Sir Martin Sorrell, Executive Chairman, S4 Capital.
Eóin Noonan | Sportsfile | Getty Images | Web Summit
Advertising titan Martin Sorrell believes Meta will rebound “extremely strongly this year” and sees a promising outlook for U.S. tech giants, despite a bruising 2022 and mass layoffs.
U.S. tech companies have let go of more than 60,000 employees in the last year, as slowing economic growth, higher interest rates in response to soaring inflation and competitive challenges squeezed margins and hammered the stock prices of tech behemoths.
Facebook parent Meta in November announced plans to eliminate 13% of its staff, amounting to more than 11,000 employees. It also issued bleak fourth-quarter guidance that wiped out around a quarter of its market cap, pushing the stock to its lowest since 2016.
A broad slowdown in online ad spending and competition from new rivals such as TikTok, along with challenges associated with privacy changes to Apple’s iOS, have hampered the social media group’s business over the past year.
The company has also taken a substantial hit from its massive investment in building its augmented reality world known as the metaverse — a strategy that has proven divisive among analysts and investors.
Sorrell, executive chairman of U.K. advertising agency S4 Capital, expects Meta to address most of its business challenges in 2023, while benefiting from China’s reopening.
“I think you’ll see Meta come back extremely strongly this year, on the back of reels and business messenger, to deal with the competition from TikTok and other short form video competitors,” Sorrell told CNBC on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
“Google had a solid year last year, and I think they’ll have a strong year this year. Amazon increased its advertising revenues from $31bn to $41bn, and I think [it] will hit $100bn in time, despite what you’re seeing in terms of jobs and hiring.”
He also suggested that the reopening of the Chinese economy would be “huge” for big tech firms, noting that outbound Chinese business, or Chinese companies expanding their businesses abroad, were historically the second-largest profit centers for the likes of Meta, Amazon and Google parent Alphabet.
Sorrell launched S4, which operates in both the digital advertising and digital transformation spaces, after leaving ad giant WPP in 2018. S4 on Wednesday confirmed its full-year guidance, and Sorrell said his clients’ advertising spending priorities in 2023 would be “topline growth in activation and performance” and “reducing [the] cost of digital transformation.”
Synopsys logo is seen displayed on a smartphone with the flag of China in the background.
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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.
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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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