Plus, Pfizer and BioNTech filed for full FDA approval for their COVID-19 vaccine, Roku reported its highest quarterly revenue growth rate ever, and DraftKings raised its full-year guidance.
Stocks were higher at the open on Friday with the Dow rising 30 points, or just under 0.1%. The S&P 500 gained 0.2%, while the Nasdaq added 0.6%.
Big disappointment. The April jobs report showed nonfarm payrolls increased by just 266,000 and the unemployment rate rose to 6.1%, a far cry for estimates for 1 million jobs added and an unemployment rate of 5.8%. “It certainly takes the pressure off the Fed and takes an imminent rate increase off the table,” said JJ Kinahan, chief market strategist at TD Ameritrade. “We’re not going to see inflation in wages, and we don’t have as many people employed as we thought, so we have to keep the party going.” Wells Fargo senior economist Sarah House said, “It’s a lot faster to lay off workers than it is to hire them back. While we are seeing some workers come back into the labor force it just isn’t fast enough.”
Pfizer and BioNTech said they have begun the process of seeking full approval for their COVID-19 vaccine for use in people aged 16 and older in the U.S. The FDA granted the vaccine emergency use authorization in December, but an EUA can be revoked at any time and lasts only as long as the state of emergency itself. A biologics license will subject the vaccine to greater scrutiny by the FDA, and if cleared, the companies will be able to begin marketing the product to the general public. “We are proud of the tremendous progress we’ve made since December in delivering vaccines to millions of Americans, in collaboration with the U.S. Government,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in a statement. “We look forward to working with the FDA to complete this rolling submission and support their review, with the goal of securing full regulatory approval of the vaccine in the coming months.”
Roku shares are up 13% at the time of writing after the TV streaming company reported its highest quarterly revenue growth rate with a 79% gain to $574 million in its latest quarter. Roku said its platform revenue, which includes advertising, rose 101% year-over-year to $574 million while its active accounts grew by 2.4 million. “We’ve said historically that the biggest impediment or governor of our ad business growth has been TV buyers’ buying patterns, that they traditionally tend to prefer traditional TV versus new things like streaming,” said CEO Anthony Wood on the earnings call. “And there’s a gap there as fewer move over to streaming versus the ad dollars. What we saw, I think, in the pandemic, was that that gap started to close. But there’s still a big gap and a lot of room to go. But advertising momentum in general is very strong.”
Peloton is up nearly 4% this morning after the company’s treadmill recall didn’t appear to be as bad as feared. The company said late yesterday that the recall would reduce sales in the current quarter by about $165 million, with CEO John Foley saying the financial impact would be “short term.” “While the recall will hit financials in the short term, and push back Tread financials a quarter or two, we think this was the prudent decision in the long term,” Barclays analyst Mario Lu said in a note. “ We continue to view Peloton as the leading company in connected digital fitness.”
And DraftKings shares are down around 4% today even after reporting a better-than-feared first quarter loss and raised its full year guidance. The sports-betting company reported a loss per share of $0.36 on revenue of $312 million in the quarter, compared to estimates for a loss per share of $0.42 on revenue of $236.2 million. DraftKings raised its fiscal year 2021 revenue guidance to a range of $1.05 billion to $1.15 billion, up from between $900 million to $1 billion, which implies year-over-year growth of between 63% and 79%. “The increase reflects solid performance in the first quarter of 2021, continued strong user activation due to the effectiveness of our marketing spend, well-executed launches of mobile sports betting and iGaming in Michigan and mobile sports betting in Virginia, and a modest contribution from our recently completed acquisitions,” the company said. “This guidance also assumes that all professional and college sports calendars that have been announced come to fruition and that we continue to operate in states in which we are live today.”
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Avid Technology Inc (NASDAQ: AVID): Avid Technologies shares surged as much as 27% higher yesterday and are up more than 5% this morning after the company reported a 9.2% year-over-year jump in revenue spurred by 78.2% year-over-year subscription revenue growth. “We are encouraged by the continued strength of, and growth in, our Recurring Revenue business during the first quarter. We continued to have success with enterprise customers adopting subscription licensing, which, coupled with the strength we saw in subscriptions for creative individuals, returned us to year-over-year revenue growth in the first quarter,” CEO Jeff Rosica said in an earnings release. “We saw continued improvement in end market demand during the first quarter, and we expect that this recovery trend will continue during 2021. We are confident the new products and features we have recently introduced, combined with the operational improvements we have made during the past several quarters, should position us well for further growth and improved profitability as we move forward through 2021 and beyond.”