Data Sheet—Behind Microsoft’s Inspiring Revival
Techpocalypse continues. Amid Microsoft‘s most recent financial success, as Adam noted, pleased investors have pushed the company’s stock price up 2% this morning. That’s not enough to undo the damage from Wednesday’s regular stock session, when growing fears about a slowing economy, higher interest rates, and trade friction pushed the entire tech sector off a cliff. Microsoft fell 5%, but Netflix was down 9%, Amazon lost 6%, while Facebook, Adobe, and Google dropped 5%. Apple and IBM were relative stalwarts, losing only 3%. Still, most stocks in the tech sector still have healthy gains for the year (though not Facebook or IBM).
A real meltdown. Speaking of falling tech stocks, former stock market darling Advanced Micro Devices has lost nearly one-third of its value over the past 24 hours. In regular trading on Wednesday, AMD was down 9% amid the general gloom over semiconductor market prospects that emanated from a poor earnings report from Texas Instruments. Then AMD released its own third quarter results, a little light on revenue, and fourth quarter forecast, very light on revenue. In premarket trading, the stock was down another 20% on Thursday. Still, for the year, even after all the tumbles, AMD’s share price is up almost 80%.
Type it out for me. Sticking on Wall Street, Twitter reported its fourth straight profitable quarter, though monthly active users dropped by 9 million as part of a purge of fake and spammy accounts (which CEO Jack Dorsey had previously signaled). Revenue rose 29% to $ 758 million. Twitter’s shares had lost 4% in regular trading on Wednesday but popped up 13% in premarket trading on Thursday morning.
Fly the friendly skies. Hackers stole credit card, passport, and other personal information from more than 9 million customers of Cathay Pacific Airways, the company confirmed on Wednesday. The privacy commissioner of Hong Kong, where the airline is based, said the breach would prompt a compliance check and Cathay’s stock price dropped as much as 7%. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom fined Facebook just $ 645,000 for the massive and improper sharing of data with Cambridge Analytica. The social network ducked huge fines (up to 4% of revenue) because the scandal occurred before the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation took affect.
Opsec. And speaking of breaches, the New York Times had a blockbuster report that foreign spies are tapping President Trump‘s calls to old friends made on his old iPhone. Trump quickly responded on Twitter that the story was “soooo wrong!” and said he mostly used government phones. The tweet was tweeted from an iPhone.
A big blindspot. As noted yesterday, Apple CEO Tim Cook was blasting the “data industrial complex.” He wasn’t exactly volunteering to give up the billions of dollars Google pays his company for presumably flaunting the privacy of Apple users, though. And former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos criticized Cook on Twitter over Apple’s China policies. Calling China “an ethical blindspot for many in tech,” he added: “We don’t want the media to create an incentive structure that ignores treating Chinese citizens as less-deserving of privacy protections because a CEO is willing to bad-mouth the business model of their primary competitor, who uses advertising to subsidize cheaper devices.”
