The first half of 2022 has been a nightmare for the stock market, with fears of an impending recession and supply chain disruptions on investors’ minds.

Tech stocks have consistently led the broader market in the past, whether rallying or retreating, and this time was no exception. Despite fairly robust fundamental performance in a challenging environment, big tech came under significant selling pressure.

Here’s a look at how some of the top tech stocks, commonly referred to using the acronym “FAANG,” fared in the first half of the year:

FAANG shares

Meta Platforms, Inc. META

Amazon, Inc. AMZN

Apple Inc. AAPL

Netflix, Inc. NFLX

Alphabet, Inc. GOOGL GOOG

No winner emerges: All FAANG stocks suffered losses in the first half of the year and, more importantly, their losses were worse than those of the market as a whole. Along with market-wide pessimism, most also found themselves struggling with company-specific issues.

Meta: Meta, the parent company of flagship social media platform Facebook, is facing competitive pressure. Short video app TikTok, owned by China’s Byte Dance, has been giving its biggest rival a hard time for some time now. Meta had no choice but to launch its own version of the music video format platform.

As Meta introduced Reels to Instagram and then to Facebook itself, it was forced to promote it at the expense of its highly monetized segments such as Feeds and Stories.

Meta’s ad revenue continues to suffer from a crackdown on Apple’s app tracking transparency. The privacy changes would impact Meta’s revenue by approximately $13 billion in 2022.

Related Link: China’s COVID-19 Shutdown Is Starting to Bite Apple, Analyst Says

Amazon: For Amazon, it was a harsher comparison to the pandemic years. The e-commerce giant took advantage of the stay-at-home scenario that prevailed in 2020 and through much of 2021 when people splurged on online shopping.

A stock split implemented by the company in June did little to reverse the negative sentiment toward the stock.

Apple: Apple continued to deliver, persisted in its shareholder return policy, and continued to roll out superior products and services.
The company relies heavily on China for the production of its hardware products, and so when COVID hit the country, investors began to price in production shortfalls. China is also a key market for Apple from a demand perspective.

Netflix: Netflix was the worst performing FAANG stock in the first half. The company reported a massive loss in net subscriber additions in the first quarter, due to competition and saturated penetration in its key markets. The company introduced a few fixes, including a crackdown on password sharing and the launch of an ad-supported service. Analysts, however, believe any recovery in company fundamentals could be a lengthy process.

Alphabet: The weakness in Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is largely due to industry-wide uncertainties that could hurt its fundamentals.

Other big tech stocks such as Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. AMD, Nvidia Corporation NVDA and Microsoft Corporation MSFT also had a bad exit in the same period. These stocks lost 46.9%, 48.4% and 23.3% respectively.

By comparison, the broader S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite indices were down 20.6% and 29.5%, respectively, in the first half of the year.