By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- Stocks in focus in premarket trade on Thursday, 30th January. Please refresh for updates.
8:55 AM ET: Coca-Cola (NYSE:) stock rose 0.9% after the company reported quarterly sales ahead of expectations, but pared earlier gains after forecasting that organic sales growth will slow slightly to 5% from 6% last year.
9 AM ET: Hershey (NYSE:) stock rose 3.5% after posting earnings around 3% higher than forecast in the fourth quarter. Revenue was roughly in line with consensus. The company also had to absorb a $108 million writedown on Krave Foods, which it bought five years ago in a move to reduce its exposure to the confectionary business.
The company’s forecast for underlying earnings per share also fell marginally short of expectations.
9 AM ET: Hershey (NYSE:) stock rose 3.5% after posting earnings around 3% higher than forecast in the fourth quarter. Revenue was roughly in line with consensus. The company also had to absorb a $108 million writedown on Krave Foods, which it bought five years ago in a move to reduce its exposure to the confectionary business.
8:40 AM ET: Eli Lilly (NYSE:) stock rose 1.8% after the pharma reported fourth-quarter earnings well ahead of expectations, thanks largely to strong sales of its diabetes drug Trulicity.
- 8:30 AM ET: Southwest Airlines (NYSE:) stock fell 3.0% after The Wall Street Journal reported that it had been running services for nearly two years without fully complying with safety regulations.
- Royal Dutch Shell's (NYSE:) ADRs fell 3.2% to their lowest in four months after the company said it would slow the pace of share buybacks by 60% to conserve cash.
Shell’s fourth-quarter earnings were hit by nearly $3 billion of impairments, the largest of which was due to its U.S. shale gas assets (following similar moves by Chevron (NYSE:) and BP (LON:)). The group’s debt-to-equity ratio rose further above its medium-term target of 25%.
8:23 AM ET: United Parcel Service (NYSE:) stock fell 0.9% after the company’s operating margin fell in the fourth quarter due to its increased reliance on Amazon.com (NASDAQ:). Amazon had cut ties with FedEx (NYSE:) at the end of last year.
UPS’s fourth-quarter earnings met expectations of $2.11 a share but revenue fell slightly short.
UPS also announced it has ordered 10,000 electric delivery vans from U.K.-based Arrival Ltd, and will team up with Google’s self-driving technology unit Waymo to take shipments between its own locations.
8:15 AM ET: Spirit Aerosystems (NYSE:) stock fell 6.4% after the company set out a painfully slow schedule for resuming production of parts for the Boeing (NYSE:) 737 MAX.
Spirit said it will produce an average 18 shipsets — that is, a complete set of parts for each aircraft — per month this year, down from 52 in 2019. It said it doesn’t expect to return to last year’s production rates until late 2022.
8:11 AM ET: Tesla (NASDAQ:) stock surged as much as 11% to a new record high, before retreating to be up 9.8%, after posting earnings and revenue ahead of expectations in the fourth quarter.
Founder Elon Musk promised deliveries would rise to well above 500,000 this year, an implicit gain of 35%, and said profit and positive cash flow would be the exception rather than the rule in future.
The company also signed up new partners to supply batteries, in the shape of China’s CATL and South Korea’s LG Chem.
8:06 AM ET: Facebook (NASDAQ:) stock slumped 7.5%, erasing gains for the year to date, after it posted its first ever drop in annual profit after the bell on Wednesday. A 51% rise in costs, due largely to the growing need to satisfy regulators' concerns over privacy, pushed its operating margin down to 34% in 2019 from 45% only a year earlier. Fourth-quarter revenue and earnings both came in slightly ahead of expectations, however.
Verizon (NYSE:) stock fell 0.7% after the company predicted only modest underlying earnings growth of between 2% and 4% this year, due in part to the need to roll out expensive 5G networks. It estimated capex spending at between $17 and $18 billion.
Fourth-quarter earnings missed expectations by less than 1% but revenues were ahead of forecasts as the company had its best quarter in six years for adding mobile phone subscribers.
Blackstone (NYSE:) stock rose 1.3% after the asset manager said fourth-quarter distributable earnings rose 27 percent year-on-year, helped by its real estate and hedge funds businesses. That offset declines in its equity and credit businesses.