Q4 Earnings Reports Disrupt Stock Markets – Biggest Winners & Losers

By Emil Bjerg, journalist and editor

This week, loads of corporations have launched their Q4 earnings, rattling the inventory markets. Right here, we cowl who’s successful, who’s dropping and why. 

Alphabet, Apple: Massive Tech Firms in Decline

American tech corporations have not too long ago been impacted by the discharge of Chinese language DeepSeek, an LLM competing with and even outcompeting its American opponents. Nvidia noticed a 17% plunge, dropping practically $600 billion, marking the most important single-day drop in U.S. company historical past, based on CNBC. Greater than every week later, the Nvidia inventory remains to be in its early restoration. 

Per week later, Massive Tech continues to endure. Google’s guardian firm, Alphabet is down by 9%, Google’s guardian firm, regardless of reporting practically 12% year-over-year income development. This occurs as Alphabet’s guess on AI has led them to lose cloud income. Financial institution of America’s Savita Subramanian explains: “These corporations, the hyper scalers, are damned in the event that they do and damned in the event that they don’t, as a result of they’ve to spend so much to stay aggressive, however they’re reducing into their money circulate”. 

Apple shares Google’s present trajectory with a decline of over 2% following a Bloomberg Information report suggesting that Chinese language regulators are considering an antitrust investigation into the corporate’s App Retailer practices.

AMD: Decline for Chips Producers 

Nvidia isn’t the one AI chip firm dealing with heavy losses. AMD’s inventory dropped 9.8% following its Q4 2024 earnings report, primarily as a consequence of its information heart income falling in need of expectations. AMD reported information heart income of $3.9 billion, which was under the consensus expectation of $4.15 billion. The disappointing outcome suggests AMD could also be dealing with elevated competitors, notably from Nvidia, within the quickly rising AI chip market. 

Palantir: AI Drives Explosive Progress

Palantir Applied sciences delivered one of many greatest surprises with their Q4 earnings. The corporate reported sturdy Q4 2024 outcomes on February 5, 2025, inflicting its inventory to surge previous $100, marking a powerful 500% improve over the previous 12 months. 

CEO Alex Karp attributes a lot of the corporate’s development to its utility of synthetic intelligence, stating, “Our enterprise outcomes proceed to astound, demonstrating our deepening place on the heart of the AI revolution”

Uber: A Robust Greenback Weakens Rideshare Big

Uber’s inventory dropped 5.3% following its Q4 2024 earnings launch which fell under expectations. With Uber working  in over 70 international locations, the corporate had warned {that a} sturdy greenback might negatively influence its efficiency. When changing overseas earnings again to USD, a robust greenback leads to decrease reported income from worldwide markets. 

Within the coming months and all through 2025, Uber’s experiments with autonomous automobiles (AVs) are prone to have a big influence on the corporate’s efficiency as Uber expands its AV choices via partnerships with corporations like Waymo and Could Mobility.

Novo Nordisk: Wegovy Demand Drives Progress

Novo Nordisk delivered a sturdy monetary efficiency for Q4 2024, surpassing analyst expectations with a web revenue of 28.23 billion Danish kroner, in comparison with the anticipated 26.09 billion Danish kroner. The corporate’s standout performer was Wegovy, its weight problems remedy, which noticed a outstanding 107% year-over-year gross sales surge. This noticed the inventory initially go up by 3.1%. 

Novo Nordisk competitor Eli Lilly will report its Q4 2024 earnings on February sixth, however is up by 1.7 % on the day of Novo Nordisk Q4 report. As such, Eli Lilly remains to be forward within the biotech race following the Novo Nordisk setback in late 2024.

Banco Santander: A European Banking Success

One other European success story is Banco Santander, which noticed its shares go up 7% in early buying and selling following the discharge of their Q4 earnings. The Spanish financial institution has seen its web revenue rising 11% year-over-year to €3.265 billion. 

Together with document earnings, Santander introduced a €10 billion share buyback program, promising important capital returns to traders in 2025 and 2026. This program, together with the €1.6 billion buyback linked to 2024 earnings, represents a considerable dedication to returning worth to shareholders.