YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki speaks during the opening keynote address at the Google I/O 2017 Conference at Shoreline Amphitheater on May 17, 2017 in Mountain View, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said Thursday that she’s stepping down. Chief product officer Neal Mohan will take the lead as the SVP and new head of YouTube.
“Today, after nearly 25 years here, I’ve decided to step back from my role as the head of YouTube and start a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects I’m passionate about,” she said.
Wojcicki, 54, joined YouTube as the CEO in 2014.
She will continue working with YouTube teams, coaching members and meeting with creators, she added.
Wojcicki said she agreed with Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai to, in the longer term, take on an advisory role across Google and Alphabet. “This will allow me to call on my different experiences over the years to offer counsel and guidance across Google and the portfolio of Alphabet companies,” she wrote.
“The time is right for me, and I feel able to do this because we have an incredible leadership team in place at YouTube,” she noted. “When I joined YouTube nine years ago, one of my first priorities was bringing in an incredible leadership team.”
Wojcicki has long-held ties to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who she let work out of her Menlo Park, California home upon founding Google. Page and Brin rented the garage space for $1,700 a month from her. Wojcicki was working in the marketing department at Intel at the time.
She joined Google in 1999 and oversaw the design and build of Google’s advertising and analytics products for fourteen years. In recent years, YouTube has expanded its physical footprint in areas like New York and near its headquarters in San Bruno, California.
Wojcicki’s blog post said she spent nearly 15 years of her career working with Mohan, the new head of YouTube, “first when he came over to Google with the DoubleClick acquisition in 2007 and as his role grew to become SVP of Display and Video Ads.”
YouTube has faced pressure in recent years amid a rise in popularity in social media, namely TikTok, which it has been trying to compete with through its short-form video platform Shorts. YouTube booked $7.96 billion in advertising revenue during the fourth quarter, which fell short of analyst expectations and was down 8% from the year prior.
Super Micro Computer shares plunged 20% on Wednesday after the company posted weaker-than-expected fiscal fourth quarter results, dented in part by President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
CEO Charles Liang told investors on a conference call that the company has “taken measures to reduce the impact” of the tariffs.
The company has in recent years benefited from surging demand for AI servers packed with Nvidia chips, but has growth has since slowed.
The server maker also offered guidance late Tuesday that fell short of consensus estimates. Super Micro said it expects 40 cents to 52 cents in adjusted earnings per share on $6 billion to $7 billion in revenue for the fiscal first quarter.
Wall Street had projected 59 cents per share and $6.6 billion in revenue for the first quarter.
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For the full year, Super Micro said it expects revenue to be at least $33 billion. That’s a step down from its forecast in February, where it projected as much as $40 billion in sales, but greater than the LSEG consensus of $29.94 billion.
Super Micro reported fourth-quarter adjusted earnings per share of 41 cents, compared with expectations for 44 cents. Revenue came in at $5.76 billion, which was below analysts’ forecasts of $5.89 billion.
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CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed reporting to this story.
Lisa Su, president and CEO of AMD, talks about the AMD EPYC processor during a keynote address at the 2019 CES in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S., January 9, 2019.
The Santa Clara, California-based company reported adjusted earnings of 48 cents per share, falling short of the 49 cents per share expected by analysts polled by LSEG.
“AI business revenue declined year over year as U.S. export restrictions effectively eliminated MI308 sales to China, and we began transitioning to our next generation,” Su said.
For the current quarter, AMD forecasted $8.7 billion in revenue, plus or minus $300 million, versus $8.3 billion expected by analysts. The company said its guidance does not account for revenue from its MI308 AI chip designed for the China market to work around chip restrictions.
During an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Wednesday, Su said the company has been working closely with the Trump administration on license requirements necessary to ship its chips to China, but took a “prudent” approach to its guide.
“From our standpoint, we think we have an extremely strong portfolio,” she said. “Tens of billions of dollars is the opportunity in a market that’s going to be, let’s call it 500 billion plus over the next few years.”
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Earlier this year, AMD said it would take a $800 million hit during the second quarter as a result of chip restrictions. AMD said in July it plans to soon resume those shipments as the Department of Commerce gets set to restart application review.
Some Wall Street analysts raised concerns over how soon those shipments may begin. Analysts at Morgan Stanley called the timing of the restart in China shipments “vague,” adding that the company requires a “near terms upside in GPU” to keep its premium.
“China upside sounds like it will take time to materialize (and it sounded like we shouldn’t count too much on it even if licenses are granted), pull-forward and inventory risks remain, and opex continues to march higher which is limiting earnings leverage,” wrote Bernstein analysts.
Investors also raised concerns about the company’s datacenter business, which grew 14% to $3.2 billion and includes its central processors and graphics processing units.
“We are more guarded on the company’s ability to drive significant scale in Datacenter GPUs over time, and think operating leverage is likely to be hampered by the significant OpEx we believe is needed for the company to support its software and systems efforts tied to datacenters,” wrote analysts at Goldman Sachs.
Su said Wednesday the company is seeing strong forecasts for compute from some of its largest customers and anticipates an “inflection point” into the third quarter.
“The data center business is actually the main driver of our growth, and we look at that as the opportunity in front of us,” she added.
Despite the post-earnings move, AMD’s revenues grew 32% from a year ago to $7.69 billion and topped a $7.42 billion estimate from analysts polled by LSEG. Net income jumped to $872 million, or 54 cents per share, up from $265 million, or 16 cents per share in the year-ago period.
The logo of Shopify is seen outside its headquarters in Ottawa, Ontario, on Sept. 28, 2018.
Chris Wattie | Reuters
Shopify shares soared 20% Wednesday after the company topped analysts’ estimates for the second quarter, and gave rosy guidance for the third quarter.
Here’s how the company did, compared with estimates from analysts polled by LSEG:
Earnings per share: 35 cents adj. vs. 29 cents
Revenue: $2.68 billion vs. $2.55 billion
Second-quarter sales surged 31% year over year to $2.68 billion, an acceleration from a year ago, when revenue expanded roughly 20%.
The Canadian e-commerce company also offered third-quarter guidance that surpassed expectations. Shopify said it expects revenue to grow at a “mid-to-high twenties percentage rate” year over year, which is higher than the 21.7% growth projected by analysts, according to StreetAccount.
The upbeat report and guidance suggested Shopify, which sells software for e-commerce businesses, is navigating President Donald Trump‘s trade war better than feared. Last quarter, the company noted there was macroeconomic “uncertainty ahead,” but that it wasn’t seeing significant price increases among its merchants due to the tariffs.
“We had factored into our guidance some potential impact from tariffs, which did not materialize,” Shopify CFO Jeff Hoffmeister said on a conference call with investors.
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Online retail peers Amazon and eBay last week reported strong revenue growth, indicating that consumers kept buying despite concerns of tariffs and rising prices.
The company hasn’t seen any “drops in U.S. demand, whether inbound, outbound or local” and instead saw the market accelerate in the second quarter, Hoffmeister said. Many Shopify merchants have raised prices, he added.
Shoppers don’t appear to be stocking up or pulling forward demand in anticipation of the tariffs, he said.
“So far we’re seeing no slowdown from the tariffs and that includes up until early August, where we are today,” Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” “The millions of stores on Shopify are doing really, really well.”
Shopify’s gross merchandise sales, or the total volume of merchandise sold on the platform, also came in higher than expected. GMS grew 29% year over year to $87.8 billion, surpassing Wall Street’s projected $81.5 billion, according to StreetAccount.
The company said it expects operating expenses as a percentage of revenue to be 38% to 39%, compared to 39% to 40% in the previous quarter.
Shopify has been investing heavily in adding more artificial intelligence tools to its platform as a way to attract and retain merchants. In May, the company released an “AI store builder” that generates webstores based on a few keywords. Shopify on Tuesday launched a set of tools to support shopping via AI agents.
Company executives said these investments appear to be paying off.
“As we continue to expand our platforms capabilities, add new products, and build for where commerce is heading, Shopify is becoming even more compelling to a wider range of businesses than ever before,” Hoffmeister said.