Meta has managed to arrest three consecutive quarters of declining revenue, sending shares leaping as the Facebook parent erases last year’s stock price slide.
Shares soared by 12 percent after the bell, adding over A$75 billion to Meta’s stock market value.
Revenue jumped 3 per cent year-on-year, to A$43.34 billion, driven by a 26 per cent jump in ad impressions. This was tempered somewhat by the average price per ad dropped by 17 per cent year-on-year.
Expenses also increased by 10 per cent year-on-year, blowing out to A$32.41 billion. This includes the cost of the company’s massive redundancies, which totalled A$1.72 billion in the first quarter alone.
Meta celebrated another milestone, with daily users across its suite of social media platform broke three billion for the first time.
Facebook daily active users were 2.04 billion on average for March 2023, an increase of 4 per cent year-over-year, while monthly users were 2.99 billion as of March 31, 2023, an increase of 2 per cent year- over-year.
“We had a good quarter and our community continues to grow,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Meta founder and CEO. “Our AI work is driving good results across our apps and business. We’re also becoming more efficient so we can build better products faster and put ourselves in a stronger position to deliver our long term vision.”
The one sticking point is the company’s insistence on pouring money into Reality Labs. While Meta has cut back everywhere else, it continues to invest in this nascent area.
“We continue to expect Reality Labs operating losses to increase year-over-year in 2023,” CFO Susan Li said.
Meta expects second quarter 2023 total revenue to be in the range of A$44.6 – A48.4 billion.
