Carvana sold a record number of cars and Chipotle's traffic held up, sending both higher after hours, while Ford's EV losses and a small ServiceNow miss weighed on those stocks. Eric Bleeker breaks down a busy earnings night.
Chipotle, Microsoft, Carvana and Ford all reporting earnings tonight. Oh my. I'm Eric Bker with 24/7 Wall Street and we are looking at the biggest stories in earnings tonight. We're going to look at Chipotle, Mexican Grill. We're going to look at Ford. We are going to look at Carvana and why the market is reacting the way it is to all of the biggest earnings announcements. So let's get started.
First up, Chipotle Mexican Grill released its third quarter results. Adjusted EPS came in at 27 cents a share. That was actually below what Wall Street was looking for at 29 cents. Um, it's it's a miss of about 7% and it ends a run of six consecutive quarters of being estimates. Even so, in early after hours trading, shares of Chipotle are up nearly 5%. So, why the shrug from from Wall Street with that miss?
Well, let's start with sales. Revenue came in at 3.29 billion, just ahead of estimates and up about 10% from a year ago. Most of that growth came from new restaurants. Chipole opened 84 company-owned locations in the quarter and 53 of them have the Chipot lane. That's the drive-through lane for picking up digital orders. Then there's traffic. and that's the part that Bulls care about the most.
Comparable restaurant sales mean sales at stores open at least a year rose 2.1%. The average check was up 1.3% and transactions were up 0.8%. That tops the comp of somewhere around a plus 1% that management had guided to back on the second quarter call. As Chipotle CEO Scott Boatright put it, three consecutive quarters of positive comparable transaction growth demonstrates that our recipe for growth strategy is working.
Another winner tonight after hours, Carvana. Shares are up 10%. Let's start with the top line. Revenue came in at 8.04 billion for the third quarter. That's up 42% from a year ago. Wall Street was looking for about 7.67 billion. So that's a clear beat. Carvana sold a record 217,385 retail units, which is up 39%. That's the first time has crossed 200,000 retail units in a single quarter.
And it happened while the wider used car industry was approximately flat. In other words, Carvana is taking customers from everybody else. But we should talk about the miss. EPS came in at 39 cents, missing expectations of 44 cents. A big piece of that was a one-time hit. Carvana took a $53 million loss on debt extinguishment, which is simply the cost of paying off bonds early.
In this case, it paid off at senior secure notes due 2030 ahead of schedule. Paying down debt early takes a bite out of earnings now and gives the company a cleaner balance sheet later. And clearly, Wall Street is happy with top line growth as shares have jumped 10% after hours. Looking further across earnings on a action pack night, Ford shares are down 2%. The company soundly beat Wall Street's profit expectations and raised its outlook for the second straight quarter, but
when you're looking into the details, the Model E Ford's electric car lost 1.1 billion in Q3 with an ebit margin of get this -86.5%. On the margin, pun intended, the market seems unimpressed with Ford's quarter despite the profit beat. And the stock being punished the harshest after hours is Service now. The SAS giant slightly beat on revenues,
but its EPS of a dollar uh per share missed expectations of a dollar and two cents. Now we've seen other stocks that miss on EPS that weren't punished. So why Service now? Well, shares are up 66% in the past six months headed into earnings, as we have seen software roundly outperform semiconductors in recent months. Uh this rotation has been ongoing, but it also means that any weakness for a company like Service now
will be punished, which is why we see shares down 15% after hours. And on 24/7 Wall Street, if you look across our videos, we've also published a summary of Microsoft, which is up about 4% after hours. and Alphabet's uh the parent company of Google is down roughly 9% as investors were disappointed with their search growth. So once again, it's a busy night that says a lot about where the market is at to right now.
Microsoft beating on EPS and revenue and also coming in below expectations on how much they are spending in CAPEX on data centers, being rewarded with a 4% gain. Google despite 103% growth in cloud computing division, being down 9%. Service Now, a software company that had risen being punished for a slight miss on EPS. So with that, uh I hope you've enjoyed this look at recent earnings and if you're looking for a source for all the best analysis on breaking news, make sure to come back to 24/7 Wall Street.
