The Q4 Earnings Report
After the 2008 financial crises, the U.S. Economy hasn’t seen a ray of sunshine for a few years, but this year proves to be different for the land of opportunity as the economy posts a better Q4 earnings report. The Q4 earnings reports shows largely solid numbers that is reflective of the brighter growth in the U.S. Economy.
The reason is that the earnings and revenue growth for the group of 219 index members has notably reached above recent periods. Compared to the growth from the prior periods this quarter’s number have remained favorable even in the Finance sector’s strong numbers.
Positive surprises are tracking below historical periods. The 64.8% earning beat percentage and 53.4% revenue beat percentage that are below the 77.6% and 60.7% earnings and revenue beat percentages.
The real disappointment in this quarter’s report has been the bad-performance of the Energy sector, we’ve seen a roughly 90-100% percent increase in the price of crude oil in the last 12 months but the last quarter of 2016 energy earnings are a significant disappointment. Energy is down by 2% year to date had a terrible earning report.
The end of the year is always gives a last minute boost for almost all companies because of all that holiday shoppers that are going crazy with the Christmas shopping. But the tech corporations are the ones that are most benefiting in this season. Companies like Apple, Netflix, Microsoft, Samsung and Facebook.
Apple sold the most iPhones last quarter to more than over 78 million units. This in turn increases the company’s earnings of $3.36 per share. Netflix’s flood-the- zone strategy when it comes to original content continues to pay off. The company added a record of 7 million subscribers in Q4, beating its own projection of 5.2 million, while earning in turn increase by 15 cents per share beat estimate.
Microsoft has a habit of throwing its weight behind emerging sectors either too early or too late. But the company appears to be falling close behind Amazon at just the right time when it comes to cloud computing. The company had an increase of 83 cents per share with a $6.83 billion in revenue.