Disappointing Meta Earnings Sends Shudders Through Stock Market
Tech stocks have been ‘priced way beyond perfection’ and now face scrutiny as interest rates are poised to rise.
3 min
Facebook’s parent company shed more than $230 billion in market value Thursday, a one-day loss that is the biggest ever for a U.S. company and increases pressure on a stock market long powered by technology shares.
Meta Platforms Inc. (formerly known as Facebook Inc.) gave a disappointing financial forecast, helping the major indexes snap a four-session winning streak. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index dropped 3.7%, its worst day since September 2020, while the S&P 500 fell 2.4%.
PayPal Holdings Inc. and Spotify Technology SA also spooked investors in recent days, when the payments giant lowered its 2022 profit outlook and the streaming company elected not to provide annual guidance. Both companies suffered sharp drops in their stock prices.
The setbacks reflect the increased scrutiny companies are under as major U.S. stock indexes remain near record highs and the Federal Reserve is preparing to raise interest rates for the first time since 2018. Rising rates tend to reduce the multiples that investors are willing to pay for a share of company profits, a trend that stands to mean pain for stocks already trading at lofty valuations. That has put heightened pressure on the companies to show their financial results justify their price tags. In recent days, several have fallen short, raising concerns among investors that further declines in major indexes could lie ahead.
“The level of forgiveness has gone down,” said Daniel Genter, chief executive and chief investment officer at RNC Genter Capital Management. “When boards come to their shareholders to confess their sins, they’re just not going to be pardoned with one Hail Mary.”
The Facebook parent company surprised investors with a deeper-than-expected decline in profit and a downbeat outlook. The company said it expects revenue growth to slow and shared that it lost about one million daily users globally. Shares declined 26%, their worst daily performance since they started trading in 2012.
The company’s challenges include a new ad-privacy policy from Apple Inc. that Meta expects to cost it more than $10 billion in lost sales for 2022. The requirement that apps ask users whether they want to be tracked limited the ability to gather data used to target digital ads, driving advertisers to change their spending.
Meta’s $232 billion drop in market value exceeds the record that Apple Inc. set in September 2020 when the iPhone maker lost about $182 billion in a single day, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Some strategists said the recent slide in shares of speculative tech companies should serve to remind investors that a robust market rally relies on advances by a variety of stocks. And they warn they expect more big stock swings ahead at any hint of slowing growth.
“The market can’t just be driven by a small number of megacap companies or tech companies,” said Yung-Yu Ma, chief investment strategist at BMO Wealth Management. “There should start to be more of a recognition that it’s not going to be technology that leads us out of this pullback.”
Earnings season had been overshadowed until recent days as investors fretted over the Fed’s plans to raise rates. They sold stocks across sectors, helping to send the S&P 500 down 5.3% in January, its worst monthly performance since the March 2020 slump.
Results out of the tech segment haven’t been all bad. Google parent Alphabet Inc. reported robust sales growth and unveiled plans for a stock split this week, helping the company add more than $135 billion in market value Wednesday. And Amazon.com Inc. said after Thursday’s closing bell that profits nearly doubled in the holiday period, helping send its shares up about 15% in late trading.
Shares of Snap Inc. and Pinterest also got a big bump after hours. Snap posted its first quarterly profit, and Pinterest said it expects first-quarter revenue to grow sharply. All three stocks had declined in the regular session ahead of the reports.
Meta, PayPal and Spotify entered 2022 at rich valuations. While the S&P 500 ended December trading at 21.5 times its projected earnings over the next 12 months, Meta was trading at 23.6 times, PayPal at 36 times and Spotify at 543.9 times, according to FactSet. Spotify isn’t an index constituent. By Thursday, Meta’s multiple had pulled back to 18 times forward earnings, while PayPal traded at 25.6 times. Spotify, meanwhile, traded at 666.2 times, after analysts cut their earnings forecasts.
“Those stocks were really priced way beyond perfection,” Mr. Genter said. “People are saying, well, guess what, perfection is not here.”
PayPal lowered its profit outlook for 2022 and abandoned a target it set last year of roughly doubling its active user base. Executives said business this year will be pressured by forces including inflation, supply-chain problems, the Omicron variant and the runoff in government stimulus. Shares slumped 25% Wednesday in their worst selloff on record and continued sliding Thursday.
And Spotify, which is embroiled in a controversy over Joe Rogan’s podcast, said it added users but declined to give annual guidance, pulling shares down 17% on Thursday.
Broadly, the corporate earnings season has surpassed expectations. With results in from about half the constituents of the S&P 500, analysts estimate that profits from index constituents rose 29% in the holiday quarter from a year earlier, according to FactSet. That is up from forecasts for 21% growth at the end of September.
Copyright 2020, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. LEARN MORE
This stylish family home combines a classic palette and finishes with a flexible floorplan
Just 55 minutes from Sydney, make this your creative getaway located in the majestic Hawkesbury region.
3 min
Austin, Texas, company Core Scientific went from bankruptcy to stock market darling this year by betting on two technologies: Bitcoin mining and AI data centers. Shares are up 400%.
But if given the choice of whether to invest more in one business over the other, executives answer without hesitating: the data centers.
“We really just value long-term, stable cash flows and predictable returns,” Chief Operating Officer Matt Brown said in an interview. The company began life as a Bitcoin miner. Even though Bitcoin has been a great asset lately, it’s very volatile. By comparison, Core Scientific can earn steady profits for years by hosting servers owned by companies that sell cloud services to AI providers, Brown said.
This year, you couldn’t go wrong betting on either. Bitcoin is up 116%, and data centers are in high demand because tech companies need them to power their AI applications.
The two technologies seem to have little in common, but they both depend on the same thing: access to reliable power. Core Scientific has a lot of it, operating nine grid-connected warehouses in six states with access to so much electricity they could serve several hundred thousand homes. Other Bitcoin miners have similarly transitioned to data center hosting , but few with quite so much success.
Core Scientific’s business didn’t look quite so good at the start of the year. The company started 2024 under the shadow of bankruptcy protection. It had too much debt on its balance sheet after going public through the SPAC process in 2022 and succumbed to a Bitcoin price crash. But the company’s fortunes quickly turned around after it emerged from bankruptcy on Jan. 23 with $400 million less debt.
The company started the year focused entirely on crypto mining, but quickly pivoted as it saw demand surge for electricity for AI data centers.
In June, the company signed a deal with a company called Coreweave to lease data center space for AI cloud services. Coreweave has since agreed to lease 500 megawatts worth of space. Core Scientific says it will get paid $8.7 billion over 12 years under the deal.
Privately held Coreweave is one of the fastest-growing companies behind the AI revolution. It was once a cryptocurrency miner, but has since transitioned to offering cloud services, with a particular focus on artificial intelligence. It’s closely connected to Nvidia , which has invested money in Coreweave and given the company access to its top-end chips. Coreweave expects to be one of the first customers for Nvidia ’s upcoming Blackwell GPUs.
Core Scientific’s quick success in this new world has surprised even the people who are driving it.
“Every once in a while I need to pinch myself, to see I’m actually not dreaming,” Brown said.
Core Scientific’s success does create a high bar for the stock to keep rising. The company is expected to lose money this year, largely because of a change in the value of stock warrants—an accounting shift that doesn’t reflect underlying earnings. Analysts see the company becoming profitable in 2025, when more of its data center deals start to hit the bottom line. They see EPS jumping tenfold by 2027. Shares trade at about 13 times those 2027 estimates.
The data center opportunity should only grow from here, as tech companies build more powerful AI systems. Of the 1,200 megawatts worth of gross power capacity Core Scientific has contracted, about 800 megawatts are going to data center computing deals and 400 megawatts toward Bitcoin mining.
Brown said the company has good relationships with its power suppliers and can potentially add more capacity without having to buy more real estate. It expects to be able to secure about 300 more megawatts worth of power at existing sites, perhaps by the end of the year.
It’s also in the hunt for new sites, including at “distressed” conventional data centers that have lost their tenants. Core Scientific has figured out how to quickly spiff up bare-bones data centers and turn them into high-tech sites with resources like liquid cooling equipment and much higher levels of electricity.
A single server rack in a standard data center might need 6 or 7 kilowatts of power. A high-performance data center can use as much as 130 kilowatts per rack; Core Scientific is working on increasing capacity to 400 kilowatts. The company likens the process of upgrading the warehouses to turning a ho-hum passenger vehicle into a Formula One racing car.
Core Scientific’s transformation from a broken-down jalopy to a hot rod has been a wild story. Its fate next year will depend on just how quickly the AI revolution unfolds.
This stylish family home combines a classic palette and finishes with a flexible floorplan
Just 55 minutes from Sydney, make this your creative getaway located in the majestic Hawkesbury region.
