Stocks – Facebook Slumps, Verizon Slips in Premarket, Tesla Surges

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.
• The company’s forecast for underlying earnings per share also fell marginally short of expectations.

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.

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