Air travelers walk toward a Lyft pickup area at Los Angeles International Airport in Los Angeles on Aug. 20, 2020.
Mario Tama | Getty Images
Lyft shares initially soared in extended trading on Tuesday but pulled way back after the company’s finance chief acknowledged on an earnings call that the release included a major error.
Here’s how the company did compared to estimates from analysts according to LSEG, formerly known as Refinitiv:
Earnings per share: 18 cents adjusted vs. 8 cents expected
Revenue: $1.22 billion vs. $1.22 billion expected
Lyft Chief Financial Officer Erin Brewer said on the earnings call that the company had misstated its margin expansion in the press release. Rather than 500 basis points, or 5%, of growth for 2024, as the company initially indicated, the actual increase will be 50 basis points, or 0.5%, Brewer said.
“This is actually a correction for the press release,” Brewer said.
The adjusted profit margin as a percentage of bookings will be 2.1%, up from 1.6% in 2023, Brewer added.
Lyft’s stock soared more than 60% minutes after the earnings release hit and is now up about 16%. The swift drop represents a market cap decline of well over $2 billion for a company that closed the day valued at less than $5 billion.
Revenue increased 4% from $1.175 billion a year earlier, Lyft said.
Gross bookings for the first quarter will be $3.5 billion to $3.6 billion, topping analysts’ estimates of $3.46 billion, according to StreetAccount.
“Given these factors, along with our plans for slightly lower capital expenditures for 2024 relative to 2023, we anticipate that Lyft will generate positive Free Cash Flow for the full-year for the first time,” Lyft said.
The company has struggled since its initial public offering in 2019, as it has bled cash to pay for drivers and compete with larger rival Uber. Even with Tuesday’s after-hours pop, the stock is still more than 80% off its debut price.
CEO David Risher, who took the helm in March of last year, said the company reached a record number of annual riders. The number of rides increased 26% from a year earlier to 191 million in the fourth quarter, and active riders rose 10% to 22.4 million.
Gross bookings for the year increased 14% to $13.8 billion, while bookings for the quarter rose 17% to $3.7 billion.
Prior to Tuesday’s report, Lyft shares were down 19% to start 2024. Uber shares are up 12%.
Synopsys logo is seen displayed on a smartphone with the flag of China in the background.
Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
The U.S. government has rescinded its export restrictions on chip design software to China, U.S.-based Synopsys announced Thursday.
“Synopsys is working to restore access to the recently restricted products in China,” it said in a statement.
The U.S. had reportedly told several chip design software companies, including Synopsys, in May that they were required to obtain licenses before exporting goods, such as software and chemicals for semiconductors, to China.
The U.S. Commerce Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
The news comes after China signaled last week that they are making progress on a trade truce with the U.S. and confirmed conditional agreements to resume some exchanges of rare earths and advanced technology.
The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.
Chris Jung | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.
S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.
Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.
Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.
While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.
Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.
New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.
Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.
A representation of cryptocurrency Ethereum is placed on a PC motherboard in this illustration taken on June 16, 2023.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
Stocks tied to the price of ether, better known as ETH, were higher on Wednesday, reflecting renewed enthusiasm for the crypto asset amid a surge of interest in stablecoins and tokenization.
“We’re finally at the point where real use cases are emerging, and stablecoins have been the first version of that at scale but they’re going to open the door to a much bigger story around tokenizing other assets and using digital assets in new ways,” Devin Ryan, head of financial technology research at Citizens.
On Tuesday, as bitcoin ETFs snapped a 15-day streak of inflows, ether ETFs saw $40 million in inflows led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust. ETH ETFs came back to life in June after much concern that they were becoming zombie funds.
The price of the coin itself was last higher by 5%, according to Coin Metrics, though it’s still down 24% this year.
Ethereum has been struggling with an identity crisis fueled by uncertainty about the network’s value proposition, weaker revenue since its last big technical upgrade and increasing competition from Solana. Market volatility, driven by geopolitical uncertainty this year, has not helped.
The Ethereum network’s smart contracts capability makes it a prominent platform for the tokenization of traditional assets, which includes U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins. Fundstrat’s Tom Lee this week called Ethereum “the backbone and architecture” of stablecoins. Both Tether (USDT) and Circle‘s USD Coin (USDC) are issued on the network.
BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund (known as BUIDL, which stands for USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) also launched on Ethereum last year before expanding to other blockchain networks.
Tokenization is the process of issuing digital representations on a blockchain network of publicly traded securities, real world assets or any other form of value. Holders of tokenized assets don’t have outright ownership of the assets themselves.
The latest wave of interest in ETH-related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood this week that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, after a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s IPO and the Senate passage of its proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.
Ether, which turns 10 years old at the end of July, is sitting about 75% off its all-time high.
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