Earnings to Watch – Week of 27 April 2026

$V reports fiscal Q2 after the close, and consensus has settled around $3.09 EPS on revenue near $10.7 billion, with implied processed-transaction growth of roughly 10% and payment-volume growth around 8.6%. The stock is down about 15% from its June 2025 high near $371, weighed by a softer inbound-US travel set-up and a more cautious lower-income consumer. Visa's last quarter showed cross-border volume up 12% and management still describing the global consumer as “healthy and resilient”, with no visible deterioration in the lower-spend bands. The questions for Tuesday: how cross-border volume held up through April, is the spread between affluent and mass-market spend widening, and is data-processing revenue still tracking ahead of total payments volume thanks to tokenisation and value-added services? With management already sounding constructive into the print, the bar is for confirmation rather than upside.

$MSFT prints fiscal Q3 with the stock down roughly 13% year to date, the worst drawdown among the AI mega-caps, on concern that capex is running ahead of cloud revenue. Capital expenditure including finance leases hit $37.5 billion in fiscal Q2, up about 66% year on year (cash purchases of property and equipment were $29.9 billion), and the company is on track for $110–120 billion of capex in FY2026, almost double the prior year. The number that matters most is Azure constant-currency growth: management guided to 37–38% and any print at the high end paired with commentary that capacity constraints are easing would be one of the cleaner signs that the infrastructure spend is beginning to convert on schedule. Beyond Azure, look for an updated read on Copilot seat economics inside the Microsoft 365 base, the cadence of OpenAI-related capacity bookings inside Intelligent Cloud, and any framing of the FY2027 capex envelope. With the multiple already de-rated versus the AI peak, the print may set the tone for the rest of hyperscaler week.

$GOOGL reports Q1 with consensus near $2.68 EPS on roughly $107 billion of revenue and a Cloud unit expected to grow more than 50% year on year. The company is one of the clearest Mag 7 outperformers year to date, with the market cap up around 130% in 12 months, and the move has been supported by investor confidence that Search can remain resilient even as AI assistants gain usage. That thesis gets tested twice on Wednesday: first by the disclosed pace of AI Overviews monetisation inside Search, and second by whether Cloud growth above 50% is sustainable into the back half. The capex line is the offsetting risk. Alphabet has guided $175–185 billion of 2026 capex, roughly double the $91.4 billion spent in 2025, and some sell-side models now point to negative free cash flow for the full year. Watch for the Cloud backlog disclosure, depreciation phasing as the new data centres come online, and any comment on Gemini adoption and enterprise AI demand.

$META reports Q1 having pre-guided 2026 capex to $115–135 billion, almost double the $72 billion spent in 2025, and having announced roughly 8,000 job cuts and plans to leave around 6,000 roles unfilled to help fund it. Q1 revenue is guided to $53.5–56.5 billion, in front of consensus, with advertising still doing the heavy lifting after a +24% Q4 print. The debate is shifting from whether AI is helping ad performance to whether the Superintelligence Labs investment can be justified on a reasonable timeline. Reality Labs ran a $6 billion operating loss in Q4 on revenue under $1 billion, and absent a step-up in Ray-Ban Meta or Quest unit economics, that pool of losses gets harder to defend each quarter. Watch for the Reels monetisation gap to Stories and Feed, any disclosure on Meta AI weekly active users, and most importantly Zuckerberg's framing of when the capex curve flattens. The stock is roughly flat year to date, so the asymmetry on a clean quarter is wide.

Mercedes-Benz reports Q1 into one of the tougher European auto set-ups in recent years. Q1 unit sales were 419,400 vehicles, down 6% group-wide but down 27% in China, where domestic premium brands are taking share and the local pricing environment continues to deteriorate. The company has guided Mercedes-Benz Cars adjusted return on sales to 3–5% for the year, down from 5% in 2025, and full-year 2025 group operating profit was already down 57% to €5.8 billion. The tariff line alone added roughly $1.2 billion of cost in 2025. The questions for Wednesday: how the China localisation push is progressing and whether localised product and software features are enough to stabilise share, what proportion of Q1 tariff cost has been priced through to customers, and how the new electric CLA and refreshed S-Class are landing in the US and European premium channels. With Stellantis reporting the next morning, this is the print that sets the read-across for European auto margin trajectory through 2026.

$AAPL reports fiscal Q2 with management guiding revenue growth of 13–16% year on year, implying $107.8–110.7 billion, and gross margin in a 48–49% range. Consensus sits near $109 billion. The December quarter delivered a record $143.8 billion top line and iPhone revenue up 23%, with management pointing to unusually strong upgrade demand, so the bar for Q2 is about whether that momentum is normalising into a still-strong run-rate or fading. Greater China consensus is above 30% growth and represents close to 20% of revenue: a second consecutive sharp recovery quarter would mark the strongest China stretch in years, but Huawei's Pura 90 launch and the post-iPhone 17 launch demand normalisation both pose risk. The other axis is cost. Apple absorbed $1.4 billion of tariff cost in Q1; the Supreme Court has struck down the IEEPA-based tariff regime, but the administration has pivoted to other trade-law tools, including Section 301 investigations, so supply-chain cost uncertainty has not disappeared, and CFO Kevan Parekh has flagged rising memory costs as a 2026 headwind. Watch for the India production share, services growth (still the highest-margin print line), and any commentary on the Vision Pro 2 timeline.

Samsung backs into the print having already pre-announced one of the most extraordinary quarters in semiconductor history. Preliminary Q1 operating profit was guided at KRW 57.2 trillion, roughly $37.9 billion, against a sell-side consensus closer to KRW 38 trillion and an even higher-conviction whisper number near KRW 50 trillion. That is nearly three times the company's previous quarterly profit peak from the 2018 DRAM cycle. The main driver appears to be the memory cycle, especially HBM and AI-server DRAM, with conventional DRAM pricing also doing a lot of the work; Samsung's HBM revenue is tracking toward roughly triple last year's run-rate as HBM3E shipments to NVIDIA scale and HBM4 qualification approaches. Memory pricing rose 40–50% in Q4 2025 and the pipeline points to another similar leg in Q1 with around 20% follow-through into Q2. With the headline number in hand, Thursday's print is about segment composition: how much of the operating profit is HBM versus conventional DRAM and NAND, what foundry margins look like as the 2nm ramp continues, and how the share buyback completed on 20 April fits into the broader capital return roadmap. The risk is purely sell-the-news: shares are already up sharply on the pre-guide.

$LLY enters Q1 as the largest pharma by market value and the leading commercial name in injectable incretin drugs, but the oral leg of the obesity market is now less one-sided than it looked a few weeks ago. Tirzepatide sales (Mounjaro and Zepbound combined) almost doubled in 2025 to about $36.5 billion, and Lilly has guided 2026 revenue to $80–83 billion, helped by continued Mounjaro and Zepbound growth, while Novo Nordisk has warned that 2026 sales and profit could fall by as much as 13% under US pricing pressure and international loss-of-exclusivity headwinds. The new variable is Foundayo, Lilly's once-daily oral GLP-1, approved on 1 April, with shipping started 6 April and broad availability from 9 April. Early IQVIA prescription data has been modest – roughly 3,707 US scripts in its second week versus 18,410 for Novo's oral Wegovy in its second week – although Lilly has cautioned that early data may not capture all channels. The questions for Thursday: how quickly Foundayo prescriptions build from here, how much supply Lilly can allocate without disrupting injectable ramps, what pricing and formulary access look like post-Inflation Reduction Act, and whether Mounjaro and Zepbound momentum remains strong enough to offset any early oral disappointment. At roughly $880 billion of market cap, Lilly trades on a multiple that leaves limited room for a slip in the obesity franchise.