Even Amazon and tech giants might not be able to click into a changing market | Business

TThe march of Amazon and other American tech giants towards world domination can sometimes seem unstoppable. Investors who bought Amazon's story were rarely disappointed either. The performance of Amazon's stock price since the millennium is + 2.345%.

Last year, technology stocks were overexploited until the fall, when almost all of them collapsed. But Amazon is still up more than 25% over the same period last year, and a 90 reading of its price / earnings ratio – essentially a measure of investors' hopes for the future – suggests that its growth stellar should continue.

But, as always, investors will be on the lookout for signs that might suggest that the company could announce its earnings for the first three months of the year on Wednesday after recognizing it 's being bumped into. obstacles.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has certainly had a difficult time going through the largest divorce in the world. The richest man in the world has also had to deal with the alleged interference of the Saudi state in his private life, as well as the bitter public campaign against Amazon's plan to open a major new office in New York.

On the corporate side, the Amazon machine recorded a third consecutive record quarterly profit at the end of 2018 – $ 3 billion. However, even in unveiling this new record, he indicated that the end of the year may not be in the first quarter, as many large investments were needed in a wide range of major strategic bets, delivery systems from drones to cloud computing.

Amazon also encountered problems outside of its domestic markets: it will close its Chinese online store on July 18, admitting in essence that the hold of well-established local platforms Alibaba and JD.com was simply too strong . (It is unlikely that busy retailers in Amazon's major markets will be particularly likeable.) The company has also been affected by regulatory actions in India, another important source of potential new customers.

Amazon's search for more growth is mirrored in leading tech companies in the US, which posted a profit this week, as penetration into its domestic market begins to stabilize.

For Twitter – finally profitable last year, 12 years after its inception – the number of daily active users is the key element of the data, because the greater the commitment of users is important, the higher the potential earnings, even if the number of tweeters is growing fast slows down.

When growth prospects stutter, the results can be brutal. Snap, which publishes its first quarter results Tuesday, is such a warning. The social media company behind the Snapchat picture messaging app is worth only half of its value when it was received two years ago, when it was sold. an enthusiastic reception. Analysts now fear that its US user base will shrink in 2019 and that losses will continue for at least the next two years. Social media company recently launched Pinterest, beware.

Of course, big tech companies have already proven that opponents were wrong. Facebook has had a particularly gloomy 2018 year, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal and other political fury and more and more regular data. Nevertheless, it should record a sharp rise in its quarterly sales, badysts expected an increase of about 25% over the previous year, to reach a little less than $ 15 billion.

Analyst Alex de Groote thinks technology companies will solve their problems, while investors believe they can continue their inexorable expansion. He said, "2018 has been a really tough year for social media and Internet companies. However, 2019 was a complete turnaround. "