Alphabet had perhaps the most astounding beat of the afternoon, as profit rose $1.12 billion and revenue $9.5 billion from a year before. The Google parent company reported third-quarter net income of $6.73 billion, or $9.57 a share, on revenue of $27.8 billion. That performance destroyed forecasts, as analysts on average expected Alphabet to report earnings of $8.31 a share on revenue of $26.9 billion. In a conference call, Alphabet Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat credited mobile search, the Google Cloud Platform and Google’s expanded hardware efforts with boosting the company, as well as YouTube. The company’s stock rise in late trading put it close to a $700 billion market cap, which would make it only the second company in U.S. history to achieve that mark, after Apple Inc. AAPL, +0.64%.
Amazon enjoyed the largest initial stock pop in after-hours trading of the four after the e-commerce giant produced an unexpectedly large profit. Amazon investors and analysts were understandably expecting scant profits after the company’s earnings plunged 77% in the previous quarter and executives were unapologetic about their free-spending ways before turning around and buying Whole Foods Market Inc., a lower-margin business. While profit has never been Amazon’s strong suit, the company has managed to steadily boost its huge revenue totals, and that paid off in the third quarter. Amazon increased revenue by $11.03 billion from the third quarter of 2016 to a record quarterly total of $43.7 billion, to post the same per-share earnings as in last year’s third quarter: 52 cents. It expects to easily break that record in the current quarter, projecting holiday-season sales of $56 billion to $60.5 billion, markedly higher than analysts were estimating.
Microsoft recently topped a $600 billion market cap for the first time since the dot-com boom, and shares headed to record levels in late trading Thursday after the company cruised past estimates with growth credited mostly to the cloud. The company reported that its first-fiscal-quarter earnings rose to $6.58 billion, or 84 cents a share, from $5.67 billion, or 72 cents a share, a year earlier. Revenue grew $2.2 billion to $24.5 billion in total. Analysts surveyed by FactSet had projected earnings of 71 cents a share on revenue of $23.52 billion.
Intel is the veteran among this bunch of companies, helping to establish the San Francisco Bay Area as Silicon Valley thanks to its pioneering semiconductors. The chip maker, though, has experienced trouble growing its profit and revenue as it missed the boat on mobile while personal computers became less important. So while Intel’s increasing revenue and profit may have looked small when compared with those of Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet, it could be more important to the company in the long run, as the world’s largest chip maker looks to new areas for growth. The company reported third-quarter net income of $4.52 billion, or 94 cents a share, compared with $3.38 billion, or 69 cents a share, in the year-ago period. Revenue rose to $16.15 billion from $15.78 billion in the year-ago period, and Intel raised its full-year outlook for adjusted earnings to $3.25 a share, plus or minus 5 cents, and its revenue forecast to $62 billion, plus or minus $500 million.
Not all tech companies were as fortunate Thursday, in a busy afternoon for earnings, showing a definite divide between the largest tech companies and those struggling to compete. Chinese internet giant Baidu Inc. BIDU, -0.92% also showed a gargantuan increase in profit, but its forecast for the current quarter sent its stock tumbling, while shares of Expedia Inc. EXPE, -0.37% dropped more than 8% after the online travel-services company missed profit and revenue expectations.
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