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Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc., during Stanford’s 2024 Business, Government, and Society forum in Stanford, California, US, on Wednesday, April 3, 2024.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

As tech’s behemoths get set to report earnings this week, they do so facing a mountain of drama.

At Google, there have been protests and restructurings, while Tesla just announced mass layoffs, price cuts and a Cybertruck recall. Microsoft’s OpenAI relationship faces fresh scrutiny and Facebook parent Meta’s major rollout of its new artificial intelligence assistant last week didn’t go so well.

The troubling news comes alongside a generative AI gold rush, as Big Tech players race the new technology into their vast portfolios of products and features to ensure they don’t fall behind in a market that’s predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.

Wall Street has been openly jittery about the upcoming results, pushing the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite down 5.5% last week, the steepest weekly slump since November 2022. Nvidia, which has emerged as an AI darling, plunged 14%, leading the slide.

“Whether this tech sell-off continues, I think really depends on how the mega-cap tech reports,” said King Lip, chief strategist at BakerAvenue Wealth Management, in an interview with CNBC’s “Closing Bell” on Monday. “Valuations have definitely been more reasonable now, now that we’ve had a little bit of a correction.”

Lip said that in the last couple of weeks his firm has “trimmed some of our tech exposure.”

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Tech companies have been pouring record sums into emerging generative AI startups and investing heavily in Nvidia’s processors to build AI models and run massive workloads. While that market is growing rapidly, investors are growing anxious that other issues at hand could lead to a pullback in spending.

On this week’s earnings calls, companies are likely to continue highlighting their efforts to cut costs and bolster profits, an efficiency theme that’s been running across the industry since early last year.

Tesla kicks off tech earnings season after the close of trading on Tuesday, with shares of the electric vehicle maker trading at their lowest since January 2023. Meta, coming off its biggest weekly stock slide since August, follows on Wednesday. Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet report on Thursday, giving Wall Street a close look at how businesses are planning their budgets for AI infrastructure.

Here are some of the biggest issues facing the Big Tech companies in their reports this week.

Tesla

A Tesla Cybertruck sits on a lot at a Tesla dealership on April 15, 2024 in Austin, Texas. 

Brandon Bell | Getty Images

Tesla shares fell for a seventh straight day on Monday and are now down 43% year to date. Elon Musk’s EV company is expected to report a decline in sales of about 5%, which would be the first year-over-year revenue drop since 2020, when the Covid pandemic disrupted operations.

Tesla’s earnings follow a bruising quarterly deliveries report and additional price cuts to the company’s vehicles and its premium driver assistance system.

Last week, the EV maker said it was laying off more than 10% of its workforce, and the same day executives Drew Baglino and Rohan Patel announced their departures.

“As we prepare the company for our next phase of growth, it is extremely important to look at every aspect of the company for cost reductions and increasing productivity,” Musk wrote in a memo announcing the layoffs.

Two days later, Musk informed employees via email that the company had sent out “incorrectly low” severance packages to some laid-off workers. And on April 12, Tesla issued a voluntary recall of more than 3,800 Cybertrucks to fix a “stuck pedal” issue depicted in a viral TikTok video.

“Since late 2023, sentiment on Tesla (TSLA) has deteriorated,” wrote John Murphy, an analyst at Bank of America, in a note on Monday.

Meta

Meta will generate more ad dollars than its competition, says Jefferies Brent Thill

Meta has been a good bet for investors this year despite last week’s slip. The stock is up 36% in 2024 after almost tripling last year, when CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Wall Street that 2023 would be the company’s “year of efficiency.”

But Meta still faces plenty of questions. For one, its Reality Labs division, which houses all of the virtual reality technologies for the nascent metaverse, is expected to show a quarterly loss of over $4 billion for a second straight period.

When it comes to AI, Meta debuted its assistant — Meta AI — on WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Messenger last week. It was the company’s biggest-ever AI initiative and is set to go up against OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google‘s Gemini.

But Meta AI quickly led to controversy. The assistant reportedly joined a private parents’ group on Facebook and claimed to have a gifted and disabled child, sounding off in the comments about its experiences with New York-area educational programs. In another case, it reportedly joined a Buy Nothing forum and tried to do free giveaways for nonexistent items.

Now, Meta has to show that it’s ready for what’s certain to be a heated election season, as President Joe Biden and Republican Donald Trump prepare to square off for a second time. Dating back to Trump’s successful presidential bid in 2016, Facebook has been a problematic place for political discourse and misinformation.

Meta is expected to report revenue growth of 26% from a year earlier to $36.16 billion, according to LSEG. That would mark the fastest rate of expansion for any period since 2021.

Alphabet

Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc., during Stanford’s 2024 Business, Government, and Society forum in Stanford, California, US, on Wednesday, April 3, 2024. 

Loren Elliott | Bloomberg | Getty Images

On a busy Thursday for tech earnings, Alphabet is likely to capture the most attention.

Last week, finance chief Ruth Porat announced a restructuring of Google’s finance department, a move that will include layoffs and relocations, as the company drives more resources toward AI.

On the same day, Google terminated 28 employees, according to an internal memo viewed by CNBC, following a series of protests against labor conditions and the company’s contract to provide the Israeli government and military with cloud computing and artificial intelligence services.

The dismissals came after nine Google workers were arrested on trespassing charges Tuesday night, staging a sit-in at the company’s offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California, including a protest in Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s office. The arrests, livestreamed on Twitch by participants, coincided with rallies outside Google offices in New York, Sunnyvale and Seattle, which attracted hundreds of attendees, according to workers involved.

On Thursday, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced a consolidation of the company’s AI teams, including responsible AI and related research teams, under the Google DeepMind umbrella. He said in a memo that “this is a business” and employees should not “attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.”

Pichai has struggled to quell employee discontent on a host of matters since the pandemic, as the company has been forced to reckon with slower growth than in years past and an investor base that’s become increasingly concerned with costs.

Analysts expect a first-quarter revenue increase of 13%, which would mark a second straight quarter of year-over-year growth in the low teens. For four straight periods, between mid-2022 and mid-2023, expansion was in single digits as advertisers pulled back due to soaring inflation and rising interest rates.

Alphabet shares are up 12% this year, topping the S&P 500, which has gained 5.1%.

Microsoft

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (R) speaks as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (L) looks on during the OpenAI DevDay event on November 06, 2023 in San Francisco, California. Altman delivered the keynote address at the first ever Open AI DevDay conference. 

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

As for Microsoft, the company seemed to narrowly avoid a European Union antitrust probe into its relationship with OpenAI, after EU regulators had pointed to the possibility earlier this year.

Microsoft has invested more than $10 billion in OpenAI, whose ChatGPT chatbot kicked off the generative AI boom in late 2022. AI has been a major focus of Microsoft’s earnings calls since then, as the company serves as OpenAI’s key technology partner through its Azure cloud infrastructure.

Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in AI startup Anthropic as well, and has taken stakes in Mistral, Figure and Humane.

The company’s position in AI has been the biggest driver behind its ascent to $3 trillion in market cap, passing Apple as the most valuable U.S. company. However, the stock is only up 6.8% this year, trailing many of its peers, and some analysts see potential weakness in parts of Microsoft’s customer base, notably small and medium-sized businesses.

“MSFT has more SMB and consumer exposure than any other stock we cover,” wrote analysts at Guggenheim, in a note dated April 21. “And while those cohorts have held up surprisingly well during this soft macro period, we are starting to see some indications of weakening demand from them.”

Microsoft is expected to report sales growth of 15% in the first quarter, according to LSEG, but analysts are projecting a slowdown over each of the next three periods.

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Apple’s falling iPhone sales don’t bother Wall Street so long as margins, buybacks are increasing

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Apple's falling iPhone sales don't bother Wall Street so long as margins, buybacks are increasing

A 10% decline in iPhone sales sounds like a problem for Apple, considering the company counts on the devices for half its revenue.

But investors didn’t seem to mind Thursday, when Apple revealed the year-over-year drop in its fiscal second-quarter earnings report. The stock rose more than 6% after the market close, a rally that would be the steepest since November 2022 should it continue into regular trading Friday.

Instead of glaring too much at iPhone revenue, Wall Street chose to focus on the positive. Apple’s gross margin expanded to 46.6%, continuing an upward trajectory that reflects the company’s growing services business, which brings with it stout profits.

Apple also signaled overall revenue growth in the current quarter will be in the low single digits, after a 4% decline in the second period. Analysts were looking for third-quarter growth of 1.3%, according to LSEG.

Deepwater Asset Management’s Gene Munster described the guidance as a “relief” given the recent trajectory of the business.

“I was expecting this was going to be flat, some investors were saying it was going to be down a few percent in June,” Munster told CNBC’s “Fast Money” after the report. “I think that was a big part of this move higher.”

But perhaps the biggest catalyst for the pop was Apple’s announcement that it had approved $110 billion of share buybacks, the most ever for a public company. For the past three years, Apple has authorized $90 billion in annual repurchases.

The after-hours jump shows how much investors are valuing Apple’s massive cash flow and the company’s willingness to return more of it to shareholders. It’s a shift in the way Apple has been viewed by Wall Street over the years, away from a hits-driven gadgets business and toward a financial powerhouse.

“Our free cash flow generation has been very strong over the years, particularly the last few years,” Apple CFO Luca Maestri said on an earnings call.

Apple revealed earlier this year that it has 2.2 billion active devices, illustrating the mammoth reach of its customer base as the company rolls out new subscription services. Despite the 4% drop in revenue, Apple still recorded nearly $24 billion in profit, a slip of just over 2% from a year earlier.

Apple said iPhone sales suffered from a difficult comparison to last year, when sales were elevated after previous shortages. Still, investors are looking for future iPhone growth, and many analysts say a potential iPhone with artificial intelligence features could do the trick and help the company snag customers from Android. Annual iPhone revenue peaked in Apple’s fiscal 2022.

While Apple provided some guidance for total revenue, it avoided offering any sort of forecast for iPhone sales.

That’s a change, even for a company that’s been giving less forward guidance since the pandemic. Maestri typically provides trends on iPhone sales, and had for the past four quarters.

There’s no guarantee investors will be able to continue counting on increased buybacks from a company that’s been more aggressive in that department than any other. Apple says it’s trying to draw down its huge cash pile, which stood at $162 billion at the end of the quarter. When its debt is roughly equal to its cash balance — meaning the company is net cash neutral — Apple will evaluate what to do next, executives said Thursday.

As of the end of 2023, Apple had spent $658 billion on buybacks over the past 10 years, far ahead of second-place Microsoft, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices.

“For the last couple of years we were doing $90 billion and now we’re doing $110 billion,” Maestri said on the call.

In terms of what happens when Apple gets to net cash neutral, Maestri said, “let’s get there first. It’s going to take a while still.”

“And then when we are there,” he said, “we’re going to reassess and see what is the optimum capital structure for the company at that point in time.”

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Don’t rate Tesla’s Full Self Driving too highly, tech investor says: ‘By no means autonomous driving’

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Don't rate Tesla's Full Self Driving too highly, tech investor says: 'By no means autonomous driving'

People are shopping at a Tesla store in Shanghai, China, on Feb. 17, 2024.

Costfoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

News of electric car giant Tesla’s progress toward rolling out its advanced driver-assistance feature in China isn’t as groundbreaking as investors are treating it, according to a top tech investor.

Mark Hawtin, GAM Investment Management’s investment director focused on investing in disruptive growth and technology stocks, told CNBC’ “Squawk Box Europe” Thursday that such expectations were misleading — not least because Tesla’s Full Self Driving service doesn’t offer full autonomous driving.

“We should say what they’re doing — everyone’s talking about this full self-driving capability,” Hawtin told CNBC. “What they’re going to be able to do in China is what they already do in the U.S. or U.K., which is sort of this assisted-driver capability.”

On Monday, shares of Tesla rose sharply, notching their best day since March 2021, after it passed a significant milestone toward the launch of FSD in China. Local Chinese authorities removed restrictions on its cars after passing the country’s data security requirements, Tesla said Sunday.

This raised expectations that Tesla’s FSD would soon be available in China. Tesla shares are up 6.7% in the last five trading days, largely on the back of buzz surrounding its roadmap to bringing FSD to China — plus, comments from CEO Elon Musk about plans to start production of more affordable models in early 2025.

But Hawtin said that the company’s so-called Full Self Driving service lacks the qualities that would make it an example of truly self-driving technology.

“It’s by no means autonomous driving yet,” he told CNBC. He thinks that a version of Tesla FSD capable of “true autonomy” is still five to 10 years away.

Hawtin said that Tesla’s reported deal with China’s Baidu is a bigger short-term win for Baidu than Tesla, adding that competition is intense in China with names like BYD, Huawei, Xpeng, Li Auto, and Xiaomi all supplying technology capable of Level 2 autonomy.

Tesla reportedly scored a deal with Baidu that would allow Musk’s firm to tap into Baidu’s mapping service license, a key requirement for offering FSD on Chinese public roads, per Reuters.

Tesla was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.

Full Self Driving, or FSD, is an upgrade to Tesla’s Autopilot driver assistant. Tesla doesn’t yet make or sell cars capable of full autonomous driving. It sells “Level 2” driver-assistance systems, marketed under the brand name FSD.

“Level 3” assisted driving, otherwise known as “conditional automation,” entails systems that handle all aspects of driving, but a driver still must be present, according to the SAE standards-setting organization.

Tesla has offered its FSD technology in China for years, but with a restricted feature set that limits it to operations like automated lane changing.

GAM does not own shares of Tesla, and Hawtin said he doesn’t personally own shares either.

– CNBC’s Lora Kolodny and Evelyn Cheng contributed to this report

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Apple on pace for best day since 2022 after earnings beat, $110 billion stock buyback

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Apple on pace for best day since 2022 after earnings beat, 0 billion stock buyback

Apple’s Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook attends the China Development Forum in Beijing on March 24, 2024. 

Pedro Pardo | AFP  | Getty Images

Apple shares popped more than 6% on Friday morning after the company reported better-than-expected second-quarter earnings and the largest-ever stock buyback program. If the gains hold until the market closes, it will be the best day for Apple shares since Nov. 30, 2022.

The iPhone maker announced on Thursday it would repurchase $110 billion of its shares, the biggest buyback in U.S. history, surpassing Apple’s prior repurchases. The company posted earnings of $1.53 per share on revenue of $90.75 billion, exceeding analysts’ estimates of earnings of $1.50 per share on revenue of $90.01 billion, according to LSEG.

But overall sales decreased 4% and iPhone sales dropped 10% year over year during the quarter, indicating flagging demand for the smartphone’s latest generation. Apple CEO Tim Cook told CNBC that quarterly sales suffered from a difficult comparison to the year-earlier period.

Analysts at Bank of America reiterated their buy rating of Apple stock — calling it a top pick — and raised their price target to $230 from $225 in a Friday investor note, writing that they expect the company to roll out generative artificial intelligence features for the iPhone this year.

“Apple is growing iPhones in Mainland China, estimate revisions are turning positive and GenAI features will drive a strong upgrade cycle,” they wrote.

JPMorgan analysts, maintaining an overweight rating, lifted their price target for Apple to $225 from $210 on Thursday, pointing to “resilient” year-over-year iPhone revenues and “expectations of an upgrade cycle-led tailwind in iPads” ahead of Apple’s product launch event next week.

“All in all, while modest revenue growth year-over-year might not be the ideal outcome,” they wrote, “it now provides visibility into higher revenue opportunities in the coming years with tailwinds from product cycles across hardware devices as well as an AI-led smartphone cycle further boosting growth.”

Morgan Stanley analysts retained their overweight rating of Apple and hiked their price target to $216 from $210 on Friday, citing the company’s quarterly performance, year-over-year growth in iPhone shipments to China in March, stock buyback and hints at AI updates to come.

“It’s hard not to get more bullish here,” they wrote.

CNBC’s Michael Bloom contributed to this report.

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