Plenty of groups have been struggling in this market, but CNBC’s Jim Cramer found one subsector that’s been running hot. That is, until Thursday night.
“The cloud-based enterprise software stocks have been holding up pretty darn well, at least until Red Hat tonight,” the “Mad Money” host said after the cloud play reported first-quarter earnings.
Shares of Red Hat fell over 11 percent after the company issued lower-than-expected guidance for rest of the 2019 fiscal year.
“It’s getting shelled on some weaker guidance. But still, this is the hottest group in the market,” Cramer said before sitting down with the CEO of a company behind another red-hot stock.
Okta CEO on Microsoft challenge
Even a sprawling technology player like Microsoft might have trouble going after newly public cybersecurity company Okta’s business, CEO Todd McKinnon told CNBC on Thursday.
Okta, which came public in April to huge fanfare, saw its shares surge 38 percent on its first day of trading.
Shares of the company, which builds software to make logging into cloud networks more secure, climbed higher still after a successful first-quarter earnings report.
“I think the big advantage that our approach has against someone like Microsoft is that we don’t have a horse in the race in terms of which applications or which operating systems or which type of computer our customers use,” McKinnon, also Okta’s co-founder and chairman, told Cramer.
Intel’s pain = your gain?
Looking past ousted Intel CEO Brian Krzanich’s personal issues, Intel’s stock is too cheap at these levels, Cramer said Thursday.
Shares of the chipmaker slid 2.38 percent on Thursday after Krzanich resigned, effective immediately, for having what the company called a “consensual relationship with an Intel employee.”
The relationship violated Intel’s strict non-fraternization policy, which forbids managers from having personal relations with any of their employees.
But the affair didn’t matter to Cramer.
“What matters to me is that the stock is now too cheap to be ignored because at the same time they released [the] Krzanich [news], they also told you that business was better than expected thanks to strong growth across all segments,” Cramer said. “The stock looks good to me.”
Out on a limb with Micron?
When CNBC’s Jim Cramer listened to Micron Technology’s conference call, he found himself considerably less skeptical about the chipmaker’s fate than most of the analysts.
“I’m a believer,” the “Mad Money” host said Thursday. “I’m out on a limb here.”
But, he admitted, “I think it’s worth the risk.”
Micron, which makes flash memory and dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips that are used in a range of technologies like smartphones and personal computers, reported third-quarter earnings on Thursday.
The results came in above Wall Street’s estimates, driven by strong demand and controlled supply in Micron’s end markets, which include the data storage and cloud computing industries.
Zume Inc. CEO on helping solve employment issues
Automation isn’t a complete job-killer, at least not if you ask Zume Inc. Chairman and CEO Alex Garden, whose company uses robots and high-tech trucks to deliver food.
“Not every job’s a great job,” Garden told Cramer in a Thursday interview. “If you own 10 restaurants [and] you’ve got 10 people working in each restaurant, you’ve got 100 people. In the Zume model, you’ve got a high-speed, co-botic commissary. Co-botic: people and robots working together.”
At Zume’s San Francisco locations — currently the company’s only market — its robots make pizza with human supervisors. The food is then loaded onto one-of-a-kind trucks with built-in ovens and is heated on the way to customers’ houses so it’s hot upon delivery.
“We pay those people great salaries,” Garden said. “They get full benefits, they’ve got great job prospects. When we automate a task – boring, dangerous, repetitive task – we promote that person. We don’t get rid of them.”
And with healthy employment across the United States, Garden said his solution can actually help create better jobs rather than killing them.
With Zume, “you’re getting the same economic throughput [as a restaurant and] better jobs [at] a tiny fraction of the labor,” he said. “For the first time in 20 years, more job openings than jobless people in the U.S. Someone’s got to solve this problem.”
Lightning round: Adjusting to a different market
In Cramer’s lightning round, he zipped through his take on callers’ favorite stocks:
First Commonwealth Financial Corporation: “No, no, no, no, no. It’s time to ring the register. There’s so many banks that are way, way, way, way down, I think you take the money off this regional and put it in others.”
Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.: “People decided they don’t want the industrials anymore. They’re throwing ’em all away. I think this stock is closer to a bottom than a top, so therefore I’m going to say start buying.”
