Investors were treated to another stock rotation opportunity – read surprise – on Wednesday when US President-elect Donald Trump struck a conciliatory tone with technology company chiefs in a New York meeting.
Most of them in from Silicon Valley, California, and many of them openly backers of rival for the White House job Hillary Clinton, Trump changed his rhetoric from the campaign earlier in the year. He was more than aware of just how many billions of dollar’s-worth of top brass had made the effort to meet him on the East Coast.
To an audience which included Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Chief Executive Larry Page, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) CEO Tim Cook and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella, Trump said his mission was “to help you folks do well.”
The Who’s Who of tech was present, including Jeff Bezos from Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Elon Musk from Tesla Motors (NASDAQ:TSLA). If there was one absentee, at least from the scheduled list, it was from Twitter (NYSE:TWTR). But no one is accusing this of being a conflict of interest issue even if Trump is an avid user of the social media microblogging site.
Trump told the executives that he would “do fair-trade deals” and said he was “going to make it a lot easier for you to trade across borders.” Trump has been a persistent critic of past trade deals, including the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership.
But he was also expected to be consistent about some cherished campaign slogans, including job creation.
The jobs discussion could put the tech giants on the defensive. Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) are five of the nation’s seven most-valuable companies and together employ roughly 600,000 workers. But they employ fewer people—particularly in the US—than many less-valuable firms. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE:WMT), for instance, employs 1.5mln people in the US alone. Trump has criticized Apple, among others, for making nearly all of its products overseas.
Trump has also repaired some bridges with technology, after IBM (NYSE:IBM) CEO Ginni Rometty, another attendee at the meeting, reached out to him in a letter last month.
But as Trump repairs relations with the tech sector a week after falling out with the drug sector when he promised to clamp down on high drug prices, investors were left wondering whether flocking back to the tech sector was the next best savvy thing.
Until and perhaps beyond Trump’s inauguration in January investors can look forward to a guessing game as the 45th president works the corporate room trying to appease and make friends. This is not to be scoffed at. Perhaps at very least it is a positive sign that he means business with business.