On Wednesday Meta, the company that controls Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, published the results of the fiscal fourth quarter of 2021, which were judged disappointing by investors: the results obtained between October and December of 2021 were in fact lower than analysts' forecasts. Also – and this was one of the most worrying figures – for the first time since it was created, Facebook lost users between the last quarter and the previous one.
All of this meant that on Wednesday Meta's stock on the Wall Street Stock Exchange lost more than 20 percent of its market value, corresponding to more than $ 200 billion.
Meta's total revenue in the final quarter of 2021 was $ 33.67 billion, up from $ 28.07 billion in the same quarter of 2020, but earnings per share fell and fell short. forecast by analysts ($ 3.67 per share against the 3.84 expected). However, Meta remains an exceptionally profitable company, which posted earnings of $ 10.2 billion in the last quarter.
But what worried the markets was the data relating to the growth of Facebook users, the social network that is in fact the main source of Meta's revenues.
Analysts had predicted an increase in the number of monthly active users (i.e. those who connect to Facebook at least once a month) which, compared to the previous quarter, remained stable at 2.91 billion. The worst figure, however, was that of daily active users, which went from 1.930 billion to 1.929 billion. As confirmed by a spokesperson for Facebook to various media, this is for Facebook the first ever decrease in daily users on a quarterly basis, a fact judged by investors as a symptom of the social network's inability to attract new users, and in particular the younger people who are moving to other platforms, such as TikTok.
In communicating the quarterly data, Meta explained that the disappointing economic data is due to a set of factors, including the supply chain crisis and the increase in inflation that has affected the whole world and consequently also advertising investors, which are among the main sources of revenue of the company.
Meta also said that one of the causes of the loss of revenue was the modification of the privacy rules by Apple, introduced last April and which had already caused Meta to lose a lot of money in recent months. Apple's new rules make it more difficult for iPhone users to be tracked while using applications, resulting in the inability to show them personalized advertisements. The new approaches had therefore been strongly criticized by Meta, which obtains a large part of its revenues from online advertising.
The results released Wednesday are also the first since the company that controls Facebook changed its name to Meta. With the change of name in Meta, Facebook had also announced that in the future it would concentrate more efforts on the creation of the “metaverse”, hence the new name of the company. The decision was announced at the end of October a few days after the outbreak of the scandal on the so-called “Facebook Papers”.
The announcement of the disappointing results of the last quarter also comes a day after Meta said it had officially given up on one of its most ambitious projects in recent years, that of creating its own cryptocurrency, which was presented in 2019 as Libra and he had recently changed his name to Diem.
– Read also: How seriously should we take the metaverse?
