Carl Eschenbach, co-CEO of Workday, speaking on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 18, 2024.
Adam Galici | CNBC
Workday shares soared 12% on Friday, one day after the finance and human resources software maker issued fiscal second-quarter results that exceeded analysts’ estimates and announced plans to further widen its adjusted operating margin through 2027.
Here is how the company did, compared to LSEG consensus:
Earnings per share: $1.75 adjusted vs. $1.65 expected
Revenue: $2.085 billion vs. $2.071 billion expected
Workday’s revenue was up about 17% year over year in the quarter ending July 31, according to a statement. Subscription revenue growth grew 17%. Net income, at $132 million, or 49 cents per share, increased from $79 million, or 30 cents per share, in the same quarter a year ago.
With respect to guidance, Workday is now looking for an adjusted operating margin of 25.25% in the 2025 fiscal year, compared to the 25% forecast it provided in May.
On a Thursday conference call with analysts, Zane Rowe, Workday’s finance chief, said he expects the company’s adjusted operating margin to expand to 30% in the 2026 and 2027 fiscal years, along with an annual subscription revenue growth of 15%. In September 2023, Workday said it was targeting a 25% adjusted operating margin for fiscal 2027 and subscription revenue growth between 17% and 19%.
“We are relentlessly focused on scaling all of our processes across the company as we review our product and go-to-market initiatives,” Rowe said. “We’re also becoming increasingly more targeted in our growth investments, balancing product development with go-to-market resources.”
Deutsche Bank analysts led by Brad Zelnick increased their 12-month price target on Workday stock to $275 from $265. They have a hold rating on the stock.
“The increased 30% operating margin target was the big upside surprise as it is now committed both sooner and greater than most were expecting,” the analysts wrote.
Citi, Evercore ISI and Piper Sandler analysts also raised their Workday price targets following the company’s report.
Conditions aren’t perfect for Workday, however. Organizations are still being more careful than usual before agreeing to sign contracts, Rowe said, adding that headcount growth among the existing customer base has slowed down.
Many other software companies have pointed to rougher economic conditions in recent quarters. But on Friday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said “the time has come for policy to adjust,” an indication that the central bank will lower its benchmark rate. That might benefit growing cloud software companies such as Workday. Investors moved away from those assets and opted for more defensive investments in 2022 as they anticipated rate hikes to ward off inflation.
The WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund, an exchange-traded fund that includes Workday, ended the day up 2% in Friday’s trading session. The S&P 500 index gained 1%.
But Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach did not suggest that market conditions will improve soon.
“In fact, we think the current environment of IT spending and the environment we’re selling into isn’t something that’s just been here the last couple quarters,” he said. “We think it’s the new norm going forward. We’re prepared because we have a great product.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025.
Hamad I Mohammed | Reuters
Tesla’s shares have finally turned positive for the year.
After a dismal first quarter, which was the worst for the stock in any period since 2022, and a brutal start to April, following President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping new tariffs, Wall Street has again rallied around the electric vehicle maker.
The stock rose 3.6% on Monday to $410.26, topping its closing price of 2024 by over $6. It’s up 85% since bottoming for the year at $221.86 on April 4. A new filing revealed that CEO Elon Musk purchased about $1 billion worth of shares in the company through his family foundation.
It’s the second straight year Tesla has bounced back after a down first quarter. Last year, the shares fell 29% in the first three months before ending up 63% for 2024.
In recent weeks, analysts have praised the EV maker’s proposed pay plan for Musk, which could amount to a $1 trillion windfall for the world’s richest person over the next decade. The company has also gotten a boost from its new MegaBlocks battery energy storage systems that Tesla ships preassembled to businesses looking to lower their power costs or make greater use of electricity from renewable resources.
Even with the rebound, Tesla is the second-worst performer this year among tech’s megacaps, ahead of only Apple, which is down about 5% in 2025. Tesla is still in the midst of a multi-quarter sales slump due to an aging lineup of EVs and increased competition from lower-cost competitors in China, namely BYD.
Tesla has seen a consumer backlash, in part because of Musk’s political activities, including spending nearly $300 million to propel President Trump back to the White House and his work with the Trump administration to slash the federal workforce.
Tesla leadership has been working to shift investors’ attention to other topics such as robotaxis and humanoid robots.
However, the company has yet to deliver vehicles that are safe to use without a human onboard and ready to take control if needed. And while Musk is touting Tesla’s Optimus robots, which he says will be able to do everything from factory work to babysitting, a product is still a long way from hitting the market.
Shares of the search giant jumped more than 4% on Monday, pushing the company into territory occupied only by Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple.
The stock got a big lift in early September from an antitrust ruling by a judge, whose penalties came in lighter than shareholders feared. The U.S. Department of Justice wanted Google to be forced to divest its Chrome browser, and last year a district court ruled that the company held an illegal monopoly in search and related advertising.
But Judge Amit Mehta decided against the most severe consequences proposed by the DOJ, which sent shares soaring to a record. After the big rally, President Donald Trump congratulated the company and called it “a very good day.”
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Alphabet shares are now up more than 30% this year, compared to the 15% gain for the Nasdaq.
The $3 trillion milestone comes roughly 20 years after Google’s IPO and a little more than 10 years after the creation of Alphabet as a holding company, with Google its prime subsidiary.
CEO Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Alphabet in 2019, replacing co-founder Larry Page. Pichai’s latest challenge has been the surge of new competition due to the rise of artificial intelligence, which the company has had to manage through while also fending off an aggressive set of regulators in the U.S. and Europe.
The rise of Perplexity and OpenAI ended up helping Google land the recent favorable antitrust ruling. The company’s hopes of becoming a major AI player largely ride with Gemini, Google’s flagship suite of AI models.
The U.S. and China have reached a ‘framework’ deal for social media platform TikTok, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday.
“It’s between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed upon,” he said from U.S.-China talks in Madrid.
Both President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet Friday to discuss the terms. Trump also said in a Truth Social post Monday that a deal was reached “on a ‘certain’ company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save.”
Bessent indicated that the framework could pivot the platform to U.S.-controlled ownership.
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The comments came during the latest round of trade discussions between the U.S. and China. Relations have soured between the two countries in recent months from Trump’s tariffs and other trade restrictions.
At the same time, TikTok parent company ByteDance faces a Sept. 17 deadline to divest the platform’s U.S. business or face being shut down in the country.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Monday that the deadline may need to be pushed back to get the deal signed, but there won’t be ongoing extensions.
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Congress passed a law last year prohibiting app store operators like Apple and Google from distributing TikTok in the U.S. due to its “foreign adversary-controlled application” status.
But Trump postponed the shutdown in January, signing an executive order in January that gave ByteDance 75 more days to make a deal. Further extensions came by way of executive orders in April and in June.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnicksaid in July that TikTok would shutter for Americans if China doesn’t give the U.S. more autonomy over the popular short-form video app.
As for who controls the platform, Trump told Fox News in June that he had a group of “very wealthy people” ready to buy the app and could reveal their identities in two weeks. The reveal never came.
He has previously said he’d be open to Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison or Tesla CEO Elon Musk buying TikTok in the U.S. Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity has submitted a bid for an acquisition, as has businessman Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty internet advocacy group, CNBC reported in January.
Trump told CNBC in an interview last year that he believed the platform was a national security threat, although the White House started a TikTok account in August.