Trade Wars, Privacy and Trump: What to Expect for Tech Earnings
- Alphabet kicks off week of reports from biggest tech companies
- China tensions, regulatory concerns haunt industry’s leaders
It’s earnings season again, and for the tech sector, it’s shaping up to be one of the most interesting in a while.
Global technology giants, which fueled the bull market to its highest heights earlier this year, are suddenly being assailed from all sides. A brewing trade war between the U.S. and China is imperiling mergers and threatening the global interconnectivity that has helped the industry thrive. A crisis has been spreading over how political-data firm Cambridge Analytica got access to millions of Facebook users’ personal information, upending the assumption that consumers will blithely give up their private details as a fair trade-off for using free services like Facebook, Google and Twitter. And don’t forget U.S. President Donald Trump’s Twitter tirades against Amazon and founding CEO Jeff Bezos.