Will Apple, AMD earnings continue tech's 'so far, so good' results?
Scott Olson
With May set to kick off with earnings results from the likes of Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD), Wall Street will be looking for more signs that the upbeat reports that have so far been delivered show a tech sector that is headed in the right direction.
In just the last week, strong results came from nearly all regions of tech, with Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Facebook parent Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META), Intel (INTC), Google's Alphabet (GOOG) and even online retailing and cloud-services giant Amazon (AMZN) all delivered quarterly reports that signaled that business is improving and customers are getting back to making deals that have been postponed for months. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said the overall state of first-quarter earnings has been much better than had widely been feared.
"So far, so good," Ives said. "The narrative for the tech sector is becoming clearer and clearer despite many tech haters yelling fire in a crowded theater."
Ives said that one area of tech that showed particular resiliency was cloud services, "with Microsoft, Google and Amazon confirming the strong cloud growth narrative thesis." For its part, Microsoft (MSFT) reported strong performance from its Azure cloud service business, and Chief Executive Satya Nadella made no secrets of his company's plans to grab the opportunities in the AI space.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai also cited Google's (GOOG) gains in cloud and AI as helping boost its first-quarter results, and Amazon (AMZN) also reported better-than-expected revenue from its AWS cloud business.
Meta (META) saw its shares surge by almost 15% the day after it delivered better-than-expected first-quarter earnings and sales that, in the words of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, showed the company was making progress in its "year of efficiency".
A highlight of Meta's (META) results was its revenue from advertising, which totaled $28.1B, and surpassed analysts estimates for $26.88B in sales. Meta's (META) ad revenue results provided some evidence that the market for digital advertising is recovering from several quarters of sales declines.
Ives said that because of Meta (META) and Google (GOOG) "digital advertising is holding up and seeing moderating tailwinds" and adding to a belief that enterprise spending, on the whole, is improving. 
"Overall tech earnings are holding up much better than feared from the doomsday crowd," Ives said. "[And] is setting the stage for a tech sector navigating this choppy backdrop much better than other sectors."
Among the big-name tech leaders still on deck to report quarterly results are AMD (AMD), on May 2, and Apple (AAPL) which will get nearly all of Wall Street's attention with its fiscal second-quarter report on May 4. Ives said that Apple's (AAPL) iPhone sales appear to be "very stable", should exceed Wall Street's expectations and also lay the groundwork for how the tech sector is viewed for the next few months.
"Apple will be a telling tale around consumer demand trends seen in the U.S., and especially China, which remains a very debatable point on the Street," Ives said.
More on tech earnings results:
Intel stock pops as Wall Street hopes 'worst case' scenario is over
Cloudflare shares dive 25% as outlook provides no security
Meta shares surge as ad sales, outlook show strength