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Retailers’ profits will get clobbered by more than 30% by tariffs, says Morgan Stanley

Analysts at Morgan Stanley crunched the numbers and it turns out tariffs are really, really bad for US retailers.

Acknowledging that “a wide range of outcomes is possible,” the analysts found that recently enacted tariffs would increase prices by 1% and decrease volumes by 3%. This assumes a 145% tariff on China and a 10% tariff on everyone else besides Canada and Mexico.

On average, earnings per share would decline by 33%, with some companies more exposed than others, the analysts wrote.

Among the most exposed companies are Target, Academy, and Restoration Hardware. (If you don’t believe them, I’d point you to the Restoration Hardware CEO’s reaction on an earnings call when seeing the impact of President Trump’s April 2 tariff announcement had on his stock in real time.) The least exposed are grocery stores like Kroger and Albertsons.

Screenshot 2025-04-16 at 11.42.13 AM
(Morgan Stanley)

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Arista Networks Reports Q3 Earnings

Arista Networks beats expectations, but stock dives on mediocre guidance

All those data centers are going to need a lot of switches and routers as well as GPUs.

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AMD posts top- and bottom-line beat in Q3 with Q4 sales guidance ahead of estimates

Advanced Micro Devices reported third-quarter results that exceeded analysts’ expectations on the top and bottom lines, with guidance to match.

  • Adjusted diluted earnings per share: $1.20 (compared to an analyst consensus estimate of $1.17)

  • Revenue: $9.25 billion (estimate: $8.74 billion, guidance: $8.4 billion to $9 billion)

  • Data center revenue: $4.34 billion (estimate: $4.14 billion)

  • Adjusted gross margin: 54% (estimate: 54%, guidance: 54%)

Its Q4 guidance for sales of $9.3 billion to $9.9 billion was strong relative to the anticipated $9.2 billion, while its adjusted gross margin outlook of 54.5% is bang in line with estimates.

Even so, shares are off about 2% in after-hours trading as of 4:24 p.m. ET.

“AMDs strong 3Q sales beat and 4Q outlook were likely driven by stronger PC and server CPU demand — similar to Intels results — along with continued share gains,” Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Kunjan Sobhani and Oscar Hernandez Tejada wrote. “The GPU ramp-up remains ahead of expectations, aided by a gaming rebound.”

AMD has had a high-profile Q4 so far, striking a megadeal with OpenAI that its CFO said “is expected to deliver tens of billions of dollars in revenue.” That announcement prompted more than 20 price target hikes from Wall Street analysts in a 24-hour span.

The company followed that up with a pact with Oracle, which said it would deploy 50,000 of AMD’s new flagship chips in data centers starting in the second half of next year. On the upcoming conference call, the Street will be looking for as much color as possible on the sales outlook for those MI450 chips.

Ahead of this release, Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore wrote:

“The focus should remain on MI450. AMDs rack scale solution shipping next year is the key, and we are excited to see what the company can do. Its still early to make market share assessments, and while the Open AI agreement is clearly an accelerant, the reliance on cloud providers to ramp those 6 gigawatts still creates some uncertainty. Ultimately, to drive share gains, the company will need to provide better ROI than NVIDIA can offer, and customers still raise questions about that given lower rack density and the need to resolve ecosystem issues.

The chip designer was the third-best-performing member of the VanEck Semiconductor ETF in 2025 heading into this report, with shares having more than doubled year to date.

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