Big Tech has made earnings look better, but here come Disney and PayPal

Most of the first-quarter earnings blizzard has passed, and the results, overall, haven’t been as bad as expected — thanks in large part to the nation’s biggest tech companies: Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft.

“At this late stage of the Q1 2023 earnings season, S&P 500 companies are recording their best performance relative to analyst expectations since Q4 2021,” FactSet Senior Earnings analyst John Butters said in a report on Friday. “Both the number of companies reporting positive EPS surprises and the magnitude of these earnings surprises are above their 10-year averages.”

Companies in the Information Technology sector helped lead the charge for the better-than-expected first-quarter results. Butters said that within that sector, results from Apple AAPL , Microsoft MSFT and Intel INTC were “substantial contributors” to mitigating that sector’s decline in earnings. The swings underscore the tech giants’ outsize influence on quarterly earnings and the index overall, as those companies look for firmer footing after the pandemic led to an explosion in digital demand that later faded.

Videogame companies are some of the most prominent this week, with developer Electronic Arts Inc. EA following up layoffs and disappointing results while executives decide whether to delay or pull the plug on some game releases. Also due this week is Roblox Corp., monetization engines Unity Software Inc. U and AppLovin Corp. APP

The results from BuzzFeed and the New York Times will follow the shutdown of BuzzFeed news, layoffs at outlets like Vice Media and Insider, the cancellation of “Vice News Tonight,” and a widening financial divide between the biggest news sites and smaller ones. While shares of BuzzFeed have plunged 88.4% over the past 12 months, the New York Times’ are up 11.7% over that period.

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