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Dell’s stock has risen as much as Nvidia’s, but Dell’s profits haven’t

Dell has been one of the hottest AI stocks of the last year, but is it really benefiting from the AI boom?

5/16/24 3:02PM

Nvidia has been one of the biggest stock market winners over the last year, with the tech industry’s insatiable demand for AI chips sending its stock up 223%. However, another company has quietly gained 223% this year too: Dell.

Yesterday, Dell shares rose more than 11% after Morgan Stanley raised its price target and predicted the company would benefit from more demand for AI servers.

This comes two months after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang highlighted the role that Dell is playing in the AI world, saying, “Everybody who is building these chatbots and generative AI, when you’re ready to run it, you’re going to need an AI factory. Nobody is better at building end-to-end systems of very large scale for the enterprise than Dell.”

Surprisingly, Dell’s financial performance hasn’t matched its stock returns.

Nvidia's ascension to the $2 trillion club coincided with the company growing its revenue and net income by 200% and 800%, since ChatGPT launched in November 2022.

Dell, on the other hand, has lower revenue than it did a year and a half ago, while its earnings have remained flat over the last three years. And Wall Street analysts don't expect operating performance to meaningfully inflect higher in the short term, either: estimates for where both revenues and profits will be in one year's time, if realized, would still leave results below their post-pandemic highs, per Bloomberg.

In Dell's Q4 earnings call, COO Jeffrey Clarke noted that they were seeing increased demand for their AI servers, noting, "AI-optimized server orders increased by nearly 40% sequentially. We shipped $800 million of AI-optimized servers, and our backlog nearly doubled sequentially, exiting the fiscal year at $2.9 billion."

However, that is still a small fraction of Dell's total $22.3 billion in total quarterly revenue, and it did little to slow an 11% drop in year-over-year sales.

Dell may be one of the winners of the AI boom, but so far, the stock has run far ahead of the business.

Max Knoblauch7h

Nike’s China business declines for seventh straight quarter

Sportswear kingpin Nike reported results for its third quarter, which ended in February, after the bell Tuesday. The stock fell about 3% in after-hours trading.

For fiscal Q3, Nike reported:

Earnings of $0.35 per share, comfortably above the Wall Street consensus of $0.29 per share compiled by FactSet.
$11.28 billion in total revenue, roughly in line with the $11.26 billion estimate.

Nike’s sales in China — where the company earns about 15% of its revenue — fell 7% to $1.62 billion. That’s its seventh straight quarter of sales declines in the market, though this quarter’s was less than feared. The company had issued weak guidance for this quarter considering continued softness in the region.

“This quarter we took meaningful actions to improve the health and quality of our business,” said Nike CEO Elliott Hill. “The pace of progress is different across the portfolio and the areas we prioritized first continue to drive momentum.”

Nike shares are trading near decade lows this month, as tariffs continue to weigh on profits and shipping costs rise amid the war with Iran. As of Tuesday’s close, the stock was down 17% year to date.

Luke Kawa, Tasha Matsumoto

Stocks end worst quarter since 2022 with best day since May

Optimism that the end of the war may be near sent stocks surging.

Max Knoblauch9h

Oil-sensitive travel stocks pop following Iran state media reporting on potential war resolution

Travel stocks are surging on Tuesday as oil prices fall following reports from Iranian state media that President Masoud Pezeshkian said the country has “the necessary will to end this war,” but would only do so with guarantees that “prevent the recurrence of aggression.”

The war has sent oil prices and refining margins surging this month, causing airlines and cruise lines to cut profit forecasts despite reported high demand.

Following Tuesday’s update, shares of the big four US airlines (Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, American Airlines, and Southwest Airlines) all climbed, along with smaller rivals including JetBlue. US airlines have stopped fuel hedging in recent years, increasing their exposure to upward swings in oil prices.

Cruise stocks also rallied, with Carnival and Norwegian up more than 6% and Royal Caribbean up about 5%.

J. Edward Moreno12h

The FDA is expected to lift restrictions on certain peptides, the NYT reports

The Food and Drug Administration is expected to lift restrictions on certain peptides, allowing the experimental, often injectable substances to be sold by compounding pharmacies, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

The potential move was previously reported by The Wall Street Journal, and teased by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast in late February.

Peptides have boomed in popularity recently, with search interest for “peptides” surpassing “ozempic” this month. Many of them are currently understudied and not approved for human use, a rule consumers are able to bypass by purchasing them from suppliers that sell them for, ostensibly, research purposes only.

As reports of the FDA changing its stance of peptides mount, consumer health companies like Hims & Hers and Superpower have been getting ready to roll out their peptide offerings as soon as they get the FDA's blessing.

The peptide gold rush: How impending deregulation could supercharge a shadow industry

Matt Phillips13h

Memory stocks bounce as Bernstein analyst calls TurboQuant fears “overdone”

Memory stocks rose Tuesday, after Bernstein analysts called the recent panic over Google’s TurboQuant AI algorithm “overdone.”

Bernstein analyst Mark Newman wrote:

“[Hard disk drive] and Memory stocks have sold off significantly due in part to fears from Google’s TurboQuant report. This however, should have zero impact on HDD demand and negligible impact on NAND demand. Given the stock sell-off we see this as an attractive entry point for Seagate Technology Holdings, Western Digital and Sandisk’s and upgrade WDC to Outperform.”

All three stocks were up early Tuesday, as was memory chip maker Micron.

Today’s rally stands in stark contrast to the pummeling these shares have endured over the last week, after Google Research published a technical paper on March 24 detailing its TurboQuant AI algorithm, which compresses the amount of data associated with AI operations without affecting the accuracy of AI models.

That was seen as a threat to surging AI demand for memory storage, which has supercharged prices for memory chips and memory-related stocks over the last year.