This week's earnings reports included lots of companies, but three tech juggernauts were some of the most notable updates, as Apple (AAPL 1.56%), Facebook (META 1.97%), and Microsoft (MSFT 1.50%) all shared their latest financials. With market capitalizations in the hundreds of billions, these three companies had investors' attention.
Each company saw its stock price move after its earnings report, with Apple rising 7%, Facebook soaring 11%, and Microsoft falling 2%. Here's a closer look at some of the key figures each of these companies shared.
Check out the latest Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft earnings call transcripts.
Image source: Apple.
Apple
Having pre-reported its preliminary revenue for its first quarter of fiscal 2019, investors were looking beyond the company's top line to other areas, such as earnings per share and guidance when the tech giant reported its latest results.
The company did all right on both of these fronts. Earnings per share came in slightly ahead of a consensus analyst forecast, hitting a record high of $4.18. In addition, the high end of the company's revenue guidance for its fiscal second quarter was about in line with the consensus forecast for the metric.
But the biggest news from the report was Apple's strong 63% gross profit margin on its services segment. With the metric being revealed for the first time, it was higher than most investors were expecting.
Given Facebook's trend of decelerating growth and rising expenses recently, investors had their eye on the company's top and bottom lines when the social network reported its fourth-quarter results.
Facebook impressed on both metrics. Revenue rose 30% year over year, outpacing a consensus analyst estimate for revenue to rise 26% year over year. Earnings per share for the period were $2.38, handily beating analysts' average estimate for $2.19.
Propelling the company's growth during the quarter was a 9% year-over-year increase in daily active users on the company's core Facebook platform, net sequential growth of about 100 million people who use at least one of the company's apps (Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, or Instagram) every month, and a 34% year-over-year increase in ad impressions.
Microsoft
Software giant Microsoft had a solid quarter. But since earnings per share were about in line with the consensus analyst estimate for the metric and since revenue was slightly below what analysts were expecting, shares pulled back slightly.
For its second quarter of fiscal 2019, Microsoft reported revenue or $32.47 billion, representing 12% year-over-year growth. Analysts, on average, had expected revenue of $32.51 billion. Non-GAAP earnings per share for the period were $1.10, up from $0.96 in the year-ago quarter.
Microsoft continued to see momentum in commercial cloud, a revenue category that lumps together revenue from Office 365 commercial, Azure, and Dynamics 365. Commercial cloud revenue rose 48% year over year, marking a slight acceleration from 47% growth in the company's first quarter of fiscal 2019.
