The parent company of Facebook, Meta revealed on Wednesday that it had earned $32 billion in revenue for the quarter that ended in June. This was an increase of 11% from the same time last year and exceeded Wall Street’s expectations.
After a brutal 2022 that was notable for revenue declines, the results mark Meta’s second consecutive quarter of revenue growth.
In addition to exceeding analysts’ expectations, the company reported quarterly profits of $7.79 billion, a 16% increase over the prior year.
In a statement announcing the results, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “We had a good quarter. We continue to see strong engagement across our apps and we have the most exciting roadmap I’ve seen in a while with Llama 2, Threads, Reels, new AI products in the pipeline, and the launch of Quest 3 this fall.”
Facebook’s daily active users have increased to 2.06 billion, a 5 percent increase from last year, according to the company. Facebook’s monthly active user base also increased by 3% from the previous year.
The results are released at a time when investor enthusiasm surrounding AI has been supporting the tech sector lately and at a time when demand for digital ads seems to be picking up steam once more.
Following the company’s third consecutive quarter of revenue decline in February, and after a grueling year in which it battled fierce competition, issues with Apple’s app privacy changes, and lower digital ad spending amid broader macroeconomic uncertainty, Zuckerberg unveiled his plans for a “year of efficiency.” The year was marked by steep cost-cutting measures and mass layoffs.
Meta announced 11,000 job layoffs in November of last year, the single-largest round of cuts in the company’s history. Zuckerberg revealed that Meta would fire 10,000 more employees in March.
“The year of efficiency was always about two different goals: becoming an even stronger technology company and improving our financial results so we can invest aggressively in our ambitious longterm roadmap,” Zuckerberg said Wednesday on a call with analysts. “Now that we’ve gotten through the major layoffs, the rest of 2023 will be about creating stability for employees, removing barriers that slow us down, introducing new AI-powered tools to speed us up and so on.”
The report comes only a few weeks after Twitter’s main rival, Threads, was launched by Meta. In less than a week after its launch, the app attracted an astonishing 100 million user signups. Although user engagement has decreased, Meta has steadily added features to the app in an effort to maintain the momentum.
“This is as good of a start as we can hope for,” Zuckerberg said in reference to Threads during the call with analysts.
“We saw unprecedented growth out of the gate and more importantly, we’re seeing more people coming back daily than I’d expected,” he added. “And now we’re focused on retention and improving the basics. And then after that, we’ll focus on growing the community to the scale that we think is going to be possible.”
Only after this, he said, will they focus on monetizing Threads. “We’ve run this playbook many times before with Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, stories, reels and more,” Zuckerberg said
Following the earnings announcement, Meta stock increased by about 4% in after-hours trading.
Source-CNN
