Meta, formerly Facebook, lost around $230 billion of market value in early trading on Thursday. Meta’s fourth-quarter earnings showed daily users falling for the first time ever.
New Delhi: Meta, formerly Facebook, lost around $230 billion of market value in early trading on Thursday, according to media reports. Meta’s fourth-quarter earnings showed daily users falling for the first time ever. After Wednesday’s market close, Meta announced lower-than-expected revenue figures, as well as a decline in Facebook users for the first time in its 18-year history. According to Bloomberg data, the loss of $230 billion of market value put Meta on track for the biggest one-day wipeout of market value in US history. Meta stock closed at $323 billion on Wednesday. As of 9:34 am ET on Thursday (8:04 pm IST on Thursday), Meta stock was 25.6 per cent lower at $240.31, compared to the stock the previous day, according to a Business Insider article. According to a Bloomberg article, this is the biggest collapse in market value for any US company, at current levels. There is no certainty what the losses will hold, especially given the recent volatility that is whipped across technology shares, a Bloomberg article said.
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With Facebook’s daily active users falling to 1.93 billion, the company witnessed its first quarterly decline on record, according to media reports. Meta’s market capitalisation, which is the value of all its shares combined, went down from $898.5 billion to $668.4 billion, according to the Business Insider report. The collapse of Meta’s stock on Thursday is the biggest drop ever, after Facebook’s user base faltered last quarter, according to reports. In September 2020, the previous biggest decline was seen by Apple, when the tech giant lost $180 billion from its market value, Bloomberg reported. In the summer of 2018, when Meta was still called Facebook, the company lost $121 billion from its value in one day. This was the company’s previous biggest drop, according to reports. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was disappointed by this quarter’s sales forecast. He saw $29 billion wiped from his net worth, according to an article by British online newspaper, The Independent.
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Zuckerberg acknowledged that Meta is facing serious competition for user time and attention, particularly from video-sharing app TikTok. Quoting Zuckerberg, the article by The Independent said that the teams are executing quite well and the product is growing very quickly. “The thing that is somewhat unique here is that TikTok is so big a competitor already and also continues to grow at quite a fast rate,” the article quoted Zuckerberg as saying. The CEO said that Meta’s rival to TikTok, Reels, is growing quickly, but monetisation has been slow, according to a Bloomberg article. “Over time we think that there is potential for a tremendous amount of overall engagement growth” with Reels, Zuckerberg said on a conference call Wednesday, according to the Bloomberg article. Quoting Zuckerberg, the Business Insider article said that people have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time, and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly. Meta said that the violating accounts solely constituted about three per cent of worldwide monthly active users in the fourth quarter, while duplicate accounts may have represented around 11 per cent of usage, according to the article by The Independent.
Since investors have braced for the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates, trading has been especially volatile recently, according to the Business Insider article. Meta said on Wednesday that the tech giant’s profit came in at $10.3 billion in the fourth quarter, giving warnings per share of $3.67 billion, according to reports.
