Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai walks to lunch at the Allen & Co. Media and Technology Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, on July 12, 2023.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Alphabet is scheduled to report fourth-quarter earnings Tuesday after the market closes.
Here’s what analysts are expecting:
Earnings: $1.59 per share, adjusted, according to LSEG, formerly known as Refinitiv.
Revenue: $85.33 billion, according to LSEG.
Google Cloud: $8.94 billion, according to StreetAccount.
YouTube ads: $9.21 billion, according to Street Account.
Traffic acquisition costs: $14.1 billion, according to StreetAccount.
Alphabet shares climbed to a record last week, joining Microsoft and Meta in rallying to fresh highs in January. Those climbs follow dramatic cost-cutting efforts that executives put in place in 2023.
Growth is accelerating, sparked by a rebound in the digital ad market and Google’s continuing dominance in mobile ads. But expansion remains meek by the company’s historic standards.
Analysts expect to see revenue growth of just more than 12% for the period that ended Dec. 31, from $76.05 billion in the same quarter a year earlier. That would be slightly above the growth rate for the third quarter and represent the strongest year-over-year increase since the first quarter of 2022. Between 2015 and the end of 2021, revenue growth reached at least 15% in all but three quarters.
YouTube is helping lift overall results, with revenue in that unit expected to jump 16% from $7.96 billion a year earlier. Google Cloud, which competes with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, remains a growth engine, with expansion expected to reach 22% from $7.32 billion.
“Our sense is retail and travel benefited Search spend in 4Q, while YouTube benefited from a stronger brand market,” analysts at KeyBanc Capital Markets wrote in a report on Jan. 28. They have the equivalent of a buy rating on the stock and increased their target price to $165 from $153.
Across Alphabet, CEO Sundar Pichai continues to focus on investments in artificial intelligence and embedding new generative AI tools into more of Google’s key products. To get there, Pichai has said the company has to make cuts elsewhere, which means more layoffs on top of 12,000 cuts last year, equal to roughly 6% of its full-time workforce.
In a memo earlier this month, Pichai warned employees that additional downsizing is coming this year, telling them that investing in its top priorities means “we have to make tough choices.” The company cut several hundred jobs in mid-January, affecting employees in areas including hardware and central engineering.
Wall Street has shown its confidence in Alphabet’s cost-cutting strategy as well as its ability to maintain its dominant internet business, even as generative AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT present consumers with new ways to access information. The stock price dipped in late 2022 and early 2023, in part due to concern that Google users would migrate elsewhere, but shares are up more than 9% this year after rallying 58% for all of last year. They closed Monday at $153.51.
In December, Google launched the large language model called Gemini, which it considers its largest and most capable AI model to date. The company is planning to license Gemini to customers through Google Cloud for them to use in their own applications.
Tech investors will be focused on earnings this week from most of the top companies in the industry. Microsoft reports Tuesday, alongside Alphabet. Amazon, Apple and Meta are all scheduled to release quarterly results Thursday.
— CNBC’s Jennifer Elias contributed to this report.
Alibaba’s global headquarters in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China, on May 9, 2024.
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Alibaba-backed Banma, a provider of technology for smart cars, is planning to list shares on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, according to a filing.
In a filing dated Aug. 21, Alibaba said it currently owns about 45% of Banma and will continue to control over 30% of the company’s stock after the listing. Banma said in a filing that the announcement does not guarantee a listing will take place.
Banma, founded in 2015 and based in Shanghai, is “principally engaged in the development of smart cockpit solutions,” Alibaba’s filing says. In March, Alibaba announced that it was deepening its partnership with BMW in China, building an artificial intelligence engine for cars with a solution built by Banma, “Alibaba’s intelligent cockpit solution provider.”
In addition to Alibaba, Banma is backed by investors including China’s SAIC Motor, SDIC Investment Management and Yunfeng Capital, a Chinese investment firm started by Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma.
Alibaba in the past referred to Banma as a joint venture “between us and SAIC Motor.”
Private renewable energy projects are still moving forward despite a pullback in government support, and new technology is making that construction more efficient.
Solar farms, for example, take meticulous planning and surveying, involve long hours and require significant labor. Now, robots are taking on the job.
CivDot is a four-wheeled robot that can mark up to 3,000 layout points per day and is accurate within 8 millimeters. The machine can ride over rugged terrain and work through rough weather.
It is the brainchild of California-based Civ Robotics.
“Our secret sauce and our core technology is actually in the navigation and the geospatial — being able to literally mark coordinates within less than a quarter inch, which is very, very difficult in an uneven terrain, outdoor surfaces, and out in the desert,” said Tom Yeshurun, CEO of Civ Robotics.
The data for manual surveying is uploaded into the Civ software, then the operator chooses the area they want to mark and presses go. The robot does the rest, saving both time and money.
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“The manual surveying equipment, if you use that in the field and you have three crews, they will need three land surveying handheld receivers. That alone is already equal to how much we lease our machines in the field, and all the labor savings is just another benefit,” Yeshurun said.
Civ Robotics has more than 100 of these robots in the field that are primarily being used by renewable energy companies, but they are also used in oil and gas. It is currently working with Bechtel Corporation on several solar projects.
“These were usually pretty highly paid field engineers that we would send out there, and they might be able to do 250 or 350 pile marks a day. With the CivDot robot, we’re able to do about 1250 a day,” said Kelley Brown, vice president at Bechtel.
Brown said the company has used the robot in thick and muddy terrain in Texas and out in the deserts of Nevada.
“And so you have to think about things like the tires, or you may have to think about clearance. Are you trying to get over existing brush and such, across the solar field? So that’s one thing that we contemplate. I think the other is, you know, this runs on batteries, so you’ve got to contemplate battery swaps,” she added.
Civ Robotics is backed by Alleycorp, FF Venture Capital, Bobcat Company, Newfund Capital, Trimble Ventures, and Converge. Total VC funding to date is $12.5 million.
There are other robotics solutions for markings, but the competition is mostly doing work on highways and soccer fields. Yeshurun said those rivals can’t handle the terrains that the solar industry faces as it expands into new territories.
CNBC producer Lisa Rizzolo contributed to this piece.
The PlayStation DualSense controller and PlayStation 5 console.
Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images
PlayStation 5 game consoles will cost $50 more in the U.S. starting this week, Sony announced on Wednesday.
The price for an entry-level PlayStation 5 Digital Edition will increase from $450 to $500, and a PlayStation 5 with a disc drive is going up to $550 from $500. Sony’s high-end PlayStation 5 Pro will cost $750, up from $700. The PlayStation 5 was first released in 2020.
President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announced in April went into effect earlier this month on most countries. The U.S. currently has a 30% tariff on imports from China, and higher tariffs on goods from the world’s second-largest economy are currently “paused,” according to the administration. Sony’s home country of Japan was hit with a 15% tariff.
While Sony didn’t attribute the increase to Trump’s tariffs, consumer companies have been warning for months that higher prices are on the way.
“Similar to many global businesses, we continue to navigate a challenging economic environment,” Sony said in its blog post.
The company said that retail prices for console accessories such as controllers haven’t changed.
Earlier this month, Sony officials said the company was working on supply chain diversification to combat U.S. tariffs, and said that the console hardware it sells in the U.S. is produced outside of China.
“It is difficult to speak to our hardware pricing strategy as that has implications for our future competitive strategy,” ” Sony officials said, according to a translated transcript of a call with financial analysts posted on its website. “But we intend to take a flexible approach to such decision-making by monitoring consumer price sensitivity as we think about total full-year segment profits, lifetime value, manufacturing, units sold in, and our content sales potential.”
In May, Microsoftraised the price of its Xbox video game consoles. Nintendo delayed pre-orders of its Switch 2 by a few weeks in April, attributing the delay to tariffs. Although Nintendo did not raise the price of its new consoles, it hiked the price of the original Switch earlier this month.