Tech Earnings Season Starts Soon. Warnings Are Already Piling Up
By Eric J. Savitz
Wed, Oct 18, 2023 10:06am
2 min
2 min
With tech earnings season about to start, investors should be aware that a flurry of the industry’s less-followed players have been warning about emerging weakness across the enterprise and telecommunications-networking landscape.
Evercore ISI hardware analyst Amit Daryanani, speaking Tuesday on Barron’s Live, noted that heading into earnings he has concerns about weakness in IT enterprise spending, continued soft demand from communications carriers, and continued caution by consumers. The primary bright spot he sees heading into earnings: spending on cloud and AI infrastructure.
The list of companies providing cautious commentary on the outlook is growing by the day.
NetScout Systems stock (ticker: NTCT) is down 17% on Tuesday after the cybersecurity software company slashed its revenue forecast for its March 2024 fiscal year to a range of $840 million to $860 million, down from a previous forecast of $915 million to $945 million. NetScout also trimmed its adjusted profit per share forecast for the year to $2 to $2.20, down from $2.20 to $2.32. The company said it is seeing “slower order conversion,” due to “industry and economic headwinds facing our customers” that began in September.
Ericsson American depositary receipts (ERIC) are 3.3% lower after the networking infrastructure company on Tuesday provided disappointing financial guidance. “We expect the underlying uncertainty impacting our Mobile Networks business to persist into 2024,” the company said.
Adtran (ADTN), which provides networking hardware, on Monday warned that it now sees third-quarter revenue of $272.3 million, below its previous guidance range of $275 million to $305 million. Adtran said that its “customers remain focused on reducing inventory levels and managing capital expenses.”
Late last week, Belden (BDC), another network infrastructure provider, said it now sees third-quarter revenue of $625 million, down from a previous forecast of $675 million to $690 million. “Demand began to weaken in the third quarter, adding to ongoing pressure from channel destocking,” Belden said in its announcement. “We believe softer demand will continue as we move into the fourth quarter, impacting both revenue and profitability.”
A10 Networks (ATEN), which also provides networking infrastructure, likewise provided September quarter preliminary results that failed to match previous estimates. “In our third quarter we experienced delays related to North American service provider customers pushing out capital expenditures,” the company said earlier this month. “Deals we expected to close at the end of the quarter were delayed into future periods.”
Cambium Networks (CMBM), which provides wireless-network infrastructure, said earlier this month that it now sees third quarter revenue of $40 million to $45 million, below previous guidance of $62 million to $70 million. The company cited a number of reasons for the big miss, including a delay in government orders due to U.S. government budgetary timing issues, and a decrease in orders from distributors in the company’s enterprise business, among other things.
Tech earnings season kicks off Wednesday with results from Netflix (NFLX), to be followed by a deluge of financial reports next week from Alphabet (GOOGL), Microsoft (MSFT), International Business Machines (IBM), Meta Platforms (META), ServiceNow (NOW), Amazon.com (AMZN), Intel (INTC), and Juniper Networks (JNPR), among others.
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Meta is betting on a human-first AI future, but growing legal battles and declining public trust are putting Mark Zuckerberg’s vision to the test.
By Adam Levine
Thu, Aug 13, 2026 3 min
3 min
“Call us optimists. Call us dreamers. Call us whatever the hell you want, but we’re betting on people, and we like those odds. The future is for everyone.”
That ad copy is from the voice-over of a July Meta Platforms META -3.38%.
spot that’s been part of a public-relations blitz to position Meta as the humanist AI company. The message was undercut by the ad’s inclusion of David Bowie’s “Five Years,” a brooding 1972 song about an impending apocalypse. But this week CEO Mark Zuckerberg left no ambiguity, publishing a 6,500-word manifesto—about 10 times the length of this newsletter—with a title that echoed the ad: “The Future is for Everyone.”
That seems to be Meta’s new tagline. In light of sinking public opinion and the company’s thousands of lawsuits from states, school districts, parents, and users, Meta’s public relations have been defensive. This push represents a return to offense, with a chance to distinguish Meta’s approach to AI from other labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, or SpaceX SPCX +9.65%.
“It is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity’s relevance would rush to build that future.”
Zuckerberg frames what sort of future we build with AI as the central issue of our time. “We believe that delivering superintelligence to everyone is the way to answer this question,” he says. “This has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where individuals can use this powerful new capability to reach their full potential, pursue their interests, and improve their lives and the world more than ever before.”
The flood of words belies the situation on the ground in mid-2026. Americans, at least, have a love-hate affair with social media. A November Pew Research Center poll reported that 71% of U.S. adults used Facebook, and 51% used Instagram. Worldwide, 3.6 billion people use at least one Meta app every day.
But in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in July and August, 61% of respondents said they wanted more government oversight of social media, and two-thirds supported laws to keep children under 16 years old off the platforms. When it comes to Meta in particular, in the 2026 Axios Harris 100, an annual poll about corporate reputation, Meta placed 96th out of 100. It’s only above two other social media companies, Chinese ultracheap retailer Temu, and Spirit Airlines, a defunct air carrier. Regarding ethics, Meta came in last, and it was only ahead of TikTok in trust.
The steady drip of headlines in the teen social media trials isn’t helping. Last week, Meta lost a judgment in New Mexico state court that raised their liability in that relatively small jurisdiction to nearly $1 billion dollars. On Wednesday, jury selection began for a federal case with four states suing Meta over addictive product design, and false marketing that said its platforms were safe for teenagers. In July, Meta claimed that the states are asking for a total of $1.4 trillion in damages, in addition to design changes in the apps. This is part of a multidistrict litigation, where thousands of federal trials with social media defendants are coordinated in Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’ district courthouse in Oakland, Calif.
There is a separate such group of thousands of cases in California state court, mostly with individual plaintiffs. The steady drip of bad headlines from the courts will continue unless Meta decides to settle en masse.
Meanwhile, in the second quarter, Meta booked “$2.40 billion of charges related to legal proceedings,” according to its quarterly filing. That may be just the beginning.
Zuckerberg spent 6,500 words getting his utopian message out, but I can sum it up in two: Trust us. The evidence is that Meta has a long way to go to win back that trust.
