By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- Stocks in focus in premarket trade on Friday, 31st January. Please refresh for updates.
9:10 AM ET: Navistar (NYSE:) stock rose 54% after Volkswagen's truck unit Traton (DE:) offered to buy the company for $2.9 billion
9:05 AM ET: Chevron (NYSE:) stock fell 1.9% after the oil company swung to a $6.6 billion loss in the fourth quarter, as impairments on assets in the Gulf of Mexico, Canada and Appalachia came out close to the top end of an earlier warning.
The company had in December warned of up to $11 billion in asset writedowns and said it was considering the sale of its stake in the Appalachian shale and in the proposed Kitmat LNG project in Canada.
The news comes a day after Royal Dutch Shell (LON:) also took a hefty charge against its U.S. shale gas assets.
9:00 AM ET: Amgen (NASDAQ:) stock fell 2.7% after the company issued disappointing guidance for 2020. The biotech expects EPS of $14.85-$15.60, well below consensus forecasts of $15.98, due to growing pressure on margins from biosimilars.
8:55 AM ET: Honeywell (NYSE:) stock fell 1.5% after the company reported a drop in sales and earnings in the fourth quarter.
Adjusted for a string of asset disposals, sales rose 2% but were still slightly behind forecasts.
The company said underlying earnings will rise by between 5% and 10% this year, as its key aerospace division avoids significant damage from the Boeing (NYSE:) 737 issue.
8:48 AM ET: Caterpillar (NYSE:) stock fell 1.0% after saying earnings per share this year would be between $8.50 and $10. Even the top end of that range was below market consensus.
The company’s fourth-quarter earnings, however, came in ahead of expectations thanks to some determined cost control.
- 8:40 AM ET: Amazon.com (NASDAQ:) stock rose 11.6% after its fourth-quarter profit raced past expectations, thanks to heavy investment in one-day shipping earlier in 2019, and to a rising contribution from its advertising business.
The surge takes Amazon's market capitalization over $1 trillion for the first time - the fourth U.S. company to do so after Apple (NASDAQ:), Alphabet (NASDAQ:) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:).
However, operating income growth from the vital cloud server business AWS slowed, and the company’s international operations continued to lose money.
- Exxon Mobil (NYSE:) stock fell 1.5% after the oil and gas major reported a 5.2% drop in fourth-quarter profit, citing weaker margins in its refining and chemical businesses.
- IBM (NYSE:) stock rose 3.8% after the company said late on Thursday that long-standing CEO Ginni Rometty will stand down. Rometty has overseen a long streak of falling revenue caused by the need to revamp IBM’s business model. That run was broken only in the last quarter.
Rometty will be succeeded by Arvand Krishna, the head of IBM’s Cloud business unit.
