Tesla’s Slide Blunts XPO’s Gains as CE 100 Index Slips 0.5%
BY PYMNTS | APRIL 24, 2023
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Earnings season has begun in earnest, and a cavalcade of income statements and webcasts with analysts will mark the next few weeks.
Volatile stock price movements drove the CE 100 Index to a virtual standstill, off 0.5% for the week.
Communications names were 5% lower, followed by the “Live” sector, which lost 2.2%. Within the communications segment, Zoom gave up 7.9%, followed by Snap Inc., which lost 6.3%.
AI Continues to Grab Some Headlines
As reported here, Zoom recently noted that it is acquiring Workvivo to continue expanding its collaboration platform for the digital-first workplace. The Workvivo platform provides a central hub with internal communication and engagement tools, a social intranet and an employee app.
Snap said last week that it had opened its AI-powered chatbot to all users, having launched My AI in February as a premium service. The newly-established global rollout offers the ability to personalize the AI and to bring it into conversation with a user’s friends.
“My AI is far from perfect, but we’ve made a lot of progress. For example, 99.5% percent of My AI responses conform to our community guidelines,” Snap said.
Within the “Live” vertical, Porch Group shares plummeted 20.9%. The company last week announced $333 million in convertible notes financing.
Roblox shares were off 10.9%.
The company is a component of the “Have Fun” segment, which managed to gain 0.7%. The gaming giant reported its March user metrics. The data show that average bookings per daily active user were between $3.73 and $3.85 in March, a range that represents a 2% decline to a positive 1% gain from the same period a year ago.
Roblox Puts Up its March Numbers
Daily active users rose 26% from March 2022 to 66.2 million users. In the release, Roblox also said it would stop reporting its key metrics on a monthly basis. “While we believe that has provided incremental information to investors regarding the seasonality of the business, we have decided to cease providing key monthly metrics to align our reporting cadence with our value of taking the long view,” the firm said.
The “Move” vertical proved to be a battleground, where the CE pillar gained 2.7% through the week. The “Move” designation was home to the biggest “winner” in our pantheon, as XPO shares surged 32.2%. As reported last week by Freightwaves,
XPO said Dave Bates would join XPO as the COO of its LTL unit. Bates joins XPO from competitor Old Dominion; last month, XPO said Old Dominion’s former CFO, Wes Frye, would join XPO’s board.
XPOs gains were tempered a bit by Tesla, which sank 10.9%. The company’s first-quarter results showed that price cuts (as much as 25% on vehicles sold in the states) are taking their toll, and profits slid 24%.
“We’ve taken a view that pushing for higher volumes and a larger fleet is the right choice here versus a lower volume and higher margin,” CEO Elon Musk said on the company’s earnings call. Operating margins came in at a bit more than 11%, where they had been more than 19% a year ago.
Musk has been making headlines elsewhere, too. As we reported last week, Musk, who owns Twitter, has threatened to sue Microsoft over the “illegal” use of the platform’s data. Twitter’s in-house news account said that Microsoft’s advertising platform would stop supporting Twitter due to the social media company’s requirement for payment for API access.
“They trained illegally using Twitter data,” Musk responded. “Lawsuit time.”
Reached by PYMNTS, Microsoft declined to comment. A message to Twitter’s press office received the same reply as all media requests: a smiling “poop” emoji. Reports last week detailed that Musk’s threat is apparently connected to OpenAI using data from Twitter to train its ChatGPT tool. OpenAI is a separate company, but it is heavily backed by Microsoft, which is building artificial intelligence (AI) into products, including its search engine Bing.
