Stocks – Amazon Cracks $1 Trln in Premarket; IBM Surges, Exxon Falls

By Geoffrey Smith

Investing.com — Stocks in focus in premarket trade on Friday, 31st January. Please refresh for updates.

• 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:).

• 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 6.x% 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.

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