Apple, the world’s most valuable public company, beat Wall Street analysts’ expectations with its record results, easing fears that the tech industry’s long period of fast growth may be coming to an end.
Demand for the newest iPhone 13 juiced sales, but the company has been warning for months that computer chip shortages and pandemic-related manufacturing problems in Asia were likely to limit supply and hamper revenue.
A global chip shortage has hurt a wide range of industries, including consumer electronics and cars.
Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said in October that supply constraints had cost his company $6 billion in revenue during its fall quarter.
Apple saw sales growth around the world, led by a 20 percent year-over-year increase in China and 19 percent in the rest of the Asia-Pacific region, though sales in Japan dropped by 14 percent from the same quarter the prior year.
Apple announced a slate of new hardware products in the fall, including new models of its MacBook Pro laptop computer, AirPods, the iPad and the Apple Watch.
Apple also benefited from strong growth in its services business, including its App Store, which Mr. Cook described as an “economic miracle for developers around the world” even as it continues to face accusations that it stifles competition and levies onerous fees on app developers.
Apple’s positive results came near the end of a week of wild trading on the stock market that was due in part to fears about how quickly the Federal Reserve might raise interest rates in an attempt to curb inflation.
But Microsoft and Tesla, despite dealing with supply chain woes of their own, posted record profits this week and beat industry expectations.
Mr. Son and other SoftBank executives balked at Mr. Claure’s request, fearing it would upset investors in Japan, where such big payouts are frowned on.
Mr. Claure has played a central role at WeWork, taking over as executive chairman after its failed 2019 initial public offering.
Mr. Claure later helped recruit Sandeep Mathrani, a veteran of the real estate business, to be the chief executive of WeWork, which ultimately went public through a special purpose acquisition company.
But Mr. Claure will remain on the boards of T-Mobile, which merged with Sprint in 2020, and the company that results from a merger of Grupo Televisa’s television content business and Univision Communications, a deal that’s expected to close soon, according to the two people familiar with the negotiations of his departure.
Mr. Claure’s personal investments were a source of consternation for some SoftBank executives.
But the two people said he would be permitted to retain his stake in the profits of SoftBank’s $5 billion Latin America Fund, a venture he spearheaded.
Its shares have fallen roughly 50 percent over the past year as tech stocks have been hit and after a regulatory crackdown in China that has weighed on Chinese stocks.
The unanimous ruling is the latest in a series of defeats for prosecutors in the United States and Britain, as more than a dozen traders have been acquitted at trial or had their convictions overturned.
The convictions of some traders who took guilty pleas still stand.
In dismissing the convictions of Mr. Connolly and Mr. Black, the appellate panel said the prosecutors hadn’t proved that the bids submitted by the bank were not rates that it could have borrowed at.
The crackdown on the manipulation of what was formally known as the London Interbank Offered Rate was one of the major criminal prosecutions to arise from the financial crisis of 2008.
The agency’s four commissioners voted unanimously to revoke the license for the American subsidiary of China Unicom, saying the company could access or reroute American communications and engage in spycraft.
Lawmakers and regulators have in recent years focused on the potential threats posted by Chinese phone carriers, which serve a small number of customers in the United States.
In 2020, the White House unsuccessfully tried to force ByteDance, a Chinese internet company, to sell TikTok, the viral video app, to an American owner, also citing national security reasons.
McDonald’s said in a financial report on Thursday that global revenues topped $23.2 billion last year, a 21 percent jump from 2019 and the highest level since reaching $24.6 billion in 2016.
On a call with Wall Street analysts, Chris Kempczinski, the chief executive and president of McDonald’s, deemed 2021 a “banner year for McDonald’s, despite the continued disruptions” of the pandemic.
Still, executives warned that many of the inflationary pressures that the chain felt in 2021 would persist or even increase in the first half of this year.
To offset those costs and maintain profit margins, McDonald’s, like other fast-food chains, increased menu prices by about 6 percent last year.
Twelve months ago this week, thousands of retail investors banded together to bid up the stocks of a handful of ailing companies, notably the video game retailer GameStop and the movie theater chain AMC.
The so-called meme stock phenomenon had been born, and some said it would signal a permanent power shift on Wall Street.
Robinhood, the commission-free trading app, played a major role in the phenomenon, and it’s still dealing with the fallout, the DealBook newsletter reports.
But the day after GameStop reached its peak, Robinhood abruptly restricted trading in some meme stocks, claiming that it had been forced to do so by a liquidity crunch, Wall Street rules and clearinghouse limits.
“We never want our customers to be surprised with trading restrictions again,” it added, noting that it had bolstered its risk and compliance infrastructure, among other things.
Robinhood said on Thursday that it had lost $3.69 billion last year, including $423 million in the last three months of 2021.
Robinhood’s stock dropped 15 percent in aftermarket trading on Thursday, and has lost about two-thirds of its value since it went public this summer, stoking rumors that it could become a takeover target.
The company also may face regulatory scrutiny on payment for order flow, in which the broker sells its trades to big institutions to execute.
A correction, a Wall Street term for a drop of 10 percent from a recent peak, serves as a signal that investors have turned more pessimistic about the market, and though the S&P 500 hasn’t closed a day in correction territory yet, it fell into it in intraday trading on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday before recovering.
Stocks rebounded as much as 1.8 percent in early trading after the Commerce Department reported that gross domestic product — the broadest measure of the goods and services produced — expanded 1.7 percent in the last three months of 2021.
A jump in consumer spending, which the government said reflected an increase in spending on services like health care and recreation, was one.
In a separate report on Thursday, the Labor Department said weekly claims for state unemployment benefits fell last week after three consecutive weeks of increases.
“The downtrend will likely continue given demand for labor remains strong and businesses remain reluctant to lay off workers amid a persistent labor shortage,” Rubeela Farooqi, chief U.S.
The market volatility is likely to persist beyond the Fed’s first rate increase, which is expected to be in March, as indicators continue to provide reasons for the central bank to move on with its plan to remove support for the economy.
After rising through much of the pandemic, the stock market has tumbled in recent weeks.
3 peak, the S&P 500 has crossed that threshold in intraday trading on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, before recovering from the worst of its losses.
That is particularly the case for technology stocks, with the Nasdaq composite index down about 16.5 percent from its most recent peak, in mid-November.
Some corrections don’t last very long, like the one in early 2018, which spanned less than two weeks.
That said, the previous bear market, at the start of the pandemic, was severe but relatively short — it erased just about 33 percent in value from stocks in just over a month.
Gross domestic product — the broadest measure of the nation’s production of goods and services — expanded by 1.7 percent in the final three months of 2021 after adjusting for inflation, the Commerce Department announced Thursday.
Last year “was defined by very strong policy support,” said Julia Coronado, a former Federal Reserve economist and a professor of finance at the University of Texas at Austin.
Now the question is whether the coming months can deliver an even fuller recovery — and how much of a shadow will be cast by the higher prices that have come with it.
Economists expect Omicron to be a drag on the economy in January and much of February.
The International Monetary Fund, citing tighter Fed policy and an anticipated halt to any further stimulus spending by Congress, reduced its U.S.
One promising sign in the fourth-quarter data is that the rebuilding of inventory among businesses made up more than half of the gains, the second-largest quarterly contribution since the last three months of 1987.
Import prices were 10.4 percent higher in December than a year earlier, according to the Labor Department.
The economy has recovered almost 19 million of the 22 million jobs lost near the peak of virus-induced suspensions in activity in 2020.
One striking change in the pandemic is that with dining, travel and other in-person experiences curtailed, consumers shifted to spending more heavily on goods.
Availability was part of the equation.
Even so, the average business owner “sees a very strong environment right now,” said Oren Klachkin, the lead economist for U.S.
Jeff Somple, the president of Mack Molding — a contract manufacturer in Arlington, Vt., that creates custom components and full products for other companies — said business had been profitable, booming even.
“Every day, our No.
When bidding for circuit boards, the lead time — the number of days from when an order is placed to when those items arrive at a plant — has been a year in some cases.
But Bob Jordan, Southwest’s executive vice president, who takes over as chief executive next week, said in a statement that he expected to report profits in March and throughout the rest of the year.
And to some extent, the same forces — the remarkable levels of aid provided by the government, and the unusual nature of the pandemic recession itself — are responsible for both trends.
Inflation-adjusted gross domestic product has rebounded sharply since the early months of the crisis, but has yet to return to its prepandemic trend.
In non-inflation-adjusted terms, gross domestic product — in simple terms, everything we make and spend in a given three-month period — has surged significantly beyond its pre-Covid trend.
The reopening of the economy after the initial lockdowns brought a surge in demand, which was bolstered by the trillions of dollars in aid that the federal government provided to households and businesses.
In that scenario, the dark blue line would start to look more like the light blue one — growth would be strong in terms of real output, not just nominal dollars.
But if supplies can’t rebound, then either we will continue to burn off excess demand in the form of inflation, or demand will have to fall.
The company had reported quarterly profits earlier last year, but the fourth quarter was the first in two years in which Southwest achieved a profit without the support of government aid.
Southwest was particularly hard hit, canceling thousands of flights, or about 9 percent of scheduled trips, in the two weeks starting Dec.
Southwest said it has canceled more than 5,600 flights in January, taking a $50 million toll on operating revenue for the month.
Still, Southwest expects operating revenue in the first quarter of 2022 to be down only about 10 to 15 percent from the same period in 2019.
Despite the challenges, Southwest hired about 5,000 people last year and expects to hire an additional 8,000 this year as travel continues to recover.
On Thursday, Alaska Airlines said it had eked out an $18 million profit for the quarter, while JetBlue Airways reported a $129 million loss.
The alliance — collectively the world’s third-largest automaker — has no choice but to band more closely together as competitors sprint ahead on electric cars.
Competitors like General Motors have said they intend to eliminate combustion engines from their lineups during the 2030s, but the alliance is hedging its bets.
Spotify said on Wednesday that it had begun removing Neil Young’s music from the streaming service, two days after he briefly posted a public letter calling on Spotify to choose between him and Joe Rogan, the star podcast host who has been accused of spreading misinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines.
Amazon settled a price-fixing investigation by the Washington State attorney general’s office on Wednesday, agreeing to pay $2.25 million and end a program that gave it control over the prices of products supplied by third-party sellers on its marketplace.
General Motors plans to hire more than 8,000 engineers and other highly specialized workers this year as part of a push to transform the company from an old-line manufacturer into a software and high-tech innovator.