Five things we have learnt from the US earnings season
Apple, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM are among the many US tech companies to have reported numbers for the final quarter of 2018 in the last few weeks. Here are the big trends from the results season so far.
1. Apple and Facebook are at warTech giant Apple (US:AAPL) has long been a pioneer of privacy. Its mac laptops are famous for not requiring external cyber security software and even the FBI has struggled to crack into locked iPhones. At a privacy conference in Brussels last year, chief executive Tim Cook said, “we at Apple believe that privacy is a fundamental human right.” Facebook (US: FB.) is the opposite. It makes no secret of the fact that it uses personal data to improve its platform for advertisers. In fact, its ability to collect information on hundreds of millions of consumers…