The latest Market Talks covering Equities. Published exclusively on Dow Jones Newswires throughout the day.
1934 ET - Hasbro's Wizards of the Coast subsidiary revealed new partnerships for its "Dungeons & Dragons" franchise. In November, Wizards of the Coast will offer "D&D: World of Warcraft," created in tandem with Microsoft's Blizzard Entertainment, which will return "Warcraft" to a tabletop game for the first time in two decades, Hasbro says. Additionally, "D&D" will team up with "Star Wars" beginning next year. Hasbro didn't disclose further details around the partnerships. (kelly.cloonan@wsj.com)
1917 ET - Roblox is in the midst of several changes to its platform, and it's tough to tell how they'll affect the business going forward, the company says as it withheld its full-year outlook earlier than scheduled. "The reality is it's very early days for many of those new initiatives," Chief Financial Officer Naveen Chopra says during a call with analysts. "There's no model that we can look at that's going to say exactly what they're going to do over the next three to six months." The video game company has been pushing safety initiatives this year, including with the roll-out of an age check feature, and is rejiggering its discovery algorithm to prioritize games that retain users over ones with stronger monetization. The latter pressured bookings in the latest quarter, and the company projects that monetization weakness will continue. (kelly.cloonan@wsj.com)
1916 ET - Roblox says that while changes it's making to its platform are creating near-term pressure, its the right strategy to boost retention over the long term. The company expects revenue growth to slow and bookings to decline in the current quarter, and also withheld its full-year outlook, switching to only quarterly guidance earlier than scheduled. "While our expectations for the remainder of the year have changed significantly, we have conviction that we're making the right tradeoffs to continue our role as an industry disruptor," CFO Naveen Chopra says during a call with analysts. Chopra says the company continues to see its investments in AI, long-term retention and safety helping it maximize its share in the gaming market, despite the weakness in the near term. (kelly.cloonan@wsj.com)
1845 ET - Australian stocks look set for a strong opening rise after U.S. indices rallied. Local futures are up by 1.1% ahead of Friday's open, suggesting that the S&P/ASX 200 will recover from a 0.8% pullback in the prior session and round out what is already on course to be its best week since early April. The benchmark index is up by 2.2% since Monday, buoyed by economic data suggesting that the Reserve Bank has room to resist raising the cash rate next week. Ahead of the open, iron-ore miner Fortescue reported a 5% on-year drop in June-quarter shipments. In the U.S., Microsoft's robust earnings report restored momentum to the artificial-intelligence boom. The DJIA rose 1.2%, the S&P 500 gained 1.7%, and the Nasdaq Composite jumped 2.8%. (stuart.condie@wsj.com)
1823 ET - Apple's supply constraints are mainly around advanced semiconductor nodes, and are driven by demand for iPhones and Macs exceeding the company's projections, CEO Tim Cook says on a call. "It's a demand forecast issue, to be candid, where the iPhone and the Mac are both doing remarkably better than we thought they would do," Cook says. "This isn't a partner or supplier issue." The supply constraints represent one headwind to the company's fourth-quarter growth, which Apple forecast below Wall Street expectations. Shares are down 6.5% after the bell. (elias.schisgall@wsj.com)
1819 ET - More suppliers of DRAM memory technology would be better for Apple, CEO Tim Cook tells analysts on a call. "Primarily, the DRAM market has three suppliers. And obviously, if there were more suppliers, that would be good," Cook says. "It would help us on the supply side and perhaps the pricing side." Apple and tech peers have been grappling with soaring memory costs, which Cook says are expected to keep rising into the fourth quarter and beyond. He does not address a report last week in The Wall Street Journal that Apple is lobbying the White House to allow it to use memory chips from two Chinese suppliers. "We're evaluating all options," Cook says. (elias.schisgall@wsj.com)
1815 ET - Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the AI adoption curve is taking a barbell shape, with AI labs consuming gobs of compute on one end, with some runaway successful generative AI applications like Claude and ChatGPT. On the other is enterprises who are getting real value from AI, using it to cut costs and boost productivity, he says. Meanwhile, "the middle of the barbell is all of the current enterprise production workloads, some of which are using inference in a pervasive way, but most of which aren't," he says. "That is going to change very significantly over time," he says, forecasting it will become the largest segment. "I think we're still in the relatively early stages of how much demand there's going to be for AI. I think it's going to change every customer experience that we know." (kelly.cloonan@wsj.com)
1808 ET - Apple guides for 4Q revenue growth between 9% and 11%, below Wall Street's consensus. The outlook includes the impacts of supply constraints, which are expected to significantly worsen in the fourth quarter, as well as a 2.5 percentage point headwind from foreign exchange rates. Apple's guidance represents a quarter-over-quarter deceleration in revenue growth, which was about 16% in the most recent quarter. Analysts polled by FactSet currently expect $114.87 billion in the fourth quarter, representing about 12% growth. Shares in Apple are down 6.7% after-hours. (elias.schisgall@wsj.com)
1805 ET - Amazon has long believed that its AWS unit could grow to a few hundred billion dollars in annual revenue, CEO Andy Jassy says. Now the company believes it will be at least double that, and could possibly become a $1 trillion annual revenue business in time, with strong free cash flow and return on invested capital, Jassy says during a call with analysts. "We will still not have enough capacity to meet all of the demand we have in 2026. And I believe this dynamic will also be true in 2027 too," Jassy says. "In fact, the demand we already have for 2028 is striking," he says, adding that enterprises are still very early in using inference at scale in their current production applications. (kelly.cloonan@wsj.com)
1659 ET - Shares in Apple fall 4.3% after-hours, even as the company reports a record third quarter with revenue up 16%. IPhone sales were up 21%, and earnings per share rose 29% to $2.02, boosted by an 11 cent impact from tariff refunds. The after-hours slip pulls back some of 15% gain Apple has enjoyed over the past month, with investors seeing the stock as a safe name in the technology sector with comparatively low capital expenditures, according to The Wall Street Journal. (elias.schisgall@wsj.com)
1619 ET - Amazon's AWS unit notched a 37% increase in sales in the latest quarter, to $42.2 billion. The gain marks the segment's fastest growth in 18 quarters, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says. "AWS is booming," Jassy says. AWS now makes up about 21% of the company's overall topline, compared to 18% in the year-ago period.(kelly.cloonan@wsj.com)
1618 ET - Amazon.com's free cash flow dipped into the red, with an outflow of $7.6 billion for the trailing twelve months ending June 30 compared with an inflow of $18.2 billion for the same period a year earlier. The company says the decline was driven primarily by a $66.1 billion increase in purchases of property and equipment, net of proceeds from sales and incentives, primarily due to investments in artificial intelligence. The results come as big tech companies ramp up AI spending, hurting free cash flow and testing Wall Street's patience.
Comments