Weekend Edition 22 – Lots More Big Tech Financial News and More...

WE 22-1: Big Tech Go Down the Hole?
Meta spiked in value after a word from Zuck, Amazon hit some numbers, but barely registered a blip in terms of shareholder profits, Alphabet is down, AMD is up, and Apple’s sales had their largest slump in 6 years. Ok, let’s start from the top, shall we?

Meta:
Had a massive cliff jumping moment last Fall. I covered that when it happened, just after the bloodbath that was the Q3 earnings call, or lack thereof. If you held onto your Meta stock, you’re a happy camper right now, as it spiked by 23% after Zuck shared his vision for a more austere and efficient version of itself. Apparently that is all the analysts and late traders needed to hear to drive the valuation up by over 20% in after hours trading on Wednesday. It wasn’t based on the strength of their sales numbers, as those only grew 4% year on year, but on the commitment to cut costs and make wiser personnel and project based decisions, rather than simply throwing money around. They are also cutting allot of middle management, to limit the bloat and make the decision-making process more streamlined. That sounds like a solid call from the Meta C-suite level. I can’t bash them for making good business decisions, however I will echo previous statements I’ve made in regard to the core of what made Meta such a force of nature to begin with, its utter, core disregard for user privacy. That is why the ads were so profitable for larger companies, especially. The old Facebook pixel was ridiculously overpowered because it was so easy to tie a new website to Facebook for analytics and spy on all of your visitors to target ads that much more readily and effectively, not to mention that the whole thing started as a CIA /5 eyes project to spy on one another’s citizens more easily. It was and remains a giant, intentional honeypot for your personal data.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/01/metas-year-of-efficiency-everything-wall-street-needed-to-hear.html

Alphabet:
Down overall, both top and bottom lines. They did not hit any of their targets this quarter, well, darn. YouTube revenues are down... Hmmm... Could platforms like Rumble, GabTV, Bitchute, and Lbry be cutting into their bottom line? Or could it be that their efforts to make YouTube profitable are just failing because it was never sustainable, particularly not at FHD and beyond resolutions with high bitrate video and audio? Or is it that more and more people are wising up and using ad blockers in their browsers or using alternative frontends that perhaps block ads for you, or DNS filtering to block ads?
What Front ends are there that either don’t ship your data off to Google (aka the USIC) or force ads down your throat? LibreTube fulfills both aims (and is available on both Android and Desktop), NewPipe which simply obscures you from Google. NewPipe feeds you content without forcing you to sign in, while also allowing you to import and export subscribed lists, likes, etc, as those are stored locally rather than in [their] cloud.
Ok, let me slow down for a minute, DNS is the Domain Name Service, which turns IP addresses into URLs and back, so that when you type in a URL, the browser knows which site you are trying to contact. YouTube depends on Ad revenue in order to be viable for more than just gathering data on your preferences and interests. Either way, YouTube underperformed in the last quarter, and contributed to a $500 million earnings shortfall for the quarter. Yes, they missed the expectation by half of a billion dollars. YouTube missed its own expectation by $290 Million, Google Cloud missed its target by $110 Million, and the share value missed its target by $.13 per share. For those of us who preach the good word about forsaking Google, perhaps we are starting to make a dent. One can hope, right?
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/02/alphabet-googl-earnings-q4-2022.html

Amazon:
Made allot of money. Their per share profits were only $.03 though. The last quarter they surpassed expected revenues by $3.78 Billion. AWS did not hit its expectations, falling short by $470 Million, but still producing $21.4 Billion in revenues. Their ad business also grew a good bit, and surpassed expectations by $180 Million. Yes, they made $149.2 Billion in revenue last quarter, but that 4% growth was just not enough, and their net income was ONLY $2.7 Billion after all other costs, that is even with the layoffs that they have been engaging in. These numbers make my head spin, but we have to keep plugging away and eventually this, too, will pass.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/02/amazon-amzn-earnings-q4-2022.html
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/you-shopped-amazon-for-the-holidays-but-its-profits-still-plunged/

Apple:
Suffered its biggest year on year decline since 2016. That reflects a 5% drop in overall sales, partially due to the fact that they are positioned as luxury products coupled with the supply-end issues they have had in China for the last few months. The fact that Apple has not seen fit to move their manufacturing to a more democratic country which might treat its citizens like more than cogs in a machine is seeming to bite them where it hurts, the pocketbook. I have mixed feelings about this... On one hand, I want to see Apple either reform itself in terms of truly being about security and privacy, or go down in smoke. On the other, I truly pity the little better than slaves they have assembling their phones, especially, in China. Either way, they actually lost ground overall, even if you take into account the surge for iPad and services. Let me run down the numbers for you:

• EPS: $1.88 vs. $1.94 estimated, down 10.9% year-over-year (share prices)
• Revenue: $117.15 billion vs. $121.10 billion estimated, down 5.49% year-over-year
• iPhone revenue: $65.78 billion vs. $68.29 billion estimated, down 8.17% year-over-year
• Mac revenue: $7.74 billion vs. $9.63 billion estimated, down 28.66% year-over-year
• iPad revenue: $9.40 billion vs. $7.76 billion estimated, up 29.66% year-over-year
• Other Products revenue: $13.48 billion vs. $15.23 billion estimated, down 8.3% year-over-year
• Services revenue: $20.77 billion vs. $20.67 billion estimated, up 6.4% year-over-year
• Gross margin: 42.96% vs. 42.95% estimated
So, as you can see, it was not a good Q4 for Apple overall, even if there were bright spots in certain sectors of their business.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/02/apple-aapl-earnings-q1-2023.html

AMD:
AMD, on the other hand, reported a strong Q4, even if their outlook for Q1 is a little less rosy. Upon that report, their stock shot up by 12%, and nudged much of the rest of the industry up with them, from Qualcomm (4%) to NVIDIA (8%) to Broadcom (3%), and even Intel (~3%) rose just a bit, in spite of issues with the market right now. What are some of those issues? Oversupply of chips which drives prices down, overall slowing market with all of the bullshit that Jerry Powell is pulling over at the Fed, and the rest of the big picture stuff.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/01/chip-stocks-up-on-amd-earnings-feds-signal-inflation-is-easing.html

WE 22-2: Might Trump Get Back onto Other Platforms?
With the pressure of Twitter and Meta letting him back onto their platforms, will other pointless social media platforms let him back on as well? Who knows... Which others may be in view, here?
• Snapchat
• Shopify
• Stripe Payments
• Discord
• Reddit
The article below states that the author could not reach most of these companies for comment, but that typically once one major company makes a move, the rest generally fall in line. Snapchat has stated that they do not plan to revisit their decision to axe his account. This article is largely a fluff piece, but has a few decent nuggets about policy in it. One example of something of interest in that category was the discussion of Meta’s “guardrails” for Trump and other, moving forward. As I have said before, if the social media giants were genuinely transparent and clear with their TOS and rules in general, rather than having so many moving targets in terms of what is “ok” and what isn’t, and will get you shadow banned, suspended, limited, or deleted. Of course, I am more about freedom of speech, but these platforms are private businesses and can make their own rules. All I want is clarity and fairness from them, but until that happens, or they implode due to enough of us waking up and leaving them that they are no longer profitable at all.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/26/tech/meta-trump-mainstream-social-media

WE 22-3: What is Google Gonna Do About ChatGPT?
An answer is coming from the giant “in the next couple of weeks”, as ChatGPT has really done damage to their core search (ad) business in the last couple of months, making it so that even with the layoffs I’ve been reporting on for what feels like the last month, their profits have only grown by 1% year-on-year. Tough times for the giant of Mountain View. To give you an idea, Google Search revenues dropped by $700 million vs Q4 2021. YouTube ad revenues dropped by $600 million, and ad revenue from other websites dropped by $900 million. Wow. That is eye-watering, isn’t it?
https://www.cnet.com/tech/expect-googles-answer-to-chatgpt-ai-chatbot-in-a-few-weeks-ceo-says/

WE 22.4: Big Tech in Trouble?
TikTok
A democrat senator is calling for Google and Apple to remove TikTok from their app stores. His reasoning is solid, as far as I’m concerned. He knows that ByteDance is beholden to the CCP to pass on the ridiculous amounts of personal data to them as a part of existing as a Chinese company. If you care about your privacy at all, and you use TikTok as an app on your devices, please, for the love of all that is Holy, stop, now! Uninstall that spyware from your device and break your addiction. You can do more with your life than be sucked down the endless hole that is TikTok, while feeding all of that information into CCP algorithms. I applaud this Senator for speaking up, and even appreciate the fact that he did not threaten government action against Apple or Google if they do not comply. That may come later, if they do not choose to do the right thing here, though.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/senator-calls-on-apple-google-to-remove-tiktok-from-app-stores/

As a followup to the conversation we had a couple of weeks ago about the UK’s efforts to censor the internet, this article exposes just how many kids in the UK have been exposed to porn at far too young an age (under 10). This isn’t even about soft core in something like Penthouse, this is nasty, hardcore smut with all sorts of violence and other kinds of stuff that should never be put out there, as it greatly reduces all human beings involved in creating, distributing, and consuming it. The author of this article is concerned, rightly, about the fact that many kids who were surveyed think that violence is normative in sex because of porn they have watched as pre-pubescent kids. This turns my stomach, because I first stumbled on porn when I was too young as well. I mistyped the url of a Tolkien fan forum that I was active in at the time, and lo and behold, I was on a porn site, at my grandma’s house. That was the beginning of a so far life-long struggle. But back to the article in question, the solution that the author poses for the UK is to further empower the watchdog, Ofcom, to really prevent kids who are too young from being exposed to unhealthy and fake explicit materials. My heart is broken over this. God, we need your help. Help us to end this scourge. It has destroyed too many lives, both performers, artists, directors, and consumers of this material. We need you to help us to break the cycle.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64451984