“This was a good quarter and we’re seeing growing momentum with our products and our business,” Zuckerberg said.
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san francisco The Facebook group Meta is in a much better position after a period of weakness. Sales rose in the past quarter by three percent to around 28.7 billion dollars, as the company announced on Wednesday. The number of monthly active users even increased by five percent to more than 3.8 billion.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “This was a good quarter and we’re seeing momentum growing with our products and our business.” Next month, Meta will complete its third wave of layoffs, and the company will then begin hiring new talent again especially in the field of advertising, metaverse and artificial intelligence. In total, Zuckerberg had around 21,000 jobs cut.
Nevertheless, Meta will be more economical this year than originally planned. Instead of the originally forecast expenditure of up to $92 billion in the fiscal year, the company will be at a maximum of $90 billion, said Zuckerberg. He had proclaimed a “Year of Efficiency”.
The data was well received on the stock exchange. After the stock markets closed, the valuation of the Meta papers rose by around twelve percent. The stock had lost two-thirds of its value in 2022, but was already up 74 percent this year ahead of the quarterly report. In November, Meta stock hit its low of just $89. It was trading at $234 in after-hours trading on Wednesday.
Analyst Brent Thill from the investment bank Jefferies still considers the Meta papers to be undervalued: “The share is still attractive.” The figures also show that the Facebook group is succeeding in retaining the user base. The company not only has 3.8 billion monthly active users, but even three billion daily users. “The engagement across all apps is impressive,” Thill wrote in an analysis.
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Nevertheless, Thill urges caution. Meta continues to be very dependent on the advertising business. The further development of the market is difficult to predict – mainly because of possible strict regulation as well as the tightened privacy settings on Apple devices, which blocked targeted advertising for Meta.
Insider Intelligence analyst Debra Aho Williamson said, “Meta’s year of efficiency got off to a better start than expected. In this economic environment – and after the catastrophe of 2022 – three percent annual sales growth is a great achievement.”
Among other things, severance payments due to the ongoing mass layoffs weighed on the result. Quarterly profit fell 24 percent to $5.7 billion. In the Reality Labs division, in which virtual worlds and special glasses are developed to display them, the operating loss rose to just under $4 billion from $2.96 billion a year earlier.
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