No bad stock

Meta Platforms, Inc.
CEO : Mr. Mark Elliot Zuckerberg

Quarterly earnings growth(YoY,%)

Susan Li says,

Revenue

• Total Q4 revenue was $32.2 billion, down 4% YoY, or up 2% YoY on a constant currency basis.
• Q4 revenue would have been approximately $2 billion higher if foreign exchange rates had remained constant with the previous year.
• Q4 total Family of Apps revenue was $31.4 billion, down 4% YoY.
• Q4 Family of Apps ad revenue was $31.3 billion, down 4%, but up 2% on a constant currency basis.
• The financial services and technology verticals were the largest negative contributors to the YoY decline in Q4 revenue.

Expenses

• Total Q4 expenses were $25.8 billion, up 22% compared to last year.
• Cost of revenue increased 31%, driven mostly by a write-down of certain data center assets as well as growth in infrastructure-related costs.
• R&D increased 39%, marketing and sales increased 4%, and G&A decreased 7%.

Operating Income

• Q4 operating income was $6.4 billion, representing a 20% operating margin.
• Family of Apps’ operating income was $10.7 billion, representing a 34% operating margin.
• Reality Labs operating loss was $4.3 billion.

Headcount and Layoffs

• Facebook ended the fourth quarter with over 86,400 employees, including a substantial majority of about 11,000 employees impacted by previously announced layoffs who remained on payroll as of December 31, 2022.
• The vast majority of the impacted employees will no longer be captured in reported headcount figures by the end of Q1 2023.
• In Q4 2022, Facebook recorded $4.2 billion of total restructuring costs in connection with its efficiency efforts.

Outlook

• Facebook expects Q1 2023 total revenue to be in the range of $26 billion to $28.5 billion.
• Facebook anticipates its full year 2023 total expenses will be in the range of $89 billion to $95 billion, lowered from the previous outlook of $94 billion to $100 billion due to slower anticipated growth in payroll expenses and cost of revenue.
• Facebook now expects to record an estimated $1 billion in restructuring charges in 2023 related to consolidating its office facilities footprint.
• Capital expenditures for 2023 are expected to be in the range of $30 billion to $33 billion, lowered from the previous estimate of $34 billion to $37 billion.

Mark Zuckerberg says,

Efficiency as Management Theme for 2023

• Management theme for 2023 is the Year of Efficiency
• Focusing on increasing efficiency of executing top priorities through sustained period to build stronger tech company and become more profitable
• Working on flattening org structure, removing layers of middle management, and deploying AI tools to help engineers be more productive
• More proactive about cutting projects that aren’t performing or may no longer be as crucial

Product Priorities

• Two major technological waves driving roadmap are AI and over the longer term, the Metaverse
• Facebook and Instagram shifting from being organized solely around people and accounts to showing more relevant content recommended by AI systems
• Reels plays across Facebook and Instagram have more than doubled over the last year, while the social component of people resharing Reels has grown even faster
• Improving monetization efficiency of Reels is the key to unlocking growth
• Ads business continuing to invest in AI resulting in higher returns on ad spend
• Business Messaging as the next pillar with click-to-message ads and paid messaging
• Generative AI is an extremely exciting new area with many different applications
• Shipped Quest Pro at the end of last year, the first mainstream mixed reality device, and launching next-generation consumer headset later this year

Financial Results

• Focused on delivering better financial results than what has been reported recently
• Meeting expectation of delivering compounding earnings growth while investing aggressively in future technology

Q & A sessions,

Lower CapEx Outlook

• Shifting to a new data center architecture that can efficiently support both AI and non-AI workloads
• Expecting the new design to be cheaper and faster to build than previous data center architecture
• Optimizing approach to building data centers with a new phased approach
• Intention to bring CapEx as a percent of revenue down over the longer term

Generative AI

• Efficiency is a focus for this year
• Working on using large language models and diffusion models for generating images, videos, avatars, 3D assets, etc.
• Expecting to launch a number of different things this year
• Challenges include scaling and making it more efficient