Earnings Previews: Alphabet, Microsoft, Visa

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No notable earnings reports were released late Friday or early Monday morning.

After U.S. markets close on Monday, Cadence Systems, Cleveland-Cliffs and NXP Semiconductor will release their quarterly earnings reports.

General Motors, NextEra Energy and Verizon are on deck to release their latest results first thing Tuesday morning.

Here is a look at three companies set to report quarterly results after markets close Tuesday afternoon.

Alphabet

The parent of Google, Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL), is the first (alphabetically speaking) of the five big tech stocks to report June-quarter earnings. The good news for investors is that the stock has added 36% to its share price so far in 2023, with about two-thirds of that increase coming by mid-April.

In the first quarter, Alphabet beat both revenue and earnings per share (EPS) estimates, largely due to the company’s massive reduction in employees. What did it have to do to keep up the momentum in the second quarter? Sell more advertising on its Google search results pages. Wall Street seems to think that happened.

Of 51 analyst ratings on the stock, 43 are Buy or Strong Buy rating, and the rest are Hold ratings. At a recent price of around $120 a share, the upside potential, based on a median price target of $126, is 11.8%. At the high price target of $172, the upside potential is 68.6%.

Second-quarter revenue is forecast at $72.75 billion, which would be up 4.2% sequentially and by 4.4% year over year. Adjusted EPS are pegged at $1.34, up 14.7% sequentially and 10.7% higher year over year. For the full 2023 fiscal year, consensus estimates call for EPS of $5.35, up 17.4%, on revenue of $300.11 billion, up 6.1%.

Alphabet stock trades at 22.5 times expected 2023 EPS, 19.0 times estimated 2024 earnings of $6.32 and 16.3 times estimated 2025 earnings of $7.37 per share. Its 52-week trading range is $83.34 to $129.04. The company does not pay a dividend, and the total shareholder return for the past 12 months was 4.97%.

Microsoft

Over the past 12 months, Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) has added 29.8% to its share price, including a gain of 43.4% so far in 2023. And while shares got a boost with the March launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the share price increase has followed a trend line that began in January.

The recent pricing announcement for Microsoft’s CoPilot AI software gave the shares another jolt, but all the hype about AI is not expected to add much to either the top or bottom line. Microsoft’s fortunes remain tethered to Azure. That is unlikely to change in the second half of the calendar year (the first half of the company’s 2024 fiscal year).

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