Yuan The company’s shares rose about 7% in after-hours trading on Wednesday after the company beat Wall Street’s revenue and profit expectations and issued a better-than-expected forecast for the period.
Here’s how it compares to the LSEG estimate:
- income: $5.16 per share, expected $4.73 per share
- income: US$39.07 billion, expected US$38.31 billion
Meta’s third-quarter revenue guidance is US$38.5 billion to US$41 billion, which is the midpoint of the range of US$39.75 billion. Analysts expected the figure to be $39.1 billion.
The company reported second-quarter revenue growth of 22%, up from $32 billion in the same period last year, the fourth consecutive quarter of growth of more than 20%. Net profit jumped 73% to $13.47 billion from $7.79 billion, or $2.98 per share, a year earlier.
Meta’s performance shows that the company’s core business, digital advertising market share, continues to grow. Advertising revenue mainly comes from Facebook and Instagram applications, which increased by 22% compared with the same period last year. Last week, the biggest competitor letter The report pointed out that Google ad sales increased by 11%, while YouTube did not meet expectations.
Meta said second-quarter expenses were $24.2 billion, including Meta’s most recent charges Settlement Agreement Texas files lawsuit over facial recognition data, seeking $1.4 billion.
The company reported second-quarter capital expenditures of $8.47 billion, below analysts’ estimates of $9.51 billion.
Meta said its spending outlook for this year was unchanged at $96 billion to $99 billion. The company narrowed the scope of capital expenditures. It is now $37 billion to $40 billion, compared with the previous low of $35 billion.
For user metrics, Meta reported that it had 3.27 billion daily active users (DAP) for the quarter, in line with StreetAccount’s estimate. In the past, Meta reported daily and monthly active user numbers for its Facebook and Messenger apps. The DAP number is the number of people accessing any of its applications.
Meta’s financial position continues to benefit from cost-cutting measures starting in late 2022. Operating income increased 58% year-over-year to $14.9 billion, and Meta’s operating profit margin expanded to 38% from 29% in the same period last year.
Meta said its headcount fell 1% to 70,799 as of June 30 from a year earlier.
Although Meta is massively downsizing, it has been investing heavily in cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality and augmented reality technology to support the Metaverse. Like other tech giants, Meta has been investing heavily in data center infrastructure and computing resources, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg says is necessary to maintain a competitive advantage.
“We had a strong quarter and Meta AI is expected to be the most used artificial intelligence assistant in the world by the end of the year,” Zuckerberg said in a statement. “We released the first cutting-edge open source artificial intelligence model. , we continue to see good traction with Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, and we are driving good growth in our app.”
Meta said Wednesday that while the company is continuing to “refine plans for next year, we currently expect capital expenditures to increase significantly in 2025 as we make investments to support our artificial intelligence research and product development efforts.”
Earlier this year, Zuckerberg explain Meta’s computing infrastructure will include 350,000 Nvidia H100 graphics cardBy the end of 2024, expensive computer chips will be used to train so-called large language models and related artificial intelligence software. of computing power, equivalent to billions of dollars.
as part of Meta’s AI pushthe company launched its latest version last week Camel AI model, which consists of three different variants and is free for developers to access and use through open source. One version of Llama 3.1 technology contains as many as 405 billion parameters, which are indicators of the size and power of an AI model, underscoring Meta’s efforts to ensure that its AI technology is consistent with competitors such as OpenAI and Google.
As of Wednesday’s close, Meta’s shares were up 34% for the year, double the Nasdaq’s gain. The stock rose 6.9% to $507.45 after hours.
Executives will discuss the results on a conference call with analysts at 5 p.m. Eastern time.
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