The Facebook group Meta came through the weakness of the online advertising market better than analysts expected. In the last quarter, sales rose 3 percent year-on-year to $28.6 billion. On the other hand, a slight decline had been expected on the market. The sales forecast for the current quarter was also better than expected. In a first reaction in after-hours trading on Wednesday, investors let the share rise by around nine percent.
Quarterly profit fell 24 percent to $5.7 billion. Meta recently initiated the second round of job cuts after a significant increase in jobs during the pandemic. 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.
In recent quarters, Meta has been troubled by an overall decline in online ad spend and issues with ad models following Apple’s privacy-enforcement measures on iPhone. In the final quarter of 2022, however, the Facebook group exceeded analyst forecasts despite a renewed decline in sales.
The number of daily active Facebook users reached 2.04 billion, up from 2 billion three months earlier. 3.02 billion users access at least one of the group’s apps every day. At the end of 2022 it was still 2.96 billion.
More: This is how Microsoft and Google attack each other