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First Solar plunges after CEO sounds the alarm on tariffs

The company said it expects to pay up to $90 million in tariffs this year.

4/30/25 10:47AM

First Solar, the largest US manufacturer of solar panels and modules, said President Trump’s tariff policies pose “a significant economic headwind” that will weigh on its bottom line this year.

The company also missed Wall Street’s profit estimates for the first three months of the year, reporting adjusted earnings per share of $1.95, much less than the $2.49 analysts polled by FactSet penciled in. But perhaps more concerning to investors is what First Solar thinks is in store for the rest of the year.

First Solar, which analysts had previously considered well positioned against tariff threats because it doesn’t rely on China, also cut its sales guidance for 2025 from between $5.3 billion and $5.8 billion to between $4.5 billion and $5.5 billion. The company said it expects to pay up to $90 million in duties for imported materials and components. It also expects to take a hit of up to $270 million from underutilization charges for lowering capacity at its factories in Malaysia and Vietnam.

“While the implementation of certain new trade policies was a possibility with the change in administration, the new tariff regime imposes — earlier this month has introduced significant challenges to 2025 that were not known at the start of the year,” First Solar CEO Mark Widmar told analysts.

First Solar has factories in Malaysia and Vietnam, which almost exclusively serve the US market, and a factory in India that serves the region as well as North America. On April 2, Trump imposed tariff rates of 26%, 24%, and 46%, on India, Malaysia, and Vietnam, respectively. While those tariffs are on a 90-day pause, the 10% universal tariff rate still weighs on the company’s bottom line, Widmar said.

There are things the company could do, like importing semi-finished modules to complete in the US, but as Trump’s tariff policy keeps changing, Widmar said his only option is to sit and wait.

“There’s a lot of strategies that we could do once we understand the policy environment and the tariff environment that we’re going to be in,” he said. “But I don’t know any of that right now.”

Widmar said that trade data for this year suggests Chinese manufacturers are importing through low-tariff countries like Laos and Indonesia. “We have no doubt that these Chinese manufacturers are also seeking to establish production in other regions around the world, such as Saudi Arabia, forcing us into a continued game of whack-a-mole,” Widmar said.

Max Knoblauch55m

Best Buy surges on better-than-expected Q1 sales, earnings

Best Buy is on pace for its best trading day in more than a year in premarket trading Thursday, following Q1 earnings that beat Wall Street’s expectations.

In its first quarter, the retailer reported:

Adjusted earnings of $1.28 per share, compared to estimates of $1.23 per share from analysts polled by FactSet.
$8.94 billion in sales, versus the $8.82 billion consensus estimate.

Best Buy reaffirmed its full-year guidance and said it expects comparable sales growth of 1% in Q2. (The same quarter last year saw the launch of Nintendo’s Switch 2.)

The company will replace CEO Corie Barry with company veteran Jason Bonfig in October of this year.

Helena Cheng2h

Dollar Tree surges on Q1 earnings beat, boost to full-year profit outlook

Dollar Tree is surging in premarket trading after the discount retailer reported Q1 earnings that exceeded Wall Street’s expectations, prompting management to boost its full-year earnings outlook.

The key Q1 figures:

Adjusted earnings per share of $1.74 (compared to analyst estimates of $1.55).
Comparable-store net sales growth of 3.5% (estimate: 3.27%).
Net sales of $4.97 billion (estimate: $4.96 billion).

The big strength, obviously, was in the bottom line. The company’s gross profit margin expanded by 120 basis points, largely thanks to lower freight costs, higher mark-ons, and reduced product shrink.

Dollar Tree raised its fiscal 2026 adjusted EPS guidance to a range of $6.70 to $7.10 (up from its prior forecast of $6.50 to $6.90). The $6.90 midpoint sits ahead of the $6.69 consensus estimate, per Bloomberg.

Guggenheim analyst John Heinbockel noted that sentiment on Dollar Tree was sour heading into this report, with estimates weakening “on a combination of low-income household health, elevated freight expense, and even the helium shortage,” which helps explain why there’s such an “outsized reaction” to these results.

While traffic was down, the consumers that did frequent Dollar Tree were spending more: average ticket sizes were up 4.5%.

“We continued advancing our strategic plan — a more relevant assortment, agile cost management, a stronger customer connection, and new store growth coupled with improved store conditions — all driving operating margin expansion and delivering a strong bottom-line performance,” CEO Mike Creedon said in a press release.

The retailer expects to open approximately 400 new store locations while converting roughly 630 existing venues into its more profitable multi-price format.

To further lower frictions for convenience-seeking shoppers, Dollar Tree officially launched a partnership with DoorDash alongside its earnings release. The distribution agreement brings more than 9,000 stores across 48 states onto the app, allowing users to order over 10,000 products on-demand. The partnership will add to existing delivery agreements with Instacart and Uber Eats as Dollar Tree increasingly competes on convenience as well as price.

Jon Keegan

US drone stocks surge on talks of government deal, while banned Chinese drone giant fights to clear its name

China-based market leader DJI still finds itself boxed out of the US market amid reports of a Trump administration deal to boost domestic drone production.

US Army Europe Holds "Combined Resolve" Exercise

Tom Jones3h

Google worker charged with using inside information to make $1.2 million on Polymarket

Polymarket trader AlphaRaccoon wasn’t just feeling lucky when he took positions related to Google’s year-end top search results late last year, but was instead using confidential data from his position inside the company, according to a criminal complaint filed in New York that was unsealed yesterday.

Michele Spagnuolo, a staff information security engineer at Google Zurich, per his LinkedIn profile, has been charged with money laundering, commodities fraud, and wire fraud, with the account reported to have made $1.2 million across various trades.

The complaint alleges that Spagnuolo used nonpublic information to place trades such as the rapper and alleged murderer D4vd being the No. 1 search on Google in 2025. When it was placed, Polymarket had assigned a “a near-zero probability” to that position.

As we noted late last year, the stakes involved and the volume of activity around this one specific subject aroused suspicion at the time, and the AlphaRaccoon (a username that was then changed to 0xafEe) account page now lies dormant as a key part of one of the first insider trading cases in the prediction market arena.

Google Employee Charged With Insider Trading

Hyunsoo Rim4h

Nebius rises after AI hedge fund Situational Awareness discloses 5.6% stake

Nebius jumped 12% in premarket trading Thursday after Situational Awareness, the hedge fund run by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, disclosed a major stake in the AI cloud company.

According to its 13G filed Wednesday, the fund reported owning 12.4 million Class A shares of Nebius, representing a 5.6% stake worth ~$2.6 billion as of Wednesday’s closing price. The position didn’t appear in the fund’s most recent 13F filing — which covered holdings as of March 31 and included other neocloud companies such as CoreWeave and IREN — suggesting the Nebius stake was added sometime after the first quarter.

The disclosure puts Situational Awareness among Nebius’ largest disclosed institutional shareholders, at least based on the latest available ownership filings, which show BlackRock as the largest institutional holder as of March 31, with 4.5% of shares outstanding.

One of the “neocloud” stocks, Nebius has gained traction recently after securing large cloud contracts with Microsoft and Meta, as well as an equity investment from Nvidia and an energy partnership with Bloom. Shares are up 165% this year and a whopping 475% over the past 12 months.

Founded in 2024 by Aschenbrenner — and named after his widely read essay on artificial superintelligence — Situational Awareness has built its portfolio around the physical infrastructure AI runs on, from chips and data centers to power and compute. Per its 13F filings, the fund’s reported portfolio value climbed to $13.7 billion as of the first quarter, up nearly 2.5x from $5.5 billion at the end of 2025.