Historical drop in turnover for Meta – E24

Revenues ended up at $28.82 billion in the second quarter, a decrease of one percent from the same period last year.

It’s the first time ever that the tech giant’s revenue has fallen.

In advance, it was expected that the revenue would end up at 28.93 billion dollars, where the advertising revenue would account for almost all of the turnover, according to estimates obtained by Bloomberg.

The result ended at 6.68 billion dollars, which was a drop of 36 percent compared to the previous year. It produced earnings per share of $2.46. Here, the analysts expected a result of 2.54 dollars.

In particular, there was a lot of excitement about advertising revenue in advance, after several companies have warned that they have encountered challenges there recently.

The average price of advertisements fell by 14 per cent from the same period last year. At the same time, displayed advertisements increased by 15 per cent, the company states.

Low expectations

The Meta share fell heavily immediately after the report became known, but has later recovered somewhat. At the time of writing, the share is down just over two percent in after-market trading.

The share fall comes at the same time as the company expects that revenues in the current quarter will end up at 26-28.5 billion dollars in the quarter. That’s far weaker than analysts’ estimate of $30.32 billion. In comparison, revenues were 28.3 billion dollars in the third quarter of last year.

CFO David Wehner explains the estimate by saying that they are experiencing weak demand for advertisements, which the company also expected in the second quarter.

– We believe this is driven by broader macroeconomic uncertainty, writes Wehner in his comments.

The aforementioned Wehner will take up the role of Meta’s first director of strategy from 1 November. The deputy head of the finance department, Susan Li, will then be promoted to finance director, the company states in the report.

Got more users

The number of daily active users increased by four percent to 1.97 billion, while monthly active users increased by one percent to 2.93 billion in the quarter.

It was expected that the number of daily active Facebook users would end up at 1.95 billion.

– It was good to see a positive development for our engagement trends this quarter from products like Reels and our investments in artificial intelligence, says Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a comment on the figures.

– We are pushing more energy and focus on our company’s key priorities that unlock both short- and long-term opportunities for Meta and the people and companies that use our services, he continues.

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