From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, these are the top stories that moved markets and had investors, business leaders, and entrepreneurs talking this week on Cheddar.
ZOOM BUST
The Zoom boom is over and investors are taking note. The video conferencing platform announced new products this week and released its earnings report on Monday. However, it had to adjust its full-year outlook downward as workers return to real, live offices. While the company expects to remain profitable, it's now expecting an 11 percent jump this year, compared to the 55 percent it earned last year. That wasn't calming enough for Wall Street, so Zoom stock dropped 14 percent over the week, though stocks, in general, fell across the board this week.
ON TARGET
Meanwhile, Target thrived during the pandemic. Now the brick-and-mortar retailer says it can continue growing profits even as increasing labor costs and supply chain issues push up costs. Shares rose nearly 10 percent after its fourth-quarter earnings report showed an 8.9 percent increase in comparable sales and a 9.2 percent jump in digital sales. The company also announced that it's investing heavily in both its physical and digital presence and is anticipating annual revenue growth in the mid-single digits in the coming years. In addition, the retailer said it plans to raise the minimum wage for workers across its stores and warehouses to between $15 and $24 an hour.
FORD'S EV GAMBIT
Ford is streamlining its electric vehicle business with a corporate restructuring that sent shares soaring this week. The automaker on Wednesday announced that it plans to separate its electric and combustion engine businesses while keeping them under the same corporate umbrella. The not-quite spin-off is a bid to maximize profits and stoke investor excitement. Investors had been pushing for a full spin-off (something they tend to do a lot) but the compromise seemed to do the trick, as the stock popped 8.4 percent on the news.
LUCID LAGS
Lucid, the luxury electric vehicle maker, is gunning for Tesla's market, but scaling up quickly is proving to be a challenge. Shares tumbled this week after the upstart carmaker announced that it would produce between 12,000 to 14,000 cars in 2022, rather than the 20,000 initially expected. CEO Peter Rawlinson said supply chain issues were behind the hold-up, but investors weren't hearing any excuses. Lucid's market cap ($37 billion) currently exceeds carmakers that are producing exponentially more cars, so expectations for growth are high. Later in the week, Lucid inked a deal to build its first factory outside of the U.S. on the west coast of Saudi Arabia.
SNOWFLAKE MELTS
The bar really is high for tech stocks these days. Despite achieving triple-digit growth and edging past Wall Street expectations, the data-warehousing company Snowflake saw its shares drop 16 percent Thursday after a quarterly earnings report projected slower future growth rates. Investors, of course, are always looking ahead, but expectations were extremely high in this case. The company called for revenue growth to slow to around 80 percent in the first quarter, which is still some serious growth, just not quite what investors were hoping for from the high-flying Snowflake. Shares continued to drop to close out the week down almost 22 percent.
