Big Tech companies report earnings: What to know this week

Emily McCormick · Reporter
9 min read

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Investors' focus this week will be on earnings results, with some of the most heavily weighted companies in the S&P 500 poised to deliver their quarterly reports.

Over the past couple of weeks, most of the companies that posted earnings results topped Wall Street's estimates, despite widespread concerns over the impact of supply chain challenges to corporate profits. These better-than-feared results helped power both the S&P 500 and Dow to fresh record highs in the past week.

As of Friday, about 23% of S&P 500 companies had reported actual results for the third quarter. Of these, 84% topped Wall Street's expectations for earnings per share (EPS), according to data from FactSet. And the estimated earnings growth rate for the S&P 500 stood at 32.7%, based on actual results and expectations for companies still yet to report. If maintained through the end of third-quarter earnings season, that would mark the third-highest earnings growth rate posted for the index since 2010.

Given the string of stronger-than-expected results posted so far, this week's docket of reports has a heightened bar to clear.

And that's especially set to be the case for the Big Tech companies, including Facebook (FB), Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN) and Alphabet (GOOGL). Most of these far outperformed the market last year, but have seen their stock gains cool so far in 2021 amid concerns over rising interest rates, chip shortages, and slowing growth after a surge in online media usage and demand for software during the height of the pandemic.

Despite the near-term challenges, however, some strategists have struck an upbeat tone on the technology sector as a whole.

"While the chip shortage will be a major conversation piece for tech investors during tech earnings season and clearly be an overhang, we believe the Street will instead look through any near-term disruption and focus on the underlying healthy demand drivers into 2022 which look robust," said Wedbush analyst Dan Ives in a note last week.

A number of the closely watched technology companies that reported last week posted results that disappointed investors or highlighted the lingering impact of these myriad concerns. Snap (SNAP), the parent company of the disappearing photo-sharing platform app Snapchat, offered a current-quarter forecast that fell short of expectations, with supply chain challenges for its advertiser customer base and privacy-related changes to Apple's iOS operating system weighing on sales and profits.

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The weak guidance sent Snap's stock down by 27% on Friday for its biggest single-day drop on record, and dragged down shares of other ad-driven companies including Facebook, Pinterest (PINS), Twitter (TWTR) and Alphabet.

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