The coming week will be the most important of this quarter’s earnings season as it will be virtually impossible to top this slate in terms of dollars and attention, with the world’s most valuable company, Apple, reporting on Tuesday.
Jeremy C. Owens for MarketWatch:
All of Big Tech will report, and those five companies — Google parent Alphabet Inc. GOOGL, +3.58% GOOG, +3.37%, e-commerce and cloud-computing powerhouse Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, +0.51%, iPhone maker Apple Inc. AAPL, +1.20%, social-media titan Facebook Inc. FB, +5.30% and software giant Microsoft Corp. MSFT, +1.23% — can determine the course of the market at this point in history.
Consider these stats, from Dow Jones Market Data Group:
• The five Big Tech companies comprised more one-fifth of the total market cap of the S&P 500 index SPX, +1.01% as of the end of the second quarter, 22%.
• In the first quarter, they provided nearly 10% of the total sales of the 500-member index, and nearly 18% of the total profit (9.7% and 17.8%, respectively).
• That proportion of profit provided by Big Tech actually decreased from 2020, when the five companies provided nearly a quarter of the index’s full-year earnings, 23.8%, and accounted for 9.1% of the total sales.
MacDailyNews Take: The analysts’ consensus for Apple expects record quarterly revenue of $72.93 billion (vs. $59.69 billion) and $1.00 EPS (vs. $0.64 YOY).
