Business | Cloudy with a dearth of chips

How the pandemic has changed the weather in the technology industry

The cloud, hardware and competition are gaining in importance

|SAN FRANCISCO

THE TECH industry recently appeared to be sitting on cloud nine. One record after another fell when quarterly results were reported three months ago. Revenues had grown by 40% on average compared with the same period a year ago and profits by 90% for the five Western technology titans—Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, collectively known as GAFAM. Indices of tech shares, such as the S&P 500 Information Technology benchmark, climbed to stratospheric heights.

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Cloudy with a dearth of chips”

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