3 Surprises From Disney, YouTube, Amazon in First Earnings Season of 2020

Earnings season can be a bit boring. Not this time. The latest round stood out because several tech and media giants — including Disney, Amazon and Alphabet, Google’s parent company — shared surprising updates about their businesses. Other companies raised eyebrows for what they didn’t share. “As competition increases in the streaming space, companies are revealing more behind their successes and/or losses that may have been more vague in the past,” Sarah Henschel, an analyst with IHS Markit, said. “With more [entering] the streaming game, companies have to be transparent in order to succeed and find support from their investors.” To recap, here are three eye-popping surprises of this earnings season: YouTube: the cash cow Let’s start with YouTube. The Google-owned video company — for the first time ever — gave investors a peak behind the curtain, revealing it pulled in $4.72 billion during Q4. For all of 2019, YouTube’s revenue topped $15 billion, an increase of 36% from the year prior. This had been a figure Google kept close to the vest for years, leaving analysts to guesstimate just how big the internet’s biggest video site actually is. Some may have looked at the disclosure cynically, as a potential...

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