Highlights for this morning: Apple breaks records, Amazon accelerates, Netflix crushes stock

Apple beat earnings expectations and forecast a record current quarter thanks to hype around the iPhone 17 and booming service segment growth. Amazon showed a strong jump in profits and accelerated its AWS cloud business, betting on its own Trainium AI chips and scaling its Project Rainier infrastructure. On these and other topics - in our review of key events by the morning of October 31.

Apple reported its fiscal fourth quarter results, beating analysts' expectations for earnings and revenue, CNBC reports. Earnings per share came in at $1.85 versus a forecast of $1.77, and revenue reached $102.47 billion, while Wall Street was expecting $102.24 billion. The main driver was the service business, up 15% to $24.97 billion, while iPhone sales totaled $49.03 billion, slightly below forecasts, due to supply constraints on new models.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said Apple expects revenue growth of 10-12% year-over-year in the current quarter, which could be the best result in the company's history. According to him, new iPhone 17 shipments are better than expected, and traffic in stores has increased amid high customer interest. At the same time, revenue in China fell 4%, but Cook expects a recovery due to the new lineup.

The company maintained pricing despite the Donald Trump administration's duties, absorbing $1.1 billion in additional costs. Gross margin was 47.2% - above the consensus forecast. For the full fiscal year, Apple forecast total revenue growth of 6% to $416 billion.

South Korean giant Samsung has announced plans to create an "AI Megafactory," a new chip manufacturing center for mobile devices and robots that will feature 50,000 Nvidia GPUs, CNBC writes. The timeline for construction has not been disclosed. The project will be part of the companies' large-scale cooperation in the field of artificial intelligence.

The partnership strengthens the position of Nvidia, whose GPUs remain key to the development and deployment of AI technologies. According to the chipmaker, the joint work with Samsung will enable the adaptation of lithography platforms to GPU architectures, providing up to a 20x increase in performance. Samsung will also implement Omniverse simulation software and use Nvidia chips for its own AI models.

Netflix said it will conduct a 10-to-1 stock split - each shareholder will receive 10 new securities for one current one, Yahoo Finance reports. After the split, the papers will be traded at a price about ten times lower than the current one: closing at $1089, it's about $110 apiece. Trading in the split shares will begin on November 17.

The company explained that the move is aimed at "reducing the market price to a range more affordable to employees participating in the option program." This is the third split in the company's history - the previous ones took place in 2004 and 2015.

Amazon's results for the third quarter exceeded analysts' estimates, Yahoo Finance reports. Earnings per share amounted to $1.95 with a forecast of $1.58, and revenue - $180.2 billion against an expected $177.8 billion. The cloud division AWS brought $33 billion, beating the consensus of $32.4 billion. Against the background of the report, the company's shares rose in extended trading by more than 13%.

CEO Andy Jesse said Amazon will "aggressively invest" in expanding capacity for AI workloads. The company launched a Project Rainier cluster with 500,000 Trainium 2 chips, and sales of those chips grew 150% in a quarter, turning it into a multi-billion dollar business.

- Japan's broad Topix index rose 0.7%, while the Nikkei 225 added 1%, with both indices hitting records.

- Hong Kong's Hang Seng fell 1 percent, while mainland China's CSI 300 index fell 1.3 percent.

- In South Korea, the Kospi index added 0.3%, while the Kosdaq rose 1.1%.

- Australia's S&P/ASX 200 was little changed.

- Nasdaq 100 futures jumped 1.1 percent, S&P 500 futures added 0.6 percent and Dow Jones Industrial Average exchange-traded contracts were little changed.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor