Would Meta see the end of the tunnel? This is what Mark Zuckerberg hopes after an encouraging first quarter for Facebook’s parent company. Over the first three months of the year, the American company recorded a turnover of 28.7 billion dollars, up 3% over one year, after three consecutive quarters of decline. At the start of the year, Meta had thus announced a decline in its annual revenues for the first time since its IPO in 2012. The group’s rebound was welcomed on Wall Street, where its share price rose by more than 10% in exchanges after the closing of the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday evening April 26.
After a year 2022 that looks like an ordeal, the social media giant is therefore off to a good start, having managed to stop the bleeding in the first quarter. However, this is not the time for euphoria, with net profit falling 24% year on year to $5.7 billion. Between January and March, Meta was penalized by an explosion in costs. This was generated by expenditure in the context of staff cuts. Amount of the invoice: 1.1 billion dollars. As a reminder, Meta announced the dismissal of 11,000 employees last November, then 10,000 in March, and a new wave is expected in May.
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Faced with a slowdown in its growth, the Californian company is now relying more on artificial intelligence rather than the metaverse, which still caused it to lose nearly 4 billion dollars in the first quarter. By 2022, $13.7 billion had been wasted building this virtual universe. But faced with the euphoria triggered by the arrival of ChatGPT, Meta has changed its tune and wants to return to the front of the stage in AI.
Thus, the group announced in February the launch of its own generative AI. Called LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI), it is based on 45 billion parameters, according to Mark Zuckerberg’s group. Since Meta’s business model is primarily based on online advertising, the company has also expressed interest in using generative AI to boost its advertising business.
If the latter is currently suffering from a difficult economic context, this does not prevent Meta from targeting between 29.5 and 32 billion dollars in revenue in the second quarter. Optimism is also warranted in terms of the number of users worldwide, which continues to increase. Meta thus ensures that more than three billion people use its Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp or Instagram applications at least once a day. Good news despite competition from TikTok.