Asian shares fall as Alphabet earnings miss drags Wall St futures lower

Asian stock markets experienced a decline on Thursday following disappointing earnings announcements from Alphabet, which sent its shares down by 10% in after-hours trading. This significant drop wiped out close to $400 billion in market value for the company. The negative impact on Alphabet's shares also dragged down the Nasdaq futures by 1%. In contrast, Microsoft exceeded expectations with better-than-anticipated cash flows, resulting in a 3% increase in its share price.

The Federal Reserve maintained interest rates as expected, but two committee members voted in favor of a rate hike. Chair Kevin Warsh expressed a more optimistic outlook on inflation during his subsequent press conference, which contributed to a rally in Treasuries. However, the primary concern for investors came from the earnings reports.

Samsung Electronics reported a near ninefold increase in operating profit for the third quarter, driven by strong demand for AI chips. Despite this positive news, the company's shares declined by over 4%, causing the KOSPI index to drop 2.6%.

Overall, the MSCI's Asia-Pacific index outside Japan fell by 0.7%, while Japan's Nikkei saw a slight increase of 0.3%. Blue-chip stocks in mainland China and Hong Kong's Hang Seng index experienced a decline of 0.9% and a modest rise of 0.2%, respectively. Jamie Hannah, a deputy head of investments at VanEck, attributed Alphabet's poor performance to the adverse effects of the AI boom on the company's traditional advertising revenue.

Both Alphabet and Microsoft acknowledged the solid performance of their AI-related revenue streams, primarily driven by growth in data center operations and cloud services.