Meta has presented its results for the last quarter of 2021, which show that the social network Facebookone of its main assets, has stopped growing. Not only that, but for the first time in its history it has recorded a decrease in the number of active daily users. Its drop has been very slight, since it has gone from 1,930 million to 1,929 million, but it still marks a change in trend for the social network, which the shareholders of Meta have not missed. A) Yes, the company’s shares are down no less than 20% in the hours after the communication of their results.
Even so, Meta is still very profitable, since during last year it made nearly $40 billion in profits, most of which come from advertising. However, it continues to lose money in areas such as Reality Labs, which is responsible for everything related to the company’s virtual and augmented reality. She alone lost $10.2 billion last year, and only made $2.3 billion.
Regarding the general data of the company, in the last three months of the year Meta entered 33,670 million dollars, a figure that represents a year-on-year increase of 20%. In the same period the company has had net income of 10,290 million and earnings of 3.67 dollars per share. Its quarterly costs and expenses, however, reached 21,100 million dollars, 38% more. Meta received 32,640 million dollars from advertising, while the income of its Others division reached 155 million dollars.
This past quarter has been the first since the company changed its name. The presentation of results has also had other novelties, since Meta revealed them divided into two segments: Family of apps and Reality Labs. The first category includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp Messenger and other services. The second deals with all the hardware, software and content related to augmented and virtual reality.
The Family of Apps area entered 32,794 million dollars in the quarter, and obtained profits of 15,890 million dollars. Reality Labs took in $877 million and had a loss of $3.3 billion.
As for the forecasts for the current quarter, the company expects to have revenues between 27,000 and 29,000 million dollars. Although they do not expect everything to be a bed of roses. the Company CFO David Wehnerhas already warned that they expect their year-over-year growth in the first quarter of this year to be affected by impressions and price increases.
Specifically, Wehner has referred to challenges such as «increased competition for people’s time«. In other words, there are more apps and other elements that its users spend time with, subtracting it from Facebook and the rest of the meta apps. In addition, he has pointed to an interaction change in Facebook apps that is giving more momentum to features like Rees, which are monetized at lower amounts than Feed and Stories.
Nonetheless, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Metastill thinks that everything is going to be better, since he points out that the company «had a strong quarter as people used our products to stay connected and businesses continued to use our services to grow«. Thus, Zuckeberg claims to be «encouraged by the progress we’ve made this past year in several important growth areas, such as Reels, trading, and VR, and will continue to invest in them and other key priorities in 2022 as we continue to develop the metaverse.«.
