Facebook Group disappoints investors with outlook

2024-04-24 22:25:16

Meta expects less sales in the future – shares will fall

Although Meta was able to more than double its profit in the first quarter, investors are disappointed by the group’s outlook. The share is losing around 12 percent.

Published today at 12:25 am

More expenses, less sales: Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook group is preparing for higher costs this year.

Photo: AFP

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The Facebook group Meta has seriously disappointed the stock market with its outlook. The share temporarily lost around twelve percent in after-hours US trading on Wednesday, although the results of the last quarter exceeded expectations.

For the current quarter, Meta predicted sales of between $36.5 billion and $39 billion. Analysts on average had expected 38.4 billion. The group is also preparing for higher costs this year as it increasingly relies on artificial intelligence. Meta now puts the range for spending this year at $96 to $99 billion. The previous forecast was between $94 and $99 billion.

Meta was able to more than double its profits

In the last quarter, Meta’s advertising business continued to run at full speed. Sales rose 27 percent year-on-year to $36.45 billion. Profits more than doubled to around $12.4 billion. An average of 3.24 billion users accessed at least one app from the group, which also includes Instagram and WhatsApp, every day in March.

The business with the digital world Metaverse and glasses for displaying virtual reality (VR) continues to generate high losses. The Reality Labs division posted operating red figures of $3.85 billion. In the same quarter of the previous year, it had made an operating loss of almost four billion dollars.