By Aditya Soni and Deborah Mary Sophia <\/p>\n
Oct 29 (Reuters) – Cash flow is king again. <\/p>\n
Wall Street rewarded Microsoft and Oracle on Wednesday for showing that they could fund their enormous AI ambitions without endlessly tapping investors. <\/p>\n
Alphabet, by contrast, was punished for burning through cash, while Google Search’s slower growth fanned fears \u200cthat competition was hurting the business that bankrolls its AI expansion. <\/p>\n
Microsoft shares rose more than 2% in premarket trading on Thursday, while Alphabet plunged nearly 11%, as \u200cinvestors drew a sharper distinction between companies making money from AI and those struggling to contain its costs. <\/p>\n
The divergence shows that after rewarding companies for spending aggressively to secure computing capacity \u2014 often through debt \u2014 investors are demanding \u200bmore evidence that the resulting growth can finance the next round of outlays. <\/p>\n
Meta offered an early warning last week, when better-than-expected revenue growth and an upbeat outlook were eclipsed by its cash burn. <\/p>\n
Oracle, on the other hand, ended regular trading nearly 11% higher on Wednesday after Larry Ellison’s company said it was planning to put a ceiling on external financing and expected to turn its cash flow positive in the second half of fiscal 2028. <\/p>\n
“Alphabet and Microsoft were night and day,” said Melissa Otto, head of research at S&P Global Visible Alpha. <\/p>\n
“Microsoft’s quarter demonstrated very disciplined \u200cgrowth, whereas Google is burning cash and its core business \u2060came in below expectations,” she said, adding that it may lead investors to question “is AI taking some share” from Google Search. <\/p>\n
Alphabet poured 121.4% of its operating cash flow into capital spending in the September quarter, compared with 68% by Microsoft, excluding finance leases. <\/p>\n
A lower ratio leaves more \u2060cash for buybacks, dividends or paying down debt. A ratio above 100% means a company is spending more than its operations generate and must make up the gap with reserves or borrowing. <\/p>\n
Google’s search revenue growth also slowed to 12% in the September quarter, falling short of expectations for a 14.7% increase, even as CEO Sundar Pichai said queries were growing at their fastest pace in five years. <\/p>\n
The \u200blong-lucrative \u200bbusiness is under threat from AI chatbots and agents that are changing how people search for information, \u200bjust as the company pours more money into the technology. Capital expenditure \u200cwill increase significantly in 2027, CFO Anat Ashkenazi told analysts. <\/p>\n
CLOUD BOOM, CASH SQUEEZE <\/p>\n
Alphabet’s eyebrow-raising capital outlay \u2014 with as much as $205 billion expected this year \u2014 is, however, driving gains at Google’s other major AI business. <\/p>\n
Google Cloud revenue more than doubled to $30.71 billion, but Alphabet’s spending overwhelmed that growth. Cash burn hit $9.07 billion after the company posted its first quarter of negative cash flow in the June period. <\/p>\n
“This is definitely a different business, Google. It’s a different business today than it was three, five, 10 years ago,” said Jeremy Saltzberg, vice president and senior investment officer at Check Capital, which owns Alphabet shares. <\/p>\n
Saltzberg pushed back on the concerns about spending, saying Alphabet needed to have big outlays to stay competitive at a time when \u200cOpenAI and Anthropic appear to be pulling ahead in Silicon Valley’s AI model race. <\/p>\n
“We think this is \u200ba sport of kings, which is that if you don’t have $150 billion to spend next year on capital \u200bexpenditure, don’t even bother showing up,” Saltzberg said. <\/p>\n
MICROSOFT’S CASH FLOW ADVANTAGE <\/p>\n
Microsoft offered a \u200bstark contrast. The company generated $18.6 billion in free cash flow in its fiscal first quarter, nearly $10 billion more than Wall Street expected, even as \u200cit poured $45.2 billion into expanding its computing infrastructure. <\/p>\n
Revenue at its Azure \u200bcloud business surged a better-than-expected 48% and the \u200bcompany forecast faster-than-expected cloud growth for the current quarter, suggesting corporate demand for AI computing remains strong. <\/p>\n
The results also suggested Microsoft was finding a broader market for AI beyond a handful of deep-pocketed customers, including OpenAI, whose heavy computing requirements have fueled the industry’s expansion. <\/p>\n
“The shiny object stuff is waning” as more businesses move beyond \u200bexperimenting with the newest or most powerful AI models and commit \u200cto long-term contracts, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a conference call with analysts. <\/p>\n
“I want the breadth,” he said. “We have large customers who want to buy \u200bfrom us … As long as the pricing is right, we may sell them some. If not, we will be patient about building the breadth business.” <\/p>\n
(Reporting \u200bby Aditya Soni and Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Sayantani Ghosh and Thomas Derpinghaus) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Aditya Soni and Deborah Mary Sophia Oct 29 (Reuters) – Cash flow is king again. Wall Street…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":950689,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[15261,45,161,49,48,46,133,1828,1829,74172,1830,1831,39783,8123,131,2519,968,1705,2511,1832,1833,176,74173,3322,74174],"class_list":["post-950688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-401k","tag-business","tag-business-news","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-economy","tag-finance","tag-financial-information","tag-investing","tag-investment-tools","tag-investor","tag-market-news","tag-mortgage","tag-mutual-funds","tag-personal-finance","tag-quote","tag-real-estate","tag-retirement","tag-stock","tag-stock-research","tag-stock-valuation","tag-stocks","tag-suze-orman","tag-tax","tag-track-portfolio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=950688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950688\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/950689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=950688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=950688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=950688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}