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Mark Zuckerberg arrives before the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States takes place inside the Capitol Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., Monday, Jan. 20, 2025.

Kenny Holston | Via Reuters

The digital advertising market was sunny enough for investors this past quarter, providing what could be a last hurrah before a looming economic storm from President Donald Trump‘s tariff onslaught.

Wall Street cheered the first-quarter results from tech giants like Meta and Alphabet, which both saw shares rise on strong revenue and earnings that beat analyst expectations.

The strong numbers from the online advertising titans in the face of economic worries showed that companies were still willing to promote their goods and services to consumers across the internet.

Amazon’s burgeoning online advertising unit also topped analyst estimates for the quarter. The online retail giant’s first-quarter ad sales jumped 19% year-over-year, representing a faster growth rate than Meta and Google’s advertising sales, which were 16% and 9%, respectively.

Smaller social media and online advertising firms like Reddit, Snap and Pinterest posted first-quarter sales that topped Wall Street projections. And even advertising technology companies like AppLovin and The Trade Desk posted strong quarterly earnings.

AppLovin shares surged nearly 15% on Wednesday after the provider of mobile ad technology surpassed analysts estimates and said it would sell its Tripledot Studios mobile gaming business.

Shares of The Trade Desk jumped 18% on Friday, just one day after the ad-tech firm reported first-quarter earnings that beat on the top and bottom lines.

The celebrations stopped, however, when it came time for executives to discuss the rest of the year.

Meta Chief Financial Officer Susan Li last week said that “Asia-based e-commerce exporters” are spending less on digital advertising due to the cessation of the de minimis trade loophole that benefited retail upstarts and heavy Facebook spenders like Temu and Shein.

“It’s very early, hard to know how things will play out over the quarter, and certainly, harder to know that for the rest of the year,” Li said during a call with analysts.

Executives at Alphabet and Pinterest shared similar sentiments about slower, Asia-specific ad sales and broader macroeconomic uncertainty heading into the rest of the year. Snap went so far as to pull its second-quarter guidance over the unpredictable economy potentially shrinking corporate ad budgets for the rest of the year.

Jeff Green, CEO of The Trade Desk, also noted the challenging economy on Thursday, saying that marketers face an “important time” as they work “amid increased macro volatility to start the year.”

“The good news is, Q1 was really strong, and Q4 of last year was pretty darn good,” said Sameer Samana, head of global equities and real assets for Wells Fargo Investment Institute.

But with companies from a variety of sectors lowering or even suspending their 2025 sales guidance, as in the case of auto giants like Ford Motor and toymaker Mattel, Samana believes the good times are likely coming to an end.

“What it’s telling me is that we better enjoy this rally, we better enjoy these good numbers,” Samana said. “This is going to be about as good as it gets for the coming year.”

In an ominous sign for social media and online advertising companies, retail and consumer packaged goods businesses like Procter & Gamble have warned of weakening sales amid the turbulent economy.

Jasmine Enberg, a vice president and principal analyst at eMarketer, said companies in these sectors generate “about half of all social ads in the U.S.,” and a decrease in their advertising spend “will have a ripple effect on the social ad market.”

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms Inc.; from left, Lauren Sanchez; Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com Inc.; Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet Inc.; and Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Inc., during the 60th presidential inauguration in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 2025.

Julia Demaree Nikhinson | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Enberg believes that a potential slowdown in advertising spend will hurt smaller tech platforms more than their larger rivals.

“I think what we’re likely to see is what we tend to see in times of economic uncertainty, which is that advertisers seek refuge in larger platforms that provide them with scale and consistent ROI,” Enberg said.

But even tech giants like Meta may feel some financial pain, explained Greg Silverman, the global director of brand economics at consulting firm Interbrand.

Although other retailers may decide to run Facebook ads now that China-linked retailers like Temu are stepping back, those promotional campaigns are unlikely to be as lucrative for those companies, said Silverman.

Temu was willing to spend big on Facebook ads because it previously benefited from the de minimis trade loophole, Silverman said, and it’s unlikely that any U.S. retailer will do the same, particularly with a rickety supply chain and high tariffs potentially raising the cost of their goods.

“The return on ad spend that Temu was getting on Facebook is going to be hard for anyone else to recreate,” Silverman said.

For Wells Fargo’s Samana, the current economic uncertainty can be traced to trade policy and tariffs and their ensuing effects throughout the markets.

“We started the year with very low levels on tariffs,” Samana said. “Tariffs at the end of this are going to be higher, and they’re going to be meaningfully higher, and that is just not good for markets. I think that’s the only point that matters.”

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Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

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Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

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.

DoorDash was the latest tech company to join during the last rebalancing in March. Cloud software vendor Workday was added in December, and that was preceded earlier in 2024 with the additions of Palantir, Dell, CrowdStrike, GoDaddy and Super Micro Computer.

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.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

CNBC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

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Ether and related stocks gain amid the latest crypto craze: Tokenization

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Ether and related stocks gain amid the latest crypto craze: Tokenization

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.

BitMine Immersion Technologies, a bitcoin miner that announced plans this week to make ETH its primary treasury reserve asset, jumped about 20%. It’s gained more than 1,000% since the announcement. Betting platform SharpLink Gaming, which has also initiated an ETH treasury strategy, added more than 11%. Bit Digital, which last week exited bitcoin mining to focus on its ETH treasury and staking plans, jumped more than 6%.

“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.

Fundstrat's Tom Lee on being named chairman of BitMine Immersion Technologies

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.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

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China’s Honor launches new challenge to Samsung with thin foldable smartphone and a big battery

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China's Honor launches new challenge to Samsung with thin foldable smartphone and a big battery

Honor launched the Honor Magic V5 on Wednesday July 2, as it looks to challenge Samsung in the foldable space.

Honor

Honor on Wednesday touted the slimness and battery capacity of its newly launched thin foldable phone, as it lays down a fresh challenge to market leader Samsung.

The Honor Magic V5 goes will initially go on sale in China, but the Chinese tech firm will likely bring the device to international markets later this year.

The company, which spun off from Chinese tech giant Huawei in 2020, is looking to stand out from rivals with key features of the Magic V5, like artificial intelligence, battery and size.

Honor said the Magic V5 is 8.8 mm to 9mm when folded, depending on the color choice. The phone’s predecessor, the Magic V3 — Honor skipped the Magic V4 name — was 9.2 mm when folded. Honor said the Magic V5 weighs 217 grams to 222 grams, again, depending on the color model. The previous version was 226 grams.

In China, Honor will launch a special 1 terabyte storage size version of the Magic V5, which it says will have a battery capacity of more than 6000 milliampere-hour — among the highest for foldable phones.

Honor has tried hard to tout these features, as competition in foldables ramps up, even as these types of devices have a very small share of the overall smartphone market.

Honor vs. Samsung

Foldables represented less than 2% of the overall smartphone market in 2024, according to International Data Corporation. Samsung was the biggest player with 34% market share followed by Huawei with just under 24%, IDC added. Honor took the fourth spot with a nearly 11% share.

Honor is looking to get a head start on Samsung, which has its own foldable launch next week on July 9.

Francisco Jeronimo, a vice president at the International Data Corporation, said the Magic V5 is a strong offering from Honor.

“This is the dream foldable smartphone that any user who is interested in this category will think of,” Jeronimo told CNBC, pointing to features such as the battery.

“This phone continues to push the bar forward, and it will challenge Samsung as they are about to launch their seventh generation of foldable phones,” he added.

The thinness of a foldable phone has become a battleground for smartphone makers to appeal to consumers who want the large screen size the device has to offer without extra weight.

At its event next week, Samsung is expected to release a foldable that is thinner than its predecessor and could come close to challenging Honor’s offering by way of size, analysts said. If that happens, then Honor will be facing more competition, especially against Samsung, which has a bigger global footprint.

“The biggest challenge for Honor is the brand equity and distribution reach vs Samsung, where the Korean vendor has the edge,” Neil Shah, co-founder of Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.

Honor’s push into international markets beyond China is still fairly young, with the company looking to build up its brand.

“Further, if Samsung catches up with a thinner form-factor in upcoming iterations, as it has been the real pioneer in foldables with its vertical integration expertise from displays to batteries, the differentiating factor might narrow for Honor,” Shah added.

Vertical integration refers to when a company owns several parts of a product’s supply chain. Samsung has a display and battery business which provides the components for its foldables.

Honor talks up AI

Smartphone players, including Honor, have also looked to stand out via the AI features available on their device.

In March, Honor pledged a $10 billion investment in AI over the next five years, with part of that going toward the development of next-generation agents that are seen as more advanced personal assistants.

Honor said its AI assistant Yoyo can interact with other AI models, such as those created by DeepSeek and Alibaba in China, to create presentation decks.

The company also flagged its AI agent can hail a taxi ride across multiple apps in China, automatically accepting the quickest ride to arrive? and cancelling the rest.

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