Facebook Parent Meta Platforms Reports First Ever Revenue Drop
Social-media giant missed Wall Street’s sales expectation but added users—defying analysts’ projections.
4 min
Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. posted its first decline in revenue and issued a muted outlook on digital advertising as it contends with growing competition from rival TikTok.
The company reported quarterly revenue of US$28.8 billion, down almost 1% from a year earlier and slightly below the US$28.9 billion Wall Street was expecting. It marks the first time that the company has posted a quarterly drop in revenue from the year earlier.
“We seem to have entered an economic downturn that will have a broad impact on the digital advertising business,” Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday. “It’s always hard to predict how deep or how long these cycles will be, but I’d say that the situation seems worse than it did a quarter ago,” he said on an earnings call.
Meta is grappling with a digital advertising market in upheaval from surging inflation and other factors that are causing a slowdown in ad spending. Google parent Alphabet Inc. on Tuesday reported the slowest rate of growth since the second quarter of 2020, when the pandemic crimped demand for advertising in some areas. Rival Snap Inc. reported its weakest-ever quarterly sales growth last week while Twitter Inc. reported a decline in revenue.
Meta also disclosed that Facebook’s daily active user base rose to 1.97 billion users. The figure was 1.96 billion three months ago. The increase defied expectations of analysts surveyed by FactSet who thought user numbers would fall.
The company posted a net profit of US$6.7 billion for the second quarter, the third quarter in a row Meta’s bottom line has fallen. The company hasn’t experienced such a slump since the fourth quarter of 2012.
The weak advertising demand was reflected in Meta’s average price per ad, which fell 14% in the quarter. A year ago, the company reported an increase of 47%, year over year, for its average price per ad.
The company said it continued to face challenges in targeting ads as a result of changes made by Apple Inc. to the iPhone’s operating system. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, on her last earnings call before she departs Meta after 14 years, said the company is adapting its business to do better ad targeting—with less user data—with products such as click-to-message ads, which open a chat with a business whenever a user clicks on the ad.
Such ads are already a multibillion-dollar business growing at double digits, she said. “We are hugely optimistic about this area of our business, and I am very convinced it will work,” Ms. Sandberg said.
Chief Financial Officer David Wehner said the company, like others, is feeling the pinch from the strong dollar, which is weighing on the top line.
Meta’s shares have retreated since the company posted quarterly results in February that showed a sharper-than-expected decline in profit, gloomy revenue outlook and dip in daily users.
Meta’s stock closed more than 6% higher and fell more than 4% after hours following the results.
The company also said it expects its total expenses for 2022 to be between US$85 billion and US$88 billion, down from the company’s previous outlook of US$87 billion to US$92 billion. The company attributed the lowered forecast to a reduction in hiring and overall expense-growth plans for the year.
Mr. Zuckerberg repeated that the company plans to slow the pace of long-term investments and steadily reduce head-count growth over the next year.
“This is a period that demands more intensity,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “And I expect us to get more done with fewer resources.”
Meta is going through a period of transition. Mr. Zuckerberg in April said the company would change how users would see content, in a bid to boost engagement. The company would use artificial intelligence to recommend content to Facebook and Instagram users from around those social networks, rather than solely showing users content from accounts they already follow. The effort mimics one of the signature features of rival TikTok, which Mr. Zuckerberg in February said posed stiff competition for Meta.
Nearly one in six posts shown on Facebook and Instagram feeds are now coming from accounts that users don’t follow and are based on artificial intelligence recommendations, according to stats shared by Mr. Zuckerberg. That could rise to nearly one in every three posts shown to users coming from accounts they don’t follow by the end of 2023.
During the quarter, Meta saw a 30% increase in the time that users are engaging with Reels, the company’s answer to TikTok short-form videos, Mr. Zuckerberg said Wednesday.
Meta, however, doesn’t yet monetize Reels at the levels of some of its other features.
“In the near term, the faster that Reels grows, the more revenue that actually displaces from higher monetizing surfaces,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “In theory, we could mitigate the short-term headwind by pushing less hard on growing Reels. But that would be worse for our products and business longer term.”
Mr. Zuckerberg added that Reels ads are on pace to generate US$1 billion in annual revenue.
Earlier this year, Meta said it planned to slow the pace of some of its long-term investments and adjust hiring plans. In May, the company disclosed a sharp slowdown in hiring, and in June, the company’s head of engineering told his managers in an internal memo to identify and report low performers so they could force those employees out. Earlier this month, the company let go of 368 contractors, including several custodial staff, at its Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters.
The company on Tuesday also said it planned to raise the price of its Quest 2 virtual-reality headset by nearly 34% to US$399.99, citing a rise in the costs to make and ship the products.
The company’s Reality Labs division, which includes VR hardware, posted revenue of US$452 million. Analysts expected it to generate US$431 million in quarterly sales.
Separately, the Federal Trade Commission said Wednesday it is seeking to block Meta from acquiring Within Unlimited Inc. and its virtual-reality dedicated fitness app, Supernatural. The deal, the FTC alleges, would lessen competition in the market and violate antitrust laws. Meta rejected the FTC’s position and said the purchase would be good for the development of the virtual-reality market.
The company also announced that come November, Mr. Wehner will transition into chief strategy officer, a new role at the company. Succeeding him as CFO will be Susan Li, Meta’s current vice president of finance. Mr. Wehner has served as Meta’s CFO since June 2014.
Reprinted by permission of The Wall Street Journal, Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: July 28, 2022.
Copyright 2020, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. LEARN MORE
This stylish family home combines a classic palette and finishes with a flexible floorplan
Just 55 minutes from Sydney, make this your creative getaway located in the majestic Hawkesbury region.
It’s a slow start for 2024 but the longer term outlook for the local economy is strong
3 min
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has described the global economy as “surprisingly resilient” amid rapid interest rate rises to quell high inflation since 2022, post-pandemic supply chain disruptions, a short-term spike in energy prices due to the war in Ukraine and increased geopolitical tensions involving China and the Middle East.
The IMF’s biannual World Economic Outlook report says the world has so far avoided stagflation and recession, with large pandemic savings enabling households to cope with higher rates and inflation, and strong immigration in advanced economies creating unusually tight labour markets.
IMF economic counsellor Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas said most indicators point to a soft landing for the global economy and the IMG now expects “less economic scarring from the pandemic”. He noted that markets had reacted exuberantly in recent weeks to the prospect of central banks lowering interest rates soon.
However, the IMF says global growth will moderate over the next five years to its lowest level in decades. It projects 3.2 percent global growth in 2024 and 2025, the same pace as 2023, with still-high borrowing costs, the withdrawal of fiscal support and weak productivity growth weighing economic activity down.
Australia is expected to underperform other advanced economies, especially the United States, this year but will surge beyond them from 2025. The IMF predicts annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth of 1.5 percent in Australia in 2024, which is well below our long-term pre-pandemic average of 2.5 percent. The US is expected to book above-average growth of 2.7 percent in 2024 and the world’s advanced economies are tipped to average 1.7 percent growth.
Australian economic growth will then move above other advanced economies and maintain upward momentum through til 2029. The IMF predicts 2 percent GDP growth for Australia in 2025 and 2.3 percent in 2029. For the US, the IMF expects 1.9 percent growth in 2025 and 2.1 percent in 2029. For the advanced economies in aggregate, the IMF forecasts 1.8 percent growth in 2025 and 1.7 percent in 2029.
The IMF said higher interest rates had had less effect on the US economy compared to Australia because most US mortgages are on long-term fixed rates and household debt has been lower since the global financial crisis. In Australia, most loans are on variable rates and therefore immediately impacted by every rate rise, household debt is high, and housing supply is restricted.
“The exceptional recent performance of the United States is certainly impressive and a major driver of global growth, but it reflects strong demand factors as well, including a fiscal stance that is out of line with long-term fiscal sustainability,” said Mr Gourinchas.
An example of unusual fiscal policy is the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes US$369 billion in new spending to encourage green energy investment. “This raises short-term risks to the disinflation process, as well as longer-term fiscal and financial stability risks for the global economy since it risks pushing up global funding costs,” he said.
While things are going well now, Mr Gourinchas said risks to global economic progress remain.
“On the downside, new price spikes stemming from geopolitical tensions, including those from the war in Ukraine and the conflict in Gaza and Israel, could, along with persistent core inflation where labour markets are still tight, raise interest rate expectations and reduce asset prices. A divergence in disinflation speeds among major economies could also cause currency movements that put financial sectors under pressure.”
Mr Gourinchas said growth in China could falter, hurting trading partners, without a comprehensive response to its property sector downturn. “Domestic demand will remain lacklustre for some time unless strong measures and reforms address the root cause. Public debt dynamics are also of concern, especially if the property crisis morphs into a local public finance crisis.”
He also noted that weak productivity growth remains a challenge for the whole world and “much hope rests on artificial intelligence delivering strong productivity gains in the medium term”.
This stylish family home combines a classic palette and finishes with a flexible floorplan
Consumers are going to gravitate toward applications powered by the buzzy new technology, analyst Michael Wolf predicts
