Meta posted $7.47 billion in net profit in the first quarter, down 21% year on year. The market, however, expected worse for the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, in a difficult economic context.
The Californian group published Wednesday a turnover approaching 28 billion dollars (+7%). Its title jumped 14% during electronic trading following the closing of the New York Stock Exchange. Above all, it has not lost users once more.
These figures were eagerly awaited by investors following those of February, when the social network admitted to having lost, for the first time, around one million active daily users in three months.
Facebook user stagnation
At the end of March, Facebook had 1.96 billion daily users, up from 1.93 at the end of December 2021, according to the company’s earnings release. And some 3.64 billion people around the world use at least one of the group’s platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp) every month.
For Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst at eMarketer, Meta must still “face the reality: Facebook user growth is stagnating”. “So it falls to Instagram to serve as an engine of growth,” she added. “The Metaverse is generating a lot of press, but Horizon Worlds, Meta’s VR social platform, only has a few hundred thousand users at this point.”
Mark Zuckerberg’s group changed its name in October to signal a shift in strategy. The social networking giant intends to focus on the ‘metaverse’, considered in Silicon Valley as the future of the internet: a parallel universe where the public will use augmented or virtual reality glasses to interact, work or be entertained.
“More people than ever are using our services today,” said the boss, quoted in the press release. ‘We remain confident in the long-term opportunities and growth that our action plan will unlock’.
Headwinds
In the immediate future, the world’s second largest player in online is nevertheless facing many headwinds. The comparison with the year 2021, marked by the explosion of web and mobile platforms thanks to the pandemic, is unfavorable to it.
And in the face of inflation and supply chain challenges, advertisers need to tighten their budgets. In addition, many have adopted the highly popular competitor app TikTok.
‘We expect revenues of between $28 billion and $30 billion in the second quarter of 2022,’ Meta said, ‘taking into account trends that affected growth in the first quarter, particularly on the end, at the beginning of the war in Ukraine’.
/ATS