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Another that appleit was a brutal earnings week for Big Tech.

alphabet, Amazon, Goal i Microsoft combined lost more than $350 billion in market capitalization after providing commentary on the third quarter and the rest of the year. Between slowing revenue growth, or in Meta’s case declining, and efforts to control costs, the tech giants have found themselves in an unfamiliar position after rampant growth over the past decade.

This week’s third-quarter results came against a backdrop of rising inflation, rising interest rates and a looming recession. Apple bucked the trend after beating revenue and profit expectations. Stocks had their best day in more than two years on Friday.

At the opposite end of the spectrum was Meta, which has seen its share price sink in 2022. The Facebook parent had no gains, posting its lowest average revenue per user in two years and said fourth-quarter sales would likely decline for a third consecutive period.

“There’s a lot going on right now in business and in the world, and so it’s hard to have a simple, ‘We’re going to do this thing, and this is going to solve all the problems,'” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday on the company’s earnings call. company

Meta shares had their worst week since the company went public in 2012, falling 24% over the past five days. Microsoft fell 2.6% for the week, following a 7.7% drop on Wednesday after the company gave weak guidance for the year-end period and missed earnings estimates for the cloud

Things were also bleak at Amazon, which was down 13%. A gloomy fourth-quarter forecast coupled with a dramatic slowdown in its cloud computing unit were largely to blame for the selloff.

While Amazon Web Services experienced slow expansion to 27.5% from 33% in the previous period, Google’s significantly smaller cloud group accelerated to nearly 38% growth from 36%. Google plans to maintain cloud spending even as it intends to slow overall headcount growth in the coming quarters.

“We are excited about the opportunity, given that enterprises and governments are still in the early days of public cloud adoption, and we continue to invest accordingly,” said Ruth Porat, Alphabet’s chief financial officer, in a conference call with analysts this Tuesday. “We remain focused on the long-term path to profitability.”

However, results for the rest of Google’s parent Alphabet were less impressive. The company’s core advertising business grew slightly, and YouTube’s ad revenue was down from a year earlier. The opposite was true for Amazon, which is catching up with Google and Facebook in digital advertising. In Amazon’s advertising business, revenue growth accelerated to 30% from 21%, beating analysts’ estimates.

“Advertisers are looking for effective advertising, and our advertising is at the point where consumers are ready to spend,” said Brian Olsavsky, the company’s chief financial officer. “We have a lot of benefits that we think will help both consumers and our marketer and advertiser partners.”

Raymond James analyst Aaron Kessler cut his price target on Amazon shares to $130 from $164 after the results. But he maintained the equivalent of a buy rating on the stock and said the company’s “robust advertising growth” has the potential to help Amazon fatten its margin.

As investors continue to move away from technology, they are finding opportunities to make money in other parts of the market that previously lagged behind software and Internet names. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 3% this week, the index’s fourth straight weekly gain. Prior to 2021, the Dow had underperformed the Nasdaq for five straight years.

I WILL SEE: Wall Street will open in the red as investors digest disappointing tech gains