Transcript
Bank of America (0:01)
As America's leading business lender, bank of America is on your corner and in your corner. With $215 billion in business loans and over 3,700 business specialists across the nation, we help businesses thrive so communities prosper. What would you like the power to do? Learn more@bankofamerica.com LOCALBUSINESS bank of America Official bank of FIFA Club World Cup 2025 Copyright 2025 bank of America Corporation. All rights reserved.
Hotels.com (0:30)
At Hotels.com, we know some travelers crave an ocean breeze. Others don't want to deal with sand. And oftentimes those two people end up together. Compare properties side by side to find yourself poolside, oceanside and still in a relationship. Find your perfect somewhere with hotels.
Jim Cramer (1:09)
Hey, I'm Kramer. Welcome to Mad Money. Welcome to Kramerica. I'll be with my friends. I'm just trying to make you a little money. My job is not just to entertain, but to explain, to educate you. Call me 1-800-743- CNBC. Tweet me at Jim Cramer. Sometimes you forget why you ever like something in the first place. Take the super stocks, the hyperscalers, the tech titans, I don't care. Whatever you want to call these stocks all got lumped together because of their size, their gigantic market caps that dwarf the rest of the market. And then they lost their juice. But on a day where The Dow gained 84 points, the S&P jumped point 63% and the Nasdaq pole vault of 1.52% led by two of these caps, the Microsoft and Meta platforms. We're reminded of how the mega caps got so big to begin with. It's their scale, their smarts, their moats, their balance sheets and their sensational products. Microsoft stock finished up 30 points, or 7.63% today after a monster quarter and better platforms jumped $23, 4.23%. Spectacular gains. Tremendous outlooks, tremendous. At the close, two more tech giants turned in strong first quarter reports, although their outlooks let's call it more muddy. Apple gave us a classic top and bottom line beat, with sales up 5% year over year and earnings per share up 8%. Despite strong headwinds in the period, everyone was worried about iPhone sales, but those came in nearly $1 billion ahead of expectations, with Apple CEO Tim Cook telling me tonight there was no evidence of a temporary sales boost from consumers buying ahead of the tariffs. China sales a little lighter, but isn't that expected by now, offset by much better than expected sales in the Americas and the rest of Asia Apple continues to achieve record sales in many emerging markets. The stock, by the way, get this, it's reduced its share count by over 40% since 2012. It announced a new $100 billion share purchase repurchase tonight. Only the very consistent service revenue line was light. That was disappointing. Got a call like I see it. I expect that the company will give more color on the exposure to tariffs, the potential impact that they might have on the rest of the year during the earnings call, which is currently ongoing. While the strength of the first quarter results themselves are a great reminder of why it never really pays to get too negative on the world's largest company, Apple says it will have $900 million in cost increases in tariffs next quarter. That is suboptimal. Not their fault. It will matter, but it's suboptimal. Then there's Amazon, which is trading lower after hours because the company gave a conservative forecast for the second quarter, as they typically do. And who can blame them given the impossible to game tariff situation. But looking at the first quarter results themselves, Amazon also reminded us why it's one of the world's best companies, why you can't bet against it. Sales grew 9% year over year, topped expectations by over $600 million, led by double digit growth from Amazon Web Services and the company's increasingly important advertising business. The gross margins are insane. Earnings per share, meanwhile, is up an incredible 62%, beat the $36 consensus estimate by 23 cents. Now, one of the more quizzical things from the Amazon quarter were the results from the Amazon Web Services cloud computing business, which is such a fabulous business. Sales were up 17%. Very good. But that was slight. That was light of what we expected. The operating margins, on the other hand, were fantastic. They reached nearly 40%. Street was only looking for 35. And that's why Amazon Web Services segment profit came in over $1 billion above expectations. Essentially all of the total company's bottom line beat in the quarter. But you know, again that people found a little bit of what we call hair on the story. So many people were worried though about Microsoft, much more than these other two going into the quarter. Microsoft's machine. It's a conference call that's incredibly well orchestrated. CEO Satya Nadella starts with a mellifluous analysis of what's going. Great guns. He takes it from 30,000ft. All perfect, every division, including most proudly, Azure. That's the gigantic web services business they have that competes with us. Then CFO Amy Hood, perhaps the most professional of the CFOs in the business gives the breakdown of the far more prosaic numbers, how much each division gained over the previous year. Then she delivers the single most important bullet in the call, the part where she raises guidance. Sometimes huge, sometimes just big. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief for Potter's sustain ovation. But for the last three quarters, three in a row, Hood underwhelmed us with her guidance. It fell flat and stock got eviscerated the first time, not so good the second time. What are you talking about? The third time, who are these knuckleheads? Inhabited the bodies of Satya and Amy. Kind of felt like the invasion of Body Snatchers. Not this time. This time it was a glorious course of raise numbers. Azure. It had huge accelerated revenue growth and will continue to do so. Certainly better than Amazon Web Services sales growth, although it's not as big as aws. The regular commercial business up so big that I thought I heard it wrong until we got the Q and A and I knew otherwise. And then the growth will continue there too. Perhaps most important, the data center spending isn't going away either, because there's just so much demand. It was perfect. This quarter was a thing of beauty. As good as Microsoft was. Believe it or not, I thought matter was better. Mark Zuckerberg has cracked the code in terms of trying to make digital advertising work for anyone, any company. Just tell us the product, send us the money and we'll get you more customers than any other method of advertising. So confident. When I heard that, I wanted to start a new business, just see if it worked. Even better, I could see where any company that advertises on television would be best off just giving a huge chunk of those ad dollars to Metta, not Linear tv. Because it's true, the performance is clearly better. I mean, he said it. I can't dispute it. Especially when it comes to reaching younger people. If you've ever started publishing business, you know that you need to reach young people, not the older people that television gives you. Because spending patterns and brand loyalty start in the teens. A teen lead can be worth 10 times the lead of an older person. If you want to reach teens, you got to go to Zuckerberg. You got to go to Meta. So if you're a big consumer packaged goods company, you can simply give all your money to matter. Fire most of your internal ad people, drop your expensive ad agency and save yourself a fortune. Any ad firm and any publisher, any CPG supervisors that was on that call knows that that's what's going to happen it was just incredible. Not only that, but Zuckerberg talked about monetizing the asset that's potentially the best thing that owns WhatsApp. When 3 billion people uses a principal communications about the cost, nothing that could change and it could give the company a gigantic new revenue stream. This was an all systems go quarter. Now we know we've heard already from Alphabet, which surprised people with how Chat by Gemini didn't cannibalize Google, even though there are concerns that Google made less money per search click and it could spiral. I don't care for the stock anymore, but I do know it's done better than most stocks in this market since in the last few weeks. A couple of weeks ago, the formerly Magnificent seven felt impossible to own. But days like today remind you why you avoid these stocks at your own pearl. You got to have a couple of these companies are endowed with tens of billions of dollars. They're like nation states. They don't flinch at spending tens of billions to compete in artificial intelligence. They have the flexibility to pivot to what's necessary. With the exception of Apple, they don't have much manufacturing risk under the new trade regime, with the exception of Apple is very difficult to figure. They're run by seasoned hands who are uncorruptible and bold and and can course correct if they missed the mark the previous quarter. They are marvelous gems, which is why I take every chance to harangue public officials and urge them to stand up for these companies which because of their size have become honeypots for lawsuits by foreign governments who never stop hitting them up for money. But in the end, their optionality knows no bounds, save tariffs, something that they could not have seen coming and snuck up on them very fast. Snuck up on everyone. Second me. How about you? This has been the roughest stretch for these amazing companies that I can recall. Right now, only Microsoft is in the black for the year. Isn't that amazing? Well, behind most stocks, it's what we call a prolonged period of underperformance. But the bottom line, if we're in for lean times. You know what? It's quarters like these that remind me that these mega caps were built to prosper, built to make money in any kind of market, and they're truly ready to excel when things turn south for everybody else, including Apples. Even though it's the slowest growing and the most tariffed, it does still make the most beloved products in the world. Let's go to Jim in Georgia. Jim.
