Meta beats expectations but lowers them for current quarter
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The news: Meta reported USD48.39 billion ($77.66 billion) in revenue for its final quarter of 2024, representing year-on-year growth of 21% and beating expectations of USD47.04 billion.
Yet the tech giant said it expects revenue to fall in the first quarter of this year, offering guidance of up to USD41.8 billion.
The numbers: Meta's net profit for the quarter was USD20.8 billion, with earnings-per-share of USD8.02. Its profit for the full year of 2024 was USD62.3 billion.
Those earnings were pushed both by the company selling more ads (6% for the quarter, 11% for the year) and its price-per-ad growing (14% year-on-year for the quarter).
Perhaps the more notable number for investors is USD119 billion, the top-of-the-range figure Meta expects to spend in the upcoming year on AI infrastructure, its reality labs division and an influx of talent to optimise both.
Reality labs, founder Mark Zuckerberg's often mocked metaverse project, suffered losses of USD4.97 billion for the quarter. It posted an income loss of USD17.73 billion for the full year of 2024. However, the division did see revenue growth of 13% for the year, up to USD2.1 billion.
The numbers came shortly after the Wall Street Journal reported that Meta will pay a USD25 million ($40 million) settlement to Donald Trump after the President sued the social media giant in 2021 for kicking him off their platforms.
Meta's shares were up 1.04% to USD676.49 in after hours trading.
The context: This quarter's earning season comes in the wake of DeepSeek V3, the Chinese artificial intelligence model that was trained using a relatively small batch of B-grade Nvidia chips.
The model's quality and the efficiency in which it was built have some raising an eyebrow at Big Tech's AI capex. Meta is among the biggest investors in AI equipment and infrastructure, with Zuckerberg earlier in the week saying the company will spend up to USD65 billion ($105 billion) by the end of the year.
Meta chief financial officer Susan Li noted that the company is expecting some regulatory headwinds both in the US, where Trump has just taken office for a second time, and in Europe, where legislators have been issuing historic fines to America's tech titans.
The sources: Meta media release, Wall Street Journal
