Shares of Facebook's parent Meta Platforms Inc. fell in regular and extended trading on Wednesday after the company warned that its advertising business depends heavily on macroeconomic environment for spending. The stock dropped despite better-than-expected results and its fastest revenue growth in two years.
"We are very subject to volatility in the macro landscape," Chief Financial Officer Susan Li said on a call with investors. "The revenue outlook is uncertain" for 2024.
Here are its five key numbers:
Revenue: $34.15 billion, higher than estimates of $33.56 billion
Earnings per Share: $4.39 Vs $3.63 expected
Daily Active Users (DAUs): 2.09 billion Vs 2.07 billion expected
Monthly Active Users (MAUs): 3.05 billion, in-line with the 3.05 billion expected
Average Revenue per User (ARPU): $11.23, higher than estimates of $11.05Meta's digital ads business was its major painpoint in 2022 as it triggered three straight quarters of revenue decline for the Mark Zuckerberg-led company. For the current quarter, the net profit grew by 2.5x to $11.58 billion, from $4.4 billion during the year-ago period.
Revenue for the period grew by 23%, the fastest pace since 2021.
Earlier this year, the company cut thousands of employees and a wide range of projects, while sharpening its focus on improving its advertising and algorithms with artificial intelligence. Talk of the metaverse, the virtual reality world that Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg renamed the company for, has been less frequent, particularly in front of the skeptical investor community.
Meta’s core advertising business has returned to growth. On Instagram and Facebook, Meta has been pushing short-form video, which it calls Reels. While that’s helped boost the time spent by users scrolling through the app, Meta’s advertisers are taking a while to get used to the new format.
These cost-cutting measures helped Meta's margins expand to 40% from 20% last year. For the remainder of the year, Meta cut its spending expectations to $87 billion from $89 billion earlier. For 2024, expenses are likely to range between $94 billion to $99 billion. Most of that expenditure will go towards building technology infrastructure to run complex AI and VR tools.
Reality Labs, the division that makes smart glasses and headsets, posted an operating loss of $3.7 billion on $210 million in revenue. Analysts had expected an operating loss of $3.94 billion on $313.4 million in revenue, on average.
Meta shares fell 4.2% in regular trade and 3.7% in afterhours trade on Wednesday night. Despite the drop, the stock is still up 140% so far in 2023.
(With Inputs From Agencies.)
