Are Big Tech earnings losing sheen?

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Editor's note: A slew of earnings reports from large technology companies in the US landed last week, and to use the go-to phrase of news channels for such events, it was, well, a “bloodbath” on Wall Street. Big Tech stocks dropped this past week as the majority of the tech firms posted lackluster earnings, leading to hundreds of billions of dollars being wiped from their market values. Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Apple and Netflix have already lost a combined market value of more than $2.5 trillion so far this year, Reuters reported last week. There are broadly two key reasons: Flagging demand for digital advertising (affecting Meta and Alphabet) and softer growth in cloud-computing divisions (for Amazon and Microsoft). Microsoft is also hit by a rapidly shrinking market for personal computers due to dwindling consumer spends and rising inflation as well as post-COVID adjustments. The shrinking digital advertising spends have had Alphabet and Meta worried. Alphabet reported its fifth consecutive quarter of slowing sales growth—the company saw YouTube revenue fall for the first time since it began reporting the unit’s performance in …