The Facebook mother Meta opened the books after hours on Thursday.
In the fourth fiscal quarter of 2023, Meta Platforms earned $5.33 per share, down from year-ago earnings of $1.76 per share and analyst estimates of $4.83. This means that the Facebook parent earned significantly more than expected.
Sales improved from 32.17 billion US dollars to 40.11 billion US dollars; the expert estimates in advance had been 39.12 billion US dollars. The sales figures were also above expectations.
Facebook Group Meta pays its first dividend after a surge in profits
Meta’s advertising business continues to run at full speed. Sales in the last quarter rose by a quarter year-on-year to 40.1 billion dollars (36.7 billion euros), as the Facebook Group announced after the US stock market closed on Thursday. The bottom line is that profits jumped from $4.65 billion a year ago to $14 billion. Meta now wants to pay a quarterly dividend for the first time and has set it at 50 US cents.
At the same time, the group continues to spend a lot of money on the development of virtual worlds and the devices for them. The operating loss of the corresponding Reality Labs division rose to $4.65 billion – from $4.3 billion a year earlier. Meanwhile, the division’s sales increased from $727 million to just under $1.1 billion.
Investors had repeatedly expressed concern that Meta was spending too much money on a technology with uncertain profit prospects. The doubts grew at times last year as the overall online advertising business slowed. Founder and boss Mark Zuckerberg has now reiterated that Meta can invest in both artificial intelligence and virtual worlds. He had Facebook’s company name changed to Meta – based on the virtual world Metaverse.
Facebook now has 2.11 billion daily active users. And every day, 3.19 billion users access at least one of the company’s apps. Meta also includes Instagram and WhatsApp.
Threads, the meta alternative to Elon Musk’s Twitter successor X, now has 130 million monthly active users. Threads gained around 30 million users within three months. Meta launched the service in the EU in December after months of delays.
Zuckerberg had always said that he saw the potential for more than a billion users on Threads. He emphasized that the app is now being used more than during the initial short-term push to launch it last summer.
Compared to other meta services, Threads is still small. Facebook has 3.07 billion monthly active users. Threads is docked to Meta’s photo and video service Instagram and can therefore rely on existing connections between hundreds of millions of users. That’s why the app is seen as a strong competitor to X.
A direct comparison with the number of users of The company boss he appointed, Linda Yaccarino, wrote in a blog post at the end of October: “More than half a billion of the best-informed and most influential people in the world come to X every month.” However, she was not specifically talking about monthly active users, as is usual in the industry. In the last quarterly report before the takeover in spring 2022, Twitter only mentioned the number of almost 238 million daily active users in the in-house app and the web version. Web analytics firms tended to conclude that the number of users declined in the year after the Musk takeover.
JPMorgan raises target for Meta to $535 – ‘Overweight’
The US bank JPMorgan raised the price target for Meta from $420 to $535 after fourth-quarter figures and left the rating at “Overweight”. The outlook for accelerated sales growth in the first quarter and a quarterly dividend demonstrate the overall strong development of the social media group, wrote analyst Douglas Anmuth in a study available on Friday. It has now become clear that Meta is making excellent short-term progress and is investing heavily in important long-term initiatives. With the quarterly distribution, Meta is opening up to a wider circle of possible investors.
The Meta share was very strong in trading on the US stock exchange NASDAQ on Friday and ultimately rose by 20.32 percent to $474.99.
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