Wall Street is anxious to hear Apple CEO Tim Cook’s first public comments on tariffs
Apple CEO Tim Cook poses as Apple holds an event at the Steve Jobs Theater on its campus in Cupertino, California, on Sept. 9, 2024.
Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters
The most anticipated part of Apple’s Thursday earnings won’t be iPhone sales or Mac forecasts – it’ll be CEO Tim Cook’s comments on how the company is dealing with President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
Apple is one of the most exposed companies to Trump’s tariffs and expected retaliation. It makes about three-quarters of its overall revenue from physical goods — iPhones, Macs and Apple Watches — mostly made in China or elsewhere in Asia. And the U.S. is its largest market.
“It’s how Apple responds to ‘everything else’ that will set the tone for post-earnings sentiment,” wrote Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring in a Monday note.
He has an overweight rating on the stock, and wants to hear what Cook and Apple finance chief Kevan Parekh have to say about how the company is mitigating supply chain and tariffs risks, if Apple will raise prices or eat costs, and the status of Cook’s relationships with Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Apple hasn’t commented on the hefty tariffs Trump announced for every country in the world on April 2, but they represent a deep threat to the iPhone maker’s supply chain and sent the company’s share price down 9%.
“We are monitoring the situation and don’t have anything more to add than that,” Cook said during Apple’s January earnings call. Those were the company’s most recent comments on Trump’s trade policy.
Apple is perhaps the highest-profile example of a company that’s gotten caught up in Trump’s trade war.
It’s the most valuable U.S. company, hundreds of millions of Americans own iPhones and Cook built his reputation in Silicon Valley as an operations expert who keeps Apple’s inventory low and its logistics tight.
But Apple and Cook have stayed tight-lipped publicly even as Trump administration officials called for the company to move iPhone production to the U.S., imagining millions of Americans “screwing in little screws” to build the devices.
The White House suggested that Apple was capable of building iPhones in the U.S., something that many analysts said is impossible at worst and would result in a $3,500 iPhone at best.
“I speak to Tim Cook. I helped Tim Cook, recently, and that whole business,” Trump said in an oval office briefing earlier this month after he delayed the highest-tariffs on non-China nations for 90 days. It was a move that boosted Apple stock. Cook has maintained a line of communication with the Trump administration, according to Trump, dating back to his first term.
Apple CEO Tim Cook escorts President Donald Trump as he tours Apple’s Mac Pro manufacturing plant with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin looking on in Austin, Texas, November 20, 2019.
Tom Brenner | Reuters
Now it’s time to hear from Apple itself.
The tariffs are a material issue that will eventually affect the company’s financials. TD Cowen predicts that the current tariffs will cost Apple about 6% of its annual earnings this year. Apple reported about $94 billion in profit in its fiscal 2024.
It’s not just investors that want a peek into Apple’s thinking — Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., questioned Cook about what he discussed with the Trump administration ahead of the president’s decision to pause tariffs on non-China nations.
Apple’s share price remains lower than it was on April 2, even though analysts have said the pause will give Apple some flexibility to avoid the highest tariffs, thanks to its production locations in India and Vietnam.
Several recent reports have said that Apple will try to source as many iPhones as possible from from India, which only faces a 10% tariff, to avoid the highest 145% tariffs on China. But although Apple has been ramping up iPhone production in India since 2017, the company has only recently begun to ship commercially significant quantities in recent years, and Apple hasn’t confirmed the pivot to India or discussed its Indian production capabilities.
“While it’s possible for all 25 million of India capacity to be allocated to the US near-term, we think it could take approximately a year for production to double to 50 million overall,” TD Cowen analyst Krish Sankar wrote Monday, saying that Apple is expected to sell between 65 million and 70 million iPhones in the U.S. this year.
Apple declined to comment on sourcing iPhones to the U.S. from India.
Another closely-watched metric will be Apple’s China revenue, which could indicate if rising nationalism will hurt iPhone sales in the company’s third largest market, which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Some analysts have noted that the smartphone owners in China are more likely to switch phone brands than Western consumers. There’s concern that now those Chinese consumers could take cues from media and government officials and buy Chinese phone brands, such as phones made by Huawei.
Dipanjan Chatterjee, principal analyst at Forrester, said that if Apple were to move a lot of production out of China, it would also have to consider if that could upset the Chinese consumer.
“If Apple is going to pull production out of China, that’s not going to go down well in that market,” Chatterjee said. “They’re going to hedge. You’re going to see a lot more saying and a little bit of tinkering and not a whole lot of doing.”
Analysts polled by FactSet expect Apple to report $1.62 in earnings per share on $94.19 billion in sales, which would be an almost 4% revenue increase on an annual basis.
WATCH: Street’s biggest Apple bear says a production move to India is unrealistic
The Intel logo is displayed on a sign in front of Intel headquarters on July 16, 2025 in Santa Clara, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Intel reported second-quarter results on Thursday that beat Wall Street expectations on revenue, as the company’s new CEO Lip-Bu Tan announced significant cuts in chip factory construction. The stock ticked higher in extended trading.
Here’s how the chipmaker did versus LSEG consensus estimates:
- Earnings per share: Loss of 10 cents per share, adjusted.
- Revenue: $12.86 billion versus $11.92 billion estimated
Intel said it expects revenue for the third-quarter of $13.1 billion at the midpoint of its range, versus the average analyst estimate of $12.65 billion. The chipmaker said that it expects to break even on earnings while analysts were looking for earnings of 4 cents per share.
For the second quarter, Intel reported a net loss of $2.9 billion, or 67 cents per share, compared with a $1.61 billion net loss, or 38 cents per share, in the year-earlier period. Earnings per share were not comparable to analyst estimates due to an $800 million impairment charge, “related to excess tools with no identified re-use,” the company said. That resulted in an EPS adjustment of about 20 cents.
The report was Intel’s second since Lip-Bu Tan took over as CEO in March, promising to make the chipmaker’s products competitive again, and to reduce bureaucracy and layers of management, including slashing staff in Oregon and California.
In a memo to employees published on Thursday, Tan said that the first few months of his tenure had “not been easy.” He said that the company had “completed the majority” of its planned layoffs, amounting to 15% of the workforce, and that it plans to end the year with 75,000 employees. Intel previously said it was trying to reduce operating expenses by $17 billion in 2025.
Intel shares are up about 13% this year as of Thursday’s close after plummeting 60% in 2024, their worst year on record.
Tan also announced several other spending cuts in the memo, particularly in the company’s costly foundry division, which makes chips for other companies and is still looking for a big customer to anchor the business.
Intel said its foundry business had an operating loss of $3.17 billion on $4.4 billion in revenue.
Tan said that Intel had cancelled planned fab projects in Germany and Poland, and will consolidate its testing and assembly operations in Vietnam and Malaysia. He added that the company would slow down the pace of its construction of a cutting-edge chip factory in Ohio, depending on market demand and if it can secure big customers for the facility.
“Over the past several years, the company invested too much, too soon – without adequate demand,” Tan wrote. “In the process, our factory footprint became needlessly fragmented and underutilized.”
Tan wrote that the company’s forthcoming chip manufacturing process, called 14A, will be built out based on confirmed customer commitments.
“There are no more blank checks. Every investment must make economic sense,” Tan wrote.
The company’s client computing group, which is primarily comprised of sales of central processors for PCs, had $7.9 billion in sales, down 3% on an annual basis.
Revenue in the data center group, which includes some AI chips but is mostly central processors for servers, rose 4% to $3.9 billion. Tan wrote in his memo that Intel wants to regain market share in data center chips, and is looking for a permanent leader for the business. Longtime rival Advanced Micro Devices has increasingly been winning server business from cloud customers.
Tan added he would personally review and approve all chip designs before they are taped out, which is the final step of the design process before a new chip is manufactured.
WATCH: How U.S. companies are mitigating Trump tariffs with foreign trade zones
Thiago Prudencio | LightRocket | Getty Images
Tesla missed on the top and bottom lines in the second quarter, but another miss was buried in its investor deck.
The company’s digital assets are currently valued at $1.24 billion.
That’s up substantially from $722 million a year ago. But anyone who’s been following the crypto market knows that the figure represents a lost opportunity amounting to billions of dollars in missed gains for the electric vehicle maker.
Bitcoin is trading near a record and is up 80% over the past year. Tesla sold 75% of its holdings in mid-2022, when the digital currency was trading at a fraction of its current price.
While CEO Elon Musk has made clear that the future of his electric vehicle company is about robotaxis and humanoid robots — not about crypto investments — the business in its current form is struggling and could use the cash boost.
Tesla reported a second straight drop in auto revenue in its earnings report late Wednesday, and came up short of Wall Street estimates. The stock plunged 8% on Thursday and is now down about 25% for the year, by far the biggest drop among tech’s megacaps.
Robotaxis and Optimus robots are huge and costly bets for Musk in markets with stiff competition and ever-changing dynamics. Tesla has also acknowledged that President Donald Trump’s tariffs and the expiration of federal EV tax credits could hurt the company’s core business in the coming quarters.
Tesla’s digital assets, meanwhile, are bolstering profitability. Gains from bitcoin in the second quarter amounted to $284 million in a period when total net income was $1.17 billion.
The gains could have been much greater.
In early 2021, Tesla invested $1.5 billion in bitcoin, banking on what the EV company called the digital currency’s “long-term potential” and to add “more flexibility to further diversify and maximize returns on our cash.”
Musk had become a loud proponent of bitcoin online, and in January of that year, the currency skyrocketed 20% in a day after the Tesla CEO added #bitcoin to his bio on Twitter, now X.
By mid-2022, the world was in a much different place. The Covid-era boom was gone, replaced by soaring inflation and rising interest rates, an equation that pushed investors out of risky assets.
Tesla said in the second quarter of that year that it sold three-quarters of its bitcoin holdings, adding cash to its balance sheet at a time when equity and crypto markets were simultaneously plunging. Tesla lost about two-thirds of its market cap in 2022, and bitcoin fell by 60%.
However, bitcoin has rebounded sharply since then, getting an added boost this year from the Trump administration’s efforts to loosen regulations and its promise to create a strategic bitcoin reserve.
Bitcoin is currently trading at over $119,000, up about sixfold from the end of the second quarter of 2022, the period when Tesla made its big move out.
Had Tesla held on to all of its bitcoin, that stash would be worth roughly $5 billion, based on estimates of how much Tesla bought in 2021, instead of $1.24 billion. The $936 million worth of bitcoin the company converted to cash would currently be valued at over $3.5 billion.
Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.
As for Musk, he’s hardly said anything about bitcoin on his social network X in the past three years. In March 2022, shortly before Tesla began dumping bitcoin, he wrote regarding cryptocurrencies, “I still own & won’t sell my Bitcoin, Ethereum or Doge fwiw.”
— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.
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