New YouTube Products Propel Alphabet

Alphabet reported 23% year-on-year growth in revenues at constant currency to 39.3 billion US dollars for the fourth quarter of 2018, boosted by "ongoing strength in mobile search with important contributions from YouTube, cloud and desktop search."

"YouTube Music and YouTube Premium are now available in nearly 30 countries up from five countries at the start of 2018," said Sundar Pichai, Alphabet CEO. "Last month, YouTube TV announced that it has expanded nationwide to cover 98% of U.S households with the rest to follow shortly. YouTube continues to invest in its thriving community of creators and build great features for its nearly 2 billion monthly log in users....The number of YouTube channels with more than 1 million subscribers nearly doubled in the last year, and the number of creators earning five or six figures grew by more than 40% year-over-year." Source: Alphabet statements

Time Warner Boosts AT&T

Excluding the impact of an accounting change, AT&T said revenues rose 17.2% year-on-year to 48.9 billion US dollars in the fourth quarter, primarily due to the Time Warner acquisition. Declines in legacy wireline services, wireless equipment, domestic video and Vrio were more than offset by WarnerMedia and growth in domestic wireless services and Xandr, AT&T said. Xandr, the advertising business, reported a 49% increase in revenues (26% excluding the AppNexus acquisition).

In 2018, capital expenditures totalled 21.3 billion dollars, down from 21.6 billion dollars in 2017. In 2019, AT&T plans to increase capex to 23 billion dollars (including one billion dollars it expects to be reimbursed), as it rolls out 5G.

On a conference call with analysts, Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, said: "Over a three-to-five year time horizon, unequivocally 5G will serve as a broadband, a fixed broadband replacement product... as we look at 5G, will you have enough capacity to have a good broadband product that serves as a streaming service for all of your DIRECTV NOW, your Netflix, etc.? I absolutely am convinced that we will have that capacity, particularly as we turn up millimetre wave spectrum. That's where the capacity and the performance comes from and that's where you'll begin to see a broad - a true replacement opportunity for fixed line broadband." Source: AT&T statement

Sales Growth Set to Slow for Amazon

Amazon said it expects net sales to be between 56 billion and 60 billion US dollars in the current quarter, which would represent year-on-year growth of between 10% and 18%. This guidance anticipates an unfavourable impact of approximately 210 basis points from foreign exchange rates.

In the fourth quarter of 2018, Amazon increased sales by 20% to 72.4 billion dollars. Excluding the impact of currency movements, sales would have risen 21%.  Amazon said tens of millions of customers worldwide started Prime free trials or began paid memberships during the holiday season.

“The number of research scientists working on Alexa has more than doubled in the past year, and the results of the team’s hard work are clear," added Jeff Bezos, Amazon  CEO. "In 2018, we improved Alexa’s ability to understand requests and answer questions by more than 20% through advances in machine learning, we added billions of facts making Alexa more knowledgeable than ever, developers doubled the number of Alexa skills to over 80,000, and customers spoke to Alexa tens of billions more times in 2018 compared  to 2017.” Source: Amazon statement

Sales Falls For Samsung Electronics

The sales of business units include inter-segment sales.

Samsung Electronics reported a 10% year-on-year fall in revenues for the fourth quarter of 2018 to 59.27 trillion Korean won (53 billion US dollars), driven by declines in its semiconductor and mobile divisions. It blamed the dip in sales in its mobile division on weak smartphone shipments, amid a stagnant market. Source: Samsung statements

Facebook Expects Further Deceleration

Facebook reported a 33% year-on-year increase in revenues on a constant currency basis for the fourth quarter to 16.9 billion US dollars, down from 34% in the third quarter.

For the current quarter, Facebook expects its total revenue growth rate to decelerate by a mid-single digit percentage on a constant currency basis compared to the fourth quarter rate. "We also expect that our revenue growth rates will continue to decelerate sequentially throughout 2019 on a constant currency basis," the company said.

It plans to invest between 18 billion and 20 billion dollars in capital expenditures in 2019, driven primarily by the building of data centres. For 2018, capital expenditure was 13.9 billion dollars.

Separately, Facebook shut down a mobile app that paid users 20 dollars a month for allowing it to collect data on their iPhones, after Apple said the app breached its policies. The app monitored the user's web and phone activity, including how they use other apps, according to a TechCrunch report. Source: Facebook statement

Model 3 Drives Tesla to New Heights

Tesla reported a 134% year-on-year increase in automotive revenue for the fourth quarter of 2018 to 6.32 billion US dollars. The company claimed its Model 3 was the best-selling passenger car in the US in terms of revenue in both the third and fourth quarter. "With nearly 140,000 units sold, Model 3 was also the best-selling premium vehicle (including SUVs) in the US for 2018 – the first time in decades an American carmaker has been able to secure the top spot," Tesla said.

Tesla is expecting to deliver a total of 360,000 to 400,000 vehicles in 2019, representing year-on-year growth of approximately 45% to 65%. By the end of 2019, Tesla is planning to start producing Model 3 vehicles at its Gigafactory Shanghai where it hopes the capital spend per unit of capacity will be less than half of that of the existing Model 3 line in Fremont.  The company said it is aiming for annualised Model 3 output in excess of 500,000 units sometime between the fourth quarter of 2019 and the second quarter of 2020.

Tesla recently launched “Navigate on Autopilot”, a feature that "allows, on most controlled-access roads such as highways, any Tesla vehicle with Enhanced Autopilot to change lanes, transition from one highway to another, and ultimately exit the highway when approaching the final destination."

Tesla also reported that energy generation and storage revenue in the fourth quarter increased by 25% year-on-year to 371 million dollars, mainly driven by a substantial growth in energy storage deployments. "Energy generation and storage revenue should increase significantly in 2019, mainly due to the storage business," Tesla said. Source: Tesla statement

Apple Sees Sales Slide Continuing

Source: Statista
Apple forecast revenue for the quarter ending March 31st will fall to between 55 billion and 59 billion dollars from 61.6 billion in the same quarter of 2018. That would represent a year-on-year decline of between 4% and 11% For the quarter ending December 29, it reported a 5% fall in revenues fo 84.3 billion dollars. Revenue from iPhones declined 15% from the prior year, while total revenue from all other products and services grew 19%.

Apple also said that more than half of the 1.8 billion iPhones it has ever sold are still in use, accounting for the bulk of the total 1.4 billion Apple devices in active use, which also include Macs, iPads and Apple Watches. source: Apple statement

Verizon Reports Modest Growth

Verizon reported a 0.5% increase in total operating revenue to 34.3 billion US dollars for the fourth quarter of 2018,  excluding the impact of the new revenue recognition standard. For the whole of 2018, on a comparable basis, operating revenues grew approximately 2.2% to 130.9 billion dollars. Verizon said the "primary driver of the increase was continued wireless service revenue growth driven by step ups in access and net account growth."

Verizon also said IoT (Internet of Things) fourth-quarter revenues, including its Verizon Connect telematics business, increased approximately 9.5% year over year, excluding the impact of the revenue recognition standard. source: Verizon statement