Breakfast | US stocks hit the brakes on their upward trend, Guo Mingchi pessimistic about Apple's 2024 shipment volume.

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Overnight Morning Market

S&P falls from historical highs, Dow and NVIDIA continue to hit new highs, Alphabet-C drops over 4% after earnings report, Microsoft fluctuates and turns down

Earnings reports continue to impact leading stocks. All three major indices opened lower, with weak volatility. Only the Dow closed higher, rising for the fourth consecutive trading day and reaching a new closing high. The S&P 500 fell 0.06%, and the Nasdaq fell 0.76%. At 03:00 Singapore time tomorrow, the Federal Reserve will announce its interest rate decision, and at 03:30, Fed Chairman Powell will hold a press conference.

Most leading tech stocks closed lower. Tesla rose nearly 0.4%, Microsoft fell nearly 0.3%, and dropped over 2% after the earnings report was released; Alphabet-C fell 1.3% and dropped over 5% after the earnings report was released; Apple fell nearly 2%, declining for five consecutive trading days; Netflix fell nearly 2.3%; Amazon fell 1.4%; Meta fell over 0.2%. NVIDIA rose nearly 0.5%, hitting a new closing high for two consecutive days; AMD fell over 3%, dropping over 6% after the earnings report was released. Intel and Qualcomm fell over 2%.

Super Micro Computer (SMCI) rose 3.5%, hitting a new closing high for two consecutive days. United Parcel Service (UPS.N) fell nearly 9%, announcing a layoff of 12,000 employees.

Overall, popular Chinese concept stocks continued to decline. The Nasdaq Golden Dragon China Index has fallen for four consecutive days, with Nio falling nearly 6%, Bilibili and Dada falling over 4%, Pinduoduo falling nearly 4%, Kingsoft Cloud falling over 3%, JD.com and XPeng falling about 3%, BIDU-SW and Tencent Music falling over 2%, Alibaba and NetEase falling nearly 2%, Li Auto falling 0.9%, while New Oriental turned up at the beginning of the session and closed up nearly 0.5%.

Due to the after-hours decline of several large tech stocks, Nasdaq futures opened down 0.95% on Wednesday morning. Walmart announced a 3-for-1 stock split and rose 1.8% after hours. Alphabet-C's after-hours decline expanded to 6.8%.

Cryptocurrency

Bitcoin fell below $43,000 per coin in the Asian market, down 1.22% intraday.

Media: Jack Dorsey's Bitcoin company Block is reportedly laying off nearly 1,000 employees.

Blue Chips and Hot Stocks

Musk's title as the richest person is at risk as a $55 billion compensation plan is announced invalid.

Alphabet-C CEO: Gemini Ultra AI model will be launched "soon". Alphabet-C is experimenting with using Gemini in search.

TF International analyst Ming-Chi Kuo stated that Apple has lowered its estimated iPhone shipments for key upstream semiconductor components in 2024 to about 200 million units (a 15% decline YoY). Among the major global smartphone brands in 2024, Apple may experience the largest decline.

Microsoft: Expects stable growth in Azure in the third quarter, with intelligent cloud revenue reaching $26 billion to $26.3 billion. AI drove a 6% increase in Azure business revenue. Microsoft's quarterly revenue was $62 billion, with market expectations at $61.14 billion, compared to $52.7 billion in the same period last year. Among them, cloud business revenue was $33.7 billion, with market expectations at $32.21 billion. AMD CEO: AMD has sufficient supply to support a target of over $3.5 billion in AI chip sales. AMD's fourth-quarter revenue was $6.2 billion, slightly higher than the market expectation of $6.13 billion and up from $5.599 billion in the same period last year. The first-quarter revenue is expected to be between $5.1 billion and $5.7 billion, with the market expectation at $5.77 billion.

Alphabet-C's fourth-quarter revenue was $86.31 billion, surpassing the market expectation of $85.36 billion and up from $76.05 billion in the same period last year. Advertising revenue reached $65.52 billion, slightly lower than the market expectation of $65.8 billion but higher than $59.042 billion in the same period last year. Cloud revenue was $9.19 billion, exceeding the market expectation of $8.95 billion and up from $7.315 billion in the same period last year.

Pfizer's fourth-quarter revenue was $14.25 billion, slightly lower than the market expectation of $14.42 billion and down from $24.3 billion in the same period last year.

Facing market share loss to competitors, PayPal plans to lay off approximately 2,500 employees, accounting for about 9% of its workforce. Since CEO Alex Chriss took office in September last year, the company has been dealing with increasingly fierce competition, profit pressure, and numerous analyst downgrades.

United Parcel Service (UPS.N) announced that it will lay off 12,000 employees to reduce costs by $1 billion and is considering selling its Coyote truck brokerage business. The fourth-quarter revenue was $24.917 billion, a 7.8% decrease compared to the same period last year and lower than the analyst expectation of $25.48 billion.

Samsung Electronics reported an operating loss of KRW 2.18 trillion in its chip business for the fourth quarter, higher than the market expectation of KRW 1.7 trillion. Chip sales reached KRW 21.69 trillion, surpassing the market expectation of KRW 20.21 trillion.

General Motors CEO announced that the company will cut costs by $2 billion by 2024.

American Airlines Group announced that it will lay off 656 employees.

De Beers Group, the international diamond giant, has once again lowered the prices of various rough diamonds in order to stimulate production and consumption. The overall price reduction is about 10%, making it one of the largest price reductions in recent years.

ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo criticized the organization for being slow and only discussing GPT in 2023, and listed "strengthening crisis awareness" as an annual goal.

Startups

Market news: Microsoft is in talks with OpenAI to lead the $2 billion funding round for robotics startup Figure AI, valuing the company at $2 billion.

NVIDIA invests in chatbot startup Kore.AI. Raj Koneru, the founder and CEO of Kore.AI, stated that the company's revenue has grown by a triple-digit percentage over the past few years, and they expect to go public in about two years.

Macro: A glimpse of the world

US consumer confidence has reached its highest level since the end of 2021, with the Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index recording 114.8 in January.

Norway's $1.5 trillion sovereign wealth fund increased its bets on the largest tech companies last year.

Saudi Arabia is reportedly restarting defense talks with the United States, including discussions on the historic cooperation between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

South Korea's chip shipments in December grew by 113.7% compared to the same period last year, the highest growth rate since 1997. Chip production in December also increased by 53.3% compared to the same period in 2016, the highest growth rate since 2016. Nasdaq plans to cut hundreds of jobs as part of its integration efforts following the acquisition of financial software company Adenza in November last year.

Shanghai has relaxed restrictions on non-Shanghai residents purchasing homes, allowing those who have paid social security for at least 5 years to buy one property outside the outer ring road (except for Chongming District).