The Facebook and Instagram parent company won $ 116.61 billion in 2022, down 1 % compared to 2021. This is the first time that the social networks giant has seen its annual income decrease from its IPO in 2012.
MO12345LEMONDE with AFP
Meta saw its annual income drop to $ 116.61 billion in 2022, a decrease of 1 % compared to 2021. Never, since its IPO in 2012, the social networks giant, which brings together in particular Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, had not recorded a drop in its annual income.
This did not prevent its title from leaping 18 % during electronic exchanges after the fence of the scholarship on Wednesday, because the market expected a more brutal fall for the Californian group which has been sailing for a year , faced with competition from Tiktok and the economic crisis.
Another positive sign, Facebook reached two billion active users on a daily basis, against 1.98 billion at the end of September, according to its press release. In all, some 3.74 billion people use at least one of the services of the company (social networks and messaging) every month.
of the difficult beginnings for the Metals
But these good surprises do not mask the reality of a business that has experienced better days. In the fourth quarter of 2022, Meta achieved a turnover of $ 32.17 billion (−4 % over a year), and saw its net profit divided by two to 4.65 billion, instead of the 6 billion expected by analysts.
The company has worried markets for a year, when the group had lost users on Facebook for the first time. It was shortly after its name change and the announcement of its pivot to the metarers, this parallel universe, accessible in particular via augmented and virtual realities, presented as the future of the Internet.
Reality Labs, the branch responsible for developing the metarers, dug its losses to $ 4.3 billion in the past quarter, after having already lost 3.7 billion in the third quarter, and 2.6 in the second.
the shadow of tiktok
Like his neighbors Google or Snap, Meta suffers from both Tiktok’s success, the reduction in advertiser’s budgets because of the economic crisis, and the regulatory changes of Apple, which bridage the capacities of social networks to Harvest user data to sell ultra-targeted advertisements.
Many large companies have implemented major social plans in the fall, but the tech sector, and particularly large platforms, had not often had to take these kinds of measures until Present.
In November, the boss Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta was going to delete 11,000 jobs, about 13 % of his workforce, chosen in all the divisions of the messaging networks in Reality Labs. And hires are frozen until the end of March 2023.