Earnings calls, loved by some CFOs and dreaded by others, allow finance leaders and their fellow executives to verbalize their organization’s progress. Each month, CFO.com compiles interesting insights shared by CFOs during these calls for The CFO Earnings Dispatch series.
For April, we highlight CFO takes from Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Starbucks, Intel, Tesla, PepsiCo, Netflix and JPMorgan Chase.
Apple
Market cap: $4.12 trillion
Date of call: April 30
Reported results vs. Wall Street expectations:
- Earnings per share: $2.01 adjusted vs. $1.95 expected
- Revenue: $111.18 billion vs. $109 billion expected
Notable CFO quote: Kevan Parekh, CFO of Apple, highlighted the company's strong iPhone performance, with double-digit growth across the majority of tracked markets and iPhone revenue reaching $57 billion — up 22% year over year, driven by the iPhone 17 family.
“iPhone grew double digits in the majority of markets we track, including the U.S., Latin America, Greater China, Western Europe, India, Japan and Southeast Asia,” said Parekh. “The iPhone active installed base grew to an all-time high, and we set a March record for iPhone upgraders. According to a recent survey from Worldpanel, iPhone was a top-selling model in the U.S., urban China, the U.K., Australia and Japan. We have been extremely pleased with the positive reception of the iPhone 17 family.”
Alphabet
Market cap: $4.62 trillion
Date of call: April 29
Reported results vs. Wall Street expectations:
- Earnings per share: $2.62 adjusted vs $2.63 expected
- Revenue: $109.9 billion vs $107.2 billion expected
Notable CFO quote: Alphabet CFO Anat Ashkenazi said that Google Cloud's revenues "accelerated across all key areas and were up 63% to $20 billion.”
“Revenue growth was driven by strong performance in Google Cloud Platform, which continued to grow at a rate that was much higher than the Cloud's overall revenue growth rate,” she said.
She continued, “The largest contributor to Cloud's growth this quarter was AI solutions, driven by strong demand for industry-leading models, including Gemini 3. In addition, we had strong growth in AI infrastructure due to continued deployment of TPUs and GPUs; and core GCP continues to be a sizable contributor, driven by demand for infrastructure and other services such as cybersecurity and data analytics.”
Microsoft
Market cap: $3.08 trillion
Date of call: April 29
Reported results vs. Wall Street expectations:
- Earnings per share: $4.27 adjusted vs. $4.06 expected
- Revenue: vs. $82.89 billion vs. $81.39 billion expected
Notable CFO quote: Looking toward the next fiscal year, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said that Microsoft will “continue to evolve how we operate to increase our pace and agility, and therefore, we expect headcount will decrease year over year. Operating expense growth will be in the mid to high-single digits, reflecting ongoing investments in R&D, inclusive of AI investment in compute, data and talent to accelerate product innovation.”
“We remain focused on delivering a platform that enables customers to build and run AI solutions, and on driving innovation in our first-party AI applications and services and therefore, we expect another year of double-digit revenue and operating income growth in FY27,” said Hood.
Meta
Market cap: $1.55 trillion
Date of call: April 29
Reported results vs. Wall Street expectations:
- Earnings per share: $7.31 adjusted vs. $6.79 estimated
- Revenue: $56.31 billion vs. $55.45 billion estimated
Notable CFO quote: Meta CFO Susan Li was asked about Meta’s recent job cuts and if the 10% reduction was due to artificial intelligence.
“Over time, we don’t really know what the optimal size of the company will be in the future,” Li said. “I think there’s a lot of change right now with AI capabilities advancing rapidly. We’re very focused on leveraging AI tools to substantially increase our productivity, and we’re seeing that reflected in the accelerating output from our engineers.”
She added, “We’re approaching this with a bias toward wanting to use these tools to build even more products and services than we would have before. At the same time, we’re making very significant investments in infrastructure, and we are very focused on continuing to operate efficiently. So, I think we will be continuously evaluating how we’re structured just to make sure we’re best set up to deliver against our priorities over the coming years.”
Amazon
Market cap: $2.86 trillion
Date of call: April 29
Reported results vs. Wall Street expectations:
- Earnings per share: $2.78 vs. $1.64
- Revenue: $181.52 billion vs. $177.30 billion
Notable CFO quote: When discussing the Amazon Web Services segment, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky highlighted that growth was accelerated by customers using its AI services in addition to its core cloud services.
“We continue to see customers increase cloud migrations and scale their use of AWS core services,” Olsavsky said. “Customers seeking the full benefit of AI are accelerating their transition to the cloud. We also see a strong correlation between AI spend and core growth. As customers spend more on AI, we see a corresponding increase in demand for core.”
He continued, “We expect this to increase over time as customers move more AI workloads into production, strengthening demand for our core services. Our AI revenue is growing triple digits year over year.”
Starbucks
Market cap: $122.2 billion
Date of call: April 28
Reported results vs. Wall Street expectations:
- Earnings per share: $0.50 adjusted vs. $0.43 expected
- Revenue: $9.53 billion vs. $9.16 billion expected
Notable CFO quote: Starbucks CFO Cathy Smith reported strong Q2 earnings, with U.S. and international markets posting positive comparable store sales and solid growth.
“U.S. licensed stores returned to positive system-wide comps for the first time since Q1 fiscal 2024,” said Smith. “This was led by record airport volumes and growth in other discretionary segments, together with continued recovery in retail and grocery.”
When discussing international results, she said, “The segment reported $2.1 billion of net revenues in the second quarter, growing nearly 10% year over year. International comp sales grew 2.6%, once again led by transactions, which were up over 2% in the quarter. As [CEO Brian Niccol] mentioned, all 10 of our largest international markets, including China, Japan, South Korea and Mexico, delivered positive comps for the first time in nine quarters.”
Intel
Market cap: $481.29 billion
Date of call: April 23
Reported results vs. Wall Street expectations:
- Earnings per share: $0.29 adjusted vs. $0.27 expected
- Revenue: $13.6 billion vs. $12.36 billion expected
Notable CFO quote: Intel's finance chief, David Zinsner, noted growth and strategic adjustments in the company’s first-quarter performance, driven by strong demand and actions to address supply challenges.
“We delivered robust Q1 results reflecting strong demand and better-than-expected available supply. We also benefited from improved product mix and pricing actions, in part to offset higher costs,” Zinsner said. “First-quarter revenue was $13.6 billion, $1.4 billion above the midpoint of our guide. Q1 revenue would have been meaningfully higher, but demand continues to outpace our growing supply. Our collective AI-driven businesses now represent 60% of revenue and grew 40% year over year. These results reflect real and deliberate changes we have made to be more responsive and accountable.”
Tesla
Market cap: $1.2 trillion
Date of call: April 22
Reported results vs. Wall Street expectations:
- Earnings per share: $0.41 adjusted vs. $0.37 expected
- Revenue: $22.39 billion vs. $22.64 billion expected
Notable CFO quote: Tesla CFO Vaibhav Taneja noted that profits were boosted by what he described as certain “one-time benefits” related to automotive warranties and some relief on tariffs.
“We have not realized any benefit from the recent Supreme Court ruling on IEEPA tariffs, as there is still a lot of uncertainty around the final outcome,” Taneja said. “Both tariffs and sustained high interest rates continue to add to our automotive cost. Interest rate subvention costs are recognized upfront. If interest rates continue to rise, our cost of subvention will continue to impact auto margins.”
PepsiCo
Market cap: $218.26 billion
Date of call: April 16
Reported results vs. Wall Street expectations:
- Earnings per share: $1.61 adjusted vs. $1.55 expected
- Revenue: $19.44 billion vs. $18.94 billion expected
Notable CFO quote: PepsiCo CFO Stephen Schmitt highlighted inflation as an area of uncertainty for the food and beverage business.
“Now our assumption is that inflation will come. The order of magnitude, we're still working through, and I think a lot of that is still to be determined,” Schmitt said. “And the way I think about it from my experience on how you manage inflation would be kind of three ways over time. One, you grow your way through it and really leverage your infrastructure. The second is you push harder on productivity. And third, you do have options with your price pack architecture. We'd like to do the majority of it through the first two.”
He continued: “From a visibility and guidance standpoint, our assumption is that we can mitigate what comes our way this year, and that's really reflected in our assumptions on guidance. And as you might expect, we've started to begin our work on 2027 scenarios, but we're still working through that, and we don't have anything more to share on that today.”
Netflix
Market cap: $396.28 billion
Date of call: April 16
Reported results vs. Wall Street expectations:
- Earnings per share: $1.23 adjusted vs. $0.77 expected
- Revenue: $12.25 billion vs. $12.18 billion expected
Notable CFO quote: Netflix CFO Spencer Neumann discussed the Warner Bros. Discovery deal costs and shared that even though the streaming company dropped the deal, it will still affect the streaming company’s finances this year.
“In January, our initial forecast or guidance for the year was carrying $275 million [in] cost for M&A-related activity, but that wasn't just Warner Bros. One thing that we were carrying in there was the InterPositive acquisition. It wasn't announced yet, but it was in our guidance,” Neumann said. “For Warner Bros. specifically, even though we obviously walked away from the deal and some of our initially planned costs for the deal, they won't fully materialize, but also some that we were planning to carry into '27 were pulled forward into 2026. So when you kind of put all that together, we're still in the ballpark, frankly, of the total that we were projecting for M&A-related expenses in the year.”
JPMorgan Chase
Market cap: $841.84 billion
Date of call: April 14
Reported results vs. Wall Street expectations:
- Earnings per share: $5.94 adjusted vs. $5.49 expected
- Revenue: $50.5 billion vs. $49.17 billion expected
Notable CFO quote: Jeremy Barnum, chief financial officer of JPMorganChase, discussed how the bank looked to see if U.S. consumers were decreasing discretionary spending to adjust for higher gas prices, but the change is “not enough yet to be visible.”
“I would caution, though, I think it remains fundamentally the case that the biggest single reason that the consumer credit performance is healthy is that the labor market is strong,” Barnum said. “And if you get bad outcomes in the Middle East, much higher energy prices or other problems that sort of do eventually crack what has been, I think from many people's perspective, a surprisingly resilient American economy and a very resilient U.S. consumer, and that winds up having knock-on effects on the labor market, then you will see that come through clearly. But right now, the story remains the same, which is a resilient consumer that's doing fine despite higher gas prices.”
