The tech giants, who marched during the pandemic, were overwhelmed by inflation, shortages, competition and regulators, all challenges that will mark their 2022 year.
Google, Meta and Apple for Silicon Valley, Microsoft and Amazon, Seattle’s neighbors, all released their quarterly results this week.
Their turnover of several tens of billions of dollars remains impressive, and more or less in line with market expectations.
But deficits fueled by the health crisis and the war in Ukraine, as well as rising costs, raw materials and labor, weigh on their growth and prospects.
As a result, Amazon disappointed investors with weaker -than -expected sales forecasts for the current quarter: between 116 and 121 billion dollars, instead of the 125 billion expected by the consensus of FactSet analysts.
This has been a difficult quarter for Amazon. All his vital activities are going in the wrong directioncommented Andrew Lipsman of eMarketer.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the band organized a second “Prime Day” [opération de soldes annuelle, NDLR] in October this year to generate additional revenueHe added.
The stock of the online retail giant fell about 12% in electronic trading after the stock market closed on Thursday.
Slow growth
Apple also saw its growth slow in the period from January to March, as expected. Its quarterly revenue reached $ 97.2 billion, up 9% year-on-year. This is the first time since the summer of 2020 that Apple has posted single-digit growth.
The Cupertino group has so far been able to limit supply problems affecting the entire electronics sector, specifically the semiconductor industry.
But the disruption caused by the resurgence of coronavirus cases should take away 4 to 8 billion dollars in revenue for the current quarter, group leaders announced Thursday.
For Alphabet (Google, YouTube) and Meta (Facebook, Instagram), the two leaders in online advertising, the unfavorable economic context means advertisers are managing their budgets more carefully.
And many of them are attracted to the star TikTok, the application of short, musical and funny videos, which is very popular with young people.
The two California companies ensured that their short video formats, copied from TikTok, were well developed in terms of audience, and that they were actively working on their monetization.
Ang YouTube Shorts now build more than 30 billion daily views, four times more than a year agohired Sundar Pichai, the boss of the Alphabet.
Our move to short formats has not yet garnered huge profits, but we are optimisticassured Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Meta.
It will take many yearssaid Sheryl Sandberg, its director of operations.
A post-pandemic hangover
We may have witnessed a post-pandemic hangover, according to eMarketer analyst Paul Verna. Large technology companies certainly not celebrated, but the health crisis greatly boosted their businesshe explained. This kind of growth cannot last.
Google’s parent company earned $ 16.4 billion in the first quarter, 8% less than a year ago. Meta, for its part, published a better-than-expected net income, 7.47 billion dollars, but dropped 21% in a year.
The social media giant, which plunged into the stock market earlier this year after losing Facebook users for the first time, has partially captured this opportunity.
There are 3.64 billion people worldwide who use at least one of the group’s platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp) each month.
One sector of activity, however, is resisting current barriers, driven by practices adopted during the pandemic, from telecommuting to entertainment and online shopping: cloud computing.
Revenues from Azure, Microsoft’s remote computing platform, jumped 46% year-on-year, as in the previous quarter.
AWS, Amazon’s service, generated $ 18.4 billion in revenue in the first quarter (+36% year-on-year). It leads the industry with 33%of global cloud spending by the end of 2021, ahead of Microsoft (22%) and Google Cloud (9%), according to research firm Canalys.
Source: Radio-Canada
