Meta posts upbeat outlook, plans $40 billion buyback

BY SALVADOR RODRIGUEZ | UPDATED 2月 01, 2023 06:12 晚上 EST

Social-media giant plans to buy back additional $40 billion in shares, says its costs are set to decline and its global users increased

Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. reported improving conditions in its underlying business and said it would buy back an added $40 billion in shares, a turnabout greeted warmly by investors after years of challenges stemming from competition and privacy restrictions.

Meta’s shares soared as much as 20% in off-hours trading as the company pointed to early signs of improvement, including a reduced estimate for costs in 2023 and a forecast that first-quarter revenue could reach as high as $28.5 billion. That would exceed the company’s sales in the first quarter of 2021, right before Apple Inc. introduced privacy measures that curtailed revenue by cutting off the company’s access to data. Meta last year began laying off employees after Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said the company hired too aggressively.

Mr. Zuckerberg said the company is focused on becoming more efficient, removing layers of middle management. Meta also will “be more proactive about cutting projects that aren’t performing or may no longer be as crucial," he said in a call with analysts.

The company has begun to see a path to recovery after using artificial intelligence tools to improve ad-targeting and improved user engagement with its short-form video product, Reels, The Wall Street Journal reported last week, citing interviews and internal documents.

On Wednesday, Meta reported quarterly revenue of $32.2 billion, or a drop of 4.5% compared with a year ago and the third consecutive quarter of declining sales. Still, the sales figure was ahead of Wall Street estimates.

Heightened competition from TikTok, the tough economic climate and the fallout from Apple’s ad-tracking changes in 2021 weighed on the digital ad market, denting results for Meta and others. Snap Inc. on Tuesday predicted a plunge of as much as 10% in sales for the current quarter.

Susan Li, Meta’s finance chief, said the company is continuing to make progress mitigating the impact of Apple’s privacy changes with new tools. “We see strong adoption of those tools," she said.

Meta’s shares have rebounded somewhat this year, rising about 27% through Wednesday’s close. The company last year warned that Apple’s policy changes alone would translate to $10 billion in lost sales in 2022.

Meta posted a net profit of $4.7 billion for the fourth quarter against the $6 billion analysts surveyed by FactSet were expecting. The latest number represented a 55% decline from the year-ago period but was higher than the three months through September. That snapped a streak of three quarters in which Meta’s profit had retreated from the preceding quarter—a slump the company hadn’t experienced in a decade.

The company said it expects its 2023 expenses to be between $89 billion and $95 billion, lower than its previous outlook of between $94 billion and $100 billion.

Meta said its average ad price fell 22% year-over-year. In the same quarter last year, the average price per ad increased 6%.

Ms. Li said weak advertising demand due to the uncertain macroeconomic landscape contributed to the decline in revenue during the fourth quarter.

To combat TikTok and make up for the loss of revenue caused by Apple’s changes, Meta has been investing heavily in artificial intelligence tools aimed at improving its ad-targeting systems and making better recommendations for users of Reels, its short-video feature.

The company’s push to improve its AI technology has started to yield results. During an internal talk in October, Mr. Zuckerberg and the company’s chief marketing officer and vice president of analytics, Alex Schultz, credited improvements to Facebook’s algorithms and the computing systems on which they run with a 20% gain in time spent in Reels consumption.

Meta’s efforts to revitalize its business come with a trump card: Facebook’s massive user base. Facebook’s daily active user numbers reached 2 billion in the most recent quarter, up from 1.98 billion three months ago.

Facebook’s daily active users in the U.S. and Canada, which had remained at 197 million the last two quarters, grew to 199 million. The company’s daily users in Europe increased to 304 million, from 303 million the two previous quarters.

“The progress we’re making on our AI discovery engine and Reels are major drivers of this," Mr. Zuckerberg said in a statement Wednesday.

Tech Layoffs Across the Industry: Amazon, Salesforce and More Cut Staff

Mr. Zuckerberg in 2021 renamed the company to reflect a focus on the so-called metaverse, a more immersive version of the internet where he said users will work and play. Meta’s Reality Labs, the division tasked with building the hardware and software underpinning that effort, reported revenue of $727 million for the quarter, a decline of 17.1% compared with a year prior. The unit, which makes Meta’s Quest virtual-reality headsets, posted an operating loss of $4.3 billion.

Horizon Worlds, the company’s flagship metaverse offering for consumers, fell short of internal performance expectations, according to internal documents from October obtained by the Journal. The company had initially set a goal of reaching 500,000 monthly active users for the service by the end of 2022, but the tally in October was less than 200,000, the documents showed.

The company didn’t provide new user figures for Horizon Worlds on Wednesday.

Meta, which has grown in part through acquisitions, has been among tech companies finding itself in the crosshairs of regulators looking to curb their reach. The company won a legal skirmish this week when a federal judge, in a sealed court decision issued overnight, declined to halt its acquisition of the virtual-reality startup Within Unlimited, delivering a setback to antitrust enforcers at the Federal Trade Commission seeking to block the deal, a person familiar with the ruling said.