$Zoom(ZM)$ Zoom still generates significant positive free cash flow (FCF) post-pandemic, producing $1.2 billion trailing-12-month FCF as of January 2023. It also has $5.41 billion in cash with no long-term debt on the balance sheet -- so it's in little danger of financial distress. This is a company likely to survive this downturn.
$Alphabet(GOOGL)$ For Google, which is already one step behind, it is not easy to break through Microsoft's encirclement in a short time. But in the field of search, Google's unique geographical position also makes it "easy to defend and difficult to attack". As long as Bard does not frequently roll over or have any outrageous incidents, it will be difficult for Bing to pose a great threat to it. At the same time, aiming at the current technical defects of ChatGPT and focusing on solving the problem of information security and reliability may also become an opportunity for Google to overtake in a corner.
$Meta Platforms, Inc.(META)$ Meta Platforms (META), formerly Facebook, has been on an elevator ride up since November as the firm finally committed to cutting costs as its top-line growth slows. Meta, like Amazon and others over-hired during the pandemic boom. Meta said in mid-March that would cut another roughly 10K jobs in the coming months in what Mark Zuckerberg is calling the “year of efficiency.” The social media titan’s disappointing 2022 is now in the rearview and it is ready to return to top and bottom line growth as it focuses once again on its core businesses Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, all of which will bounce back from a bad year for digital advertising because its reach is out of this world. Meta’s ‘monthly active people
With the new GPT-4, C3 Generative AI for Enterprise Search, which combines the power of the existing C3 AI Platform with a search model similar to Google’s natural language processing and generative pre-trained transformers. C3 Generative AI Product Suite is expected to be applied for use cases in aerospace, oil and gas, utilities, consumer packaged goods (CPG), healthcare, financial services, and defense and intelligence. C3.ai suite would be in demand and cost of creation will also reduce. Customers would bring their customized GPT-4 model to C3.ai platform to test and deploy. With the advantage of C3.ai technology in integration. I would see C3.ai stock on the uptrend.
Companies like Meta, Snap & YouTube's parent company Alphabet would benefit if such a ban on TikTok was in place. These digital media companies had a tough time in 2022 as digital advertising spending was cut, impacting their revenues. Social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube have been losing market share to TikTok. In 2021, TikTok topped a billion monthly users. An August Pew Research Center survey found that 67% of teens in the U.S. use TikTok, and 16% said they are on it almost constantly. According to Insider Intelligence, TikTok controls 2.3% of the worldwide digital ad market, putting it behind only Google (including YouTube), Facebook (including Instagram), Amazon and Alibaba
In a more recent development, Credit Suisse has admitted to having "material weaknesses" in its internal controls over financial reporting, which has led to the restatement of the cash-flow statements for 2019 and 2020. Unfortunately for the bank, this news comes at a time when the recent failures of US banks have heightened concerns about the stability of the financial system.
Recently, the CPI data released by the US in February rose by 6% year-on-year, in line with market expectations. However, the turmoil triggered by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has largely dampened rate hike expectations, and traders are now betting that the Fed policy rate will peak at around 4.83% at the May meeting, implying that the Fed still has about 25 basis points to raise interest rates. Meanwhile, around 3 rate cuts of 25 basis points each are expected by the December meeting.
$Meta Platforms, Inc.(META)$ Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram has announced a new round of 10,000 staff layoffs, and shelved plans of hiring on 5,000 open positions. Meta has tagged 2023 as the "Year of Efficiency", as their spending post pandemic has swelled, developing the future of the metaverse and launching their AR/VR headset Meta Quest Pro late in 2022 that costs as much as an iPhone 14 Pro.
$Meta Platforms, Inc.(META)$ On the other side of the ledger, Meta Platforms $(META)$ has been unimpressive in the buyback category. It bought back 378 million shares in the 10 years ended in September, but it issued 431 million shares to employees so its share count increased about 12%. From its initial public offering in 2012 to September, its market cap rose by a multiple of about 7 times, but the stock price rose less than 5 times, according to FactSet. Arguably, some companies such as Meta use buybacks as a way of neutralizing the negative price effect of issuing shares. The deal to the market is that the company will conserve cash by paying employees partially in stock, and later on, it will buy back stock to soften the negative impact