Plus, Disney missed on revenue and subscriber expectations, Airbnb’s revenue rose by 5% last quarter as travel increased, and the CDC said those vaccinated against COVID-19 need no longer wear masks in most indoor and outdoor settings.
Stocks were higher at the open on Friday with the Dow rising 29 points, or less than 0.1%. The S&P 500 gained 0.4%, while the Nasdaq added 1%.
The crypto rollercoaster continued Friday morning with Dogecoin surging nearly 30% to $0.54 after a supportive tweet from Dogefather Elon Musk and as Coinbase said it would list the meme currency. After saying that Tesla would no longer accept payments in cryptocurrency due to the energy usage associated with mining and transactions, Musk said in a tweet late Thursday, “Working with Doge devs to improve system transaction efficiency. Potentially promising.” Also sending Dogecoin higher, Coinbase said on its earnings call that it plans to list the crypto in the next six to eight weeks. Crypto traders have flocked to the zero-fee investing app Robinhood to trade the token, and now with Coinbase’s move, trading could rise.
Speaking of Coinbase’s earnings, the cryptocurrency exchange reported revenue tripled from last quarter. The company posted earnings per share of $3.05 on revenue of $1.80 billion, up from $585 million in the previous quarter. Coinbase’s fate is tethered to the performance of digital assets like bitcoin, and the company noted that Bitcoin prices nearly doubled during the quarter, while Ether prices almost tripled. Disney also reported, posting lower-than-expected revenue and subscriber numbers for its streaming service. The mouse house said it earned $0.79 per share on revenue of $15.61 billion, while analysts had expected revenue of $15.87 billion, and said it added 103.6 million paid subscribers to its Disney+ streaming service, while it was expected to post 109 million additions. “This quarter’s numbers were exactly as we projected internally, so no disappointment here,” said CEO Bob Chapek.
In other earrings news, Airbnb said revenue increased by 5% in the first quarter as rising COVID vaccinations led to an uptick in travel. The company reported a loss of $1.95 per share on revenue of $886.9 million, beating estimates for revenue of $714.4 million. The company’s gross booking value—which tracks host earnings, service fees, cleaning fess, and taxes—totaled $10.3 billion, up 52% year-over-year. We expect revenue in Q2 2021 to be significantly higher than that of Q2 2020, given the impact of Covid- 19 on the prior year period, and to be at a similar level to that of Q2 2019,” the company said. “In Q2 2021, we expect the positive momentum of recovery experienced in Q1 2021 to be partially offset by the continued uncertainty of travel restrictions and lockdowns in EMEA.” While Airbnb reported a beat, DoorDash delivered a miss, posting a loss per share of $0.34—versus a loss of $0.26 expected—on revenue of $1.08 billion. Stronger-than-expected consumer demand, along with extreme weather events and the impact of stimulus checks, resulted in a meaningful undersupply of Dashers in the latter part of Q1,” company executives wrote in a letter to investors. “Stimulus checks created a particularly acute challenge, as we believe they drove a short-term increase in consumer demand and a simultaneous decrease in Dasher hours.”
The ongoing semiconductor shortage that’s hobbling the global automotive industry is now expected to cost the industry $110 billion in revenue in 2021. That’s according to a new report from AlixPartners, a global consulting firm that’s closely monitoring the widening crisis, who says the world’s carmakers will lose 3.9 million vehicles of production to the shortage. “The pandemic-induced chip crisis has been exacerbated by events that are normally just bumps in the road for the auto industry, such as a fire in a key chip-making fabrication plant, severe weather in Texas and a drought in Taiwan,” said Mark Wakefield, global co-leader of AlixPartners. “But all these things are now major issues for the industry — which, in turn, has driven home the need to build supply-chain resiliency for the long term.”
Time to get your teeth whitened. The CDC updated its mask guidelines for the vaccinated yesterday afternoon. Fully vaccinated people no longer need to wear a face mask or stay 6 feet away from others in most settings, whether outdoors or indoors, the CDC said. Masks will still need to be worn in health-care settings or at businesses that require them to be worn by patrons, as well as on airplanes, buses, trains, and other public transportation. “Anyone who is fully vaccinated can participate in indoor and outdoor activities, large or small, without wearing a mask or physical distancing,” said CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky. “If you are fully vaccinated, you can start doing the things that you had stopped doing because of the pandemic. We have all longed for this moment, when we can get back to some sense of normalcy.”
Stocks We’re Watching
Ramaco Resources Inc (NASDAQ: METC): Ramaco Resources shares jumped as much as 24% yesterday after the company reported first quarter results. “We just had an exceptional quarter with our operating team hitting on all cylinders. They did an outstanding job of safely producing a record 577,000 tons in the first quarter of 2021, which was well above our internal projections,” Chairman and CEO Randall Atkins said in the earnings release. “This led to record low Company-wide cash costs, which were sub $60 per ton. We are probably the only non-longwall producer of met coal in Central Appalachia that can say it achieved sub $60 per ton cash costs in any recent quarter. This puts Ramaco clearly in the first quartile of the U.S. met coal cash mine cost curve, even including longwall producers.”