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April 30, 2020
Business

The deluge of first-quarter reports this week is giving investors a detailed look at how the start of the coronavirus crisis affected businesses. Of course, second-quarter earnings this year may well be even more grim.

Facebook cautioned Wall Street that it could face intensifying difficulties in its advertising business as the spread of the coronavirus ripples through the global economy, although the falloff in spending has stabilized. The company’s revenue in the first quarter rose 18 percent to $17.74 billion from a year earlier, while profit more than doubled to $4.9 billion, surpassing Wall Street estimates. A year earlier, Facebook had taken a $3 billion charge to pay for a privacy settlement with the Federal Trade Commission.
Microsoft reported strong growth in sales and profits for the quarter ended in March, saying that the coronavirus outbreak had “minimal net impact” on its financial performance. Revenue rose 15 percent to $35 billion, compared with the analysts’ consensus forecast of $33.66 billion. Its operating earnings per share rose 23 percent to $1.40 a share in the quarter. That was well above the average estimate of Wall Street analysts of $1.26 a share, as compiled by Refinitiv, a research firm.
Boeing reported $16.9 billion of revenue in the first quarter of the year, a 26 percent decline from last year, as the aviation industry ground to a halt during the coronavirus pandemic. The company said Wednesday that it planned to cut its work force by about 10 percent, a reduction it hopes to achieve voluntarily, through buyouts and early retirement offers.
General Electric said Wednesday that overall revenue fell 8 percent to $20.5 billion in the first quarter of the year. The coronavirus pandemic especially affected the aviation division, which saw a 13 percent decline. But the health care sector of the business, which doubled its production of ventilators and increased its manufacturing of other medical equipment used in the diagnosis and treatment of Covid-19, saw revenue increase by 7 percent, to $5.3 billion.
The restaurant giant Yum Brands said on Wednesday that same-store sales across its brands had dropped 7 percent in the first quarter. Sales at K.F.C. shrank 8 percent, while Pizza Hut sales dropped 11 percent. But sales at Taco Bell — which has been offering drive-through service throughout the pandemic — rose 1 percent.
Airbus, the European aircraft giant, reported on Wednesday a net loss of 481 million euros (about $522 million) in the first quarter of 2020, a reversal from a profit of 40 million euros in the same period a year ago. The company said that it delivered 122 commercial aircraft compared with 162 in the first quarter of 2019.
Volkswagen, the world’s largest carmaker, said that vehicle sales fell 25 percent in the first three months of the year, a vivid indication of the havoc that the coronavirus is causing throughout the auto industry. The company, based in Wolfsburg, Germany, said that it sold 1.9 million vehicles in the first quarter compared with 2.6 million in the first quarter of 2019. Profit also collapsed, falling more than 80 percent to 517 million euros, or $562 million.

Catch up: Here’s what else is happening.

FedEx said on Wednesday that it would not take federal funds earmarked to pay employees under the CARES Act, one day after UPS announced the same. Lawmakers had set aside $25 billion in grants for passenger airlines and $4 billion for cargo carriers to pay workers, though the Treasury Department later classified a portion of the funds for airlines as a loan.
Tyson Foods said on Wednesday that it was doubling bonuses, to a total of $120 million, for its 116,000 front-line workers and truck drivers in the United States. The company also said it was increasing short-term disability coverage for employees unable to work because of illness and putting additional health screening measures into place.
Lyft plans to lay off 17 percent of its employees, the company said in a regulatory filing, as the ride-hailing company struggles with a downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The company told staff about the cuts in an email on Wednesday. Five percent of workers will be furloughed, and remaining employees will take a pay cut. Executive pay will be reduced 30 percent, pay for vice presidents will be reduced 20 percent, and pay for other workers will be reduced 10 percent.
Volkswagen said on Wednesday that it would not restart production at its plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., on May 3, a date it announced just a week earlier. The German automaker did not provide a new start date, and said in a statement that it would first “weigh the readiness of the supplier base, as well as market demand and the status of the Covid-19 outbreak.”

Reporting was contributed by Alan Rappeport, Mary Williams Walsh Steve Lohr, Taylor Lorenz, Ben Casselman, Jaclyn Peiser, Stanley Reed, Jack Ewing, Ben Dooley, Keith Bradsher, Alan Rappeport, Jeanna Smialek, David Yaffe-Bellany, Jason Karaian, Kate Conger, Mike Isaac, Tara Siegel-Bernard, Neal E. Boudette, Michael Corkery, Sapna Maheshwari, Gregory Schmidt, Mohammed Hadi, Katie Robertson, Carlos Tejada, Mike Ives and Kevin Granville.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/29/business/stock-market-coronavirus.html