Sony jumps on strong earnings and buyback plan despite warning of an upcoming tariff hit
Sony is up 5% premarket after reporting fourth-quarter earnings that beat analyst expectations and issuing a buyback plan of up to 250 billion yen ($1.71 billion). It posted Q4 earnings per share of 32.63 yen, beating consensus estimates of 25.48 yen. Fourth-quarter revenue was down 24%, missing expectations.
The Japanese company also warned that tariffs could harm fiscal year 2025 operating income to the tune of 100 billion yen ($684 million). Sony recently raised prices on its PlayStation 5 in Europe and some other international markets, citing the “challenging economic environment, including high inflation, and fluctuating exchange rates,” which likely means tariffs.
Sony’s gaming segment, which houses PlayStation, saw a 4% drop in sales and a 12.5% decline in operating income year on year in Q4 (which ended March 31, before the tariff news). Sales and operating income for that segment were up 10% and 43%, respectively, for the full fiscal year.
Beyond Meat is showing what happens when a low nominal share price, retail enthusiasm, heavy options activity, and relatively elevated short interest collide: this is what a meme stock rally looks like.
Shares of the plant-based meat company are on a tear again on Tuesday morning, pushing toward the $2 level after sinking as low as $0.50 last Thursday. As of 7:39 a.m. ET, more than $115 million has changed hands trading Beyond Meat, the fourth-most of any stock listed on US exchanges.
The rally didn’t need any fundamental news, but it got some anyways: management announced plans to expand its product availability at over 2,000 Walmart locations nationwide, further adding to the stock’s early gains.
This continues Beyond Meat’s high-volume surge that saw the stock more than double on Monday, in what was by far its biggest one-day gain on record. By the time the dust settled on the opening session of the week, Beyond Meat had volumes in excess of 1.2 billion, effectively turning over its (newly boosted) shares outstanding three times over during the course of the day. That’s a higher level of turnover than Opendoor Technologies enjoyed during its most insane session of this year back on July 21.
JPMorgan strategist Arun Jain observed that this retail interest came out of nowhere as the stock was trading for coins rather than dollars, as this chart on BYND’s daily net retail imbalance through Friday shows:
Source: JPMorgan
This sudden flood of positive retail sentiment appears to be in no small part thanks to a (since banned) Reddit user with the handle capybaraSTOCKS, who has since transitioned to YouTube and X to share his thesis on the company. Business Insider identified this person as Dimitri Semenikhin, a Dubai-based real estate developer.
The move on Monday included a massive spike in call volumes up to more than triple their previous daily record:
When you’re a meme stock, your equity is what becomes your top product. And while, yes, most companies do tend to see higher trading volumes on any given day than the sales they’re making, this discrepancy is particularly stark with Beyond Meat. Through its history as a publicly traded company, it’s recorded plant-based meat sales of 487.5 million pounds. In other words: more than twice as many shares traded on Monday compared to pounds sold from Q1 2018 through Q2 2025!
IonQ is up in early trading on Tuesday after the quantum computing company shared two technical papers that demonstrate 99.99% two-qubit gate performance.
According to IonQ’s press release, this marks a new “quantum computing world record” for a two-qubit system, topping the previous world record of 99.97% set last year by Oxford Ionics, which IonQ acquired earlier this year. Though 99.99% and 99.97% sound very similar, the former represents an error rate of 1 in 10,000 operations; the latter represents an error rate of 3 in 10,000 operations.
The company says it is the first and only quantum computing company to cross the “four-nines” benchmark, per the release, putting IonQ on track to scale up toward millions of qubits by 2030.
The “two-qubit gate fidelity,” or the error rate of quantum computers’ two-qubit operations, is an important yardstick to measure the performance of a quantum computer. When accuracy improves, the technology’s window for commercial operations widens — a welcome development in the nascent industry, which has been fueled by increased US government interest and speculative trading as much as it has been by technical breakthroughs this year.
In July, peer Rigetti Computing announced that its two-qubit fidelity was 99.5%, catalyzing its largest one-day gain since January. The two companies both operate gate-based models, but with different approaches: Rigetti uses superconducting circuits, while IonQ, as its name implies, uses trapped ions.
In CEO Niccolo de Masi’s words:
“This level of quantum performance has been the industry’s north star for decades and crossing it brings fault-tolerant quantum systems years closer to mass market adoption. For our global customers, it means unlocking more value from quantum computing sooner, while dramatically lowering the cost and complexity of large-scale systems.”
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