All is relative. Meta offered a jump of more than 20% on the stock market during electronic trading after the close on Wednesday 1er february. The reason for such a rebound? The parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp published results that were a little less bad than what financial analysts expected. Turnover for the fourth quarter of 2022 fell “only” by 4% compared to the previous year, to 32.2 billion dollars (29.3 billion euros).
The number of daily active users of the Facebook platform has passed the 2 billion mark, a figure “much better than feared”, greeted, on Twitter, Dan Ives. The Wedbush Securities bank analyst, however, did not fail to point out in passing that “bullish mood” recovery was also due to the slowdown in the rise in interest rates decided on the same day by the American central bank. And the announcement by Meta of a share buyback of up to 40 billion dollars, a technique used by companies to support their share price…
Beyond these stock market fluctuations, the company’s situation remains tense. A negative spiral was set in motion after Meta first announced a decline in Facebook’s daily user count in February 2022 and then in overall revenue in July. Despite a stabilization of the pace of the fall at the end of the year, 2022 will remain a pivotal year, with revenues down 1%, to 118 billion dollars.
Founder Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged this historic turning point: ” After [une croissance] for eighteen years at a rate of 20% or 30% per year, things have changed quite markedly this year. It’s a pretty big descent. I don’t think it’s going to continue, but things aren’t going to go back to the way they were either.” he told analysts. In an attempt to reassure, he promised a “year of efficiency”.
Adjustments under market pressure
To explain the fall in profit – down 55% to $4.7 billion in the last quarter of 2022, and 41% to $23 billion in 2022 – Meta cited $4.2 billion in costs. restructuring at the end of the year. These would be linked to the 11,000 layoffs (13% of the workforce) announced at the start of November 2022, but also to other cost-saving measures: reduction of office space, slowdown in investment and restructuring of data centers, etc.
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