the market, the Windows market experienced a significant downturn. Microsoft also reported that it did not manage to achieve the expected growth in the cloud sector of its business, with Azure showing only 35% growth. In spite of everything, the company still achieved a US$17.6 in profits – although this is a 14% decrease in comparison to the previous year.

Alphabet/Google
Compared to the same period last year, Google did see a slight increase in sales, although it still failed to fulfill its prognoses. Due to considerably worse margins, the company's earnings per share fell from US$1.40 to US$1.06. There was some unusual restraint from advertising customers (with investments in advertising currently being made with much more caution) and considerable increases in personnel costs due to new hires. As stated during the announcement of the figures, Google is currently suffering from rising interest rates, a dollar that is too strong, and decreasing activity on the market. Additionally, YouTube is also losing some of its market share to TikTok, further decreasing the company's revenue from advertising.

Meta/Facebook
The crash of Facebook's parent company, Meta, is even more drastically noticeable. Within no more than a few hours, the company's share value fell from US$129.35 to US$97.50. Wall Street is referring to the company's current figures as a disaster. A drop in profits of more than 52% is more than a simple dent, and the company doesn't expect things to magically turn around next quarter. Facebook has a very similar problem to Google, mainly customers' hesitation to purchase advertising spots. At the same time, "Reality Labs", Meta's vision for the future of the AR/VR world, is sucking up billions of dollars of resources without delivering any mentionable profits.