Business is booming for America’s tech giants. Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Google reported sales and profits figures on Thursday covering the three months to September 30 and there was a common thread growth shows no sign of slowing.
The wafer-thin boxes and wordage trucks were an early sign and now we’ve got increasingly proof: Amazon continues to be one of the biggest winners from the pandemic. Sales at the internet giant shot to $96.1bn in the three months to September 30 – up 37% from the same period in 2019. And profits hit a record $6.3bn, nearly three times last year’s total.
The rise was driven by its e-commerce merchantry in North America, as families increasingly turned to online shopping. But the company’s razzmatazz and deject computing merchantry moreover saw significant gains.
The growth has not come without cost. Amazon said it had lost $2.5bn in Covid-related expenses and its reputation has moreover taken a hit, with protests versus the firm’s working conditions and other policies.
Facebook, owner of Instagram and WhatsApp, reported a whopping 2.5 billion average daily users in September. That’s up 15% from September a year ago but only a 3% rise from June, when people stuck at home turned to social media, generating a inflowing of activity.
The company warned that the number of Facebook daily users declined in the US and Canada its most profitable market and told investors they expected the trend to continue.
Twitter reported a similar story, ultimatum 187 million daily active users in the July-September quarter, up just 1 million from the prior period.
Amid the shutdowns earlier this year, many businesses cut advertising spending. The move led sales to slow at Facebook and pushed Alphabet, the parent Company of Google and YouTube, to its first year-on-year ripen in quarterly revenue since becoming a publicly-listed visitor in 2004.
But spending from those businesses has returned. At Google, revenue was up 14% year-on-year – far largest than analysts had expected. The rise helped profits jump an eye-popping 59% year-on-year to increasingly than $11bn, sending the firm’s shares up increasingly than 6% in after-hours trading.
Twitter also saw income go higher 14%, while at Facebook it jumped 22% and the business said it had in mind that growth to increase in this rate.
Apple sales hit $64.7bn, up slightly from a year ago handily whipping most observer degrees in which event is probable, as amount of exchange of goods of small computers and iPads was moved as waves. But shares in the business sank in after-hours trading any way, as investors went through digestion a more than 20% drop in iPhone income.
The hit was especially clear in apples Greater China region which accounts for about 30 percent of it total sales and there was a 30 percent sales declined in that region.
Apple expressed confidence that buyers were simply waiting out for its latest phone, which went on sales a little bit late this year compared to previous years.
Despite the ongoing impacts of Covid-19, Apple is in the midst of our most prolific product introduction period ever, and the early response to all our new products, led by our first 5G-enabled iPhone line-up, has been tremendously positive,” chief executive Tim Cook said.
As is typical, discussions from the companies focused on sales and profits – and not the controversies swirling around them as calls for tougher regulation gain traction in the US and elsewhere.
In its prepared comments, Facebook stood out with its brief nod to the issue, warning of “headwinds… from the evolving regulatory landscape”.
But the companies’ financial success will only make them more of a target for complaints, warned Paolo Pescatore, analyst at PP Foresight.
“Tech dominance will continue to raise eyebrows given the antitrust concerns,” he said. “There will be further calls from rivals to regulate tech companies.”
