#Meta, beat and raise! Nabeurs +7%.
Adverteerders schroeven de advertentiebudgetten geleidelijk aan weer op. Maar ze zijn voorzichtig en kiezen voor de veilige opties zoals Meta en Alphabet die een bewezen staat van dienst hebben en het grootste bereik opleveren.
Resultaten:
Omzet groeide met 11% naar $31,99 miljard (analistenverwachting Refinitiv lag op $31,12 miljard). 12% omzetgroei zonder effect van wisselkoersen. Kosten stegen 10%. Operationele marge stabiel op 29%. EPS groeide 21% naar $2,98 (lager effectief belastingtarief), verwachting was $2,91.
Dagelijkse actieve gebruikers (DAP) van één van de apps (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp) steeg met 7% (jaar-over-jaar) tot een record van 3,07 miljard. Maandelijkse actieve gebruikers (MAP) steeg met 6% tot een record van 3,88 miljard gebruikers.
De gebruikers van Facebook worden ook afzonderlijk gerapporteerd. DAP +6% naar 2,06 miljard. MAP +3% naar 3,03 miljard.
Ad impressions (hoe vaak een advertentie werd bekeken) steeg 34% en de gemiddelde prijs per advertentie daalde 16%.
Verlies Reality Labs (Metaverse) $3,7 miljard in het tweede kwartaal. Meta verwacht dat de verliezen nog zullen toenemen in 2024 aangezien ze verder zal investeren in AR en VR. De afdeling verloor meer dan $40 miljard sinds 2021. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO: “We remain fully committed to the Metaverse vision”. Zuckerberg gaf in de call aan dat de focus op de korte termijn op AI zal liggen, op lange termijn op de metaverse.
Capex 6,35 miljard, $793 miljoen aandeleninkopen, FCF $11 miljard, cash en beleggingen $53,45 miljard.
AI aanbevolen content op Facebook van accounts die je niet volgt is nu de snelst groeiende categorie op Facebook Feed en zorgde voor een toename van 7% tijd doorgebracht op het platform.
Reels gaat hard. Inmiddels 200 miljard views per dag. Begint ook op te leveren. Vorige herfst nog zo’n $3 miljard dollar omzet uit Reels, inmiddels $10 miljard. Bijna alle adverteerders gebruiken inmiddels een van Meta’s AI gedreven producten.
Susan Li, CFO, tijdens earnings call: "However, we continue to expect time on Reels will monetize at a lower rate than Stories and Feed for the foreseeable future since people scroll more slowly through video content."
De 200 miljoen Whatsapp Business gebruikers kunnen nu ‘click-to-whatsapp’ advertenties creëren zonder dat de consument een FB of Instagram account nodig heeft.
Zuckerberg: "We continue to see strong engagement across our apps and we have the most exciting roadmap I've seen in a while with Llama 2, Threads, Reels, new AI products in the pipeline, and the launch of Quest 3 this fall."
Outlook:
Outlook voor volgend kwartaal werd naar boven bijgesteld. Omzet verwacht tussen $32 miljard en $34,5 miljard, waar door analisten gerekend werd op $31,1 miljard.
Totale kosten zullen in 2023 tussen $88 en $91 miljard liggen, eerder rekende het management nog op 86 tot 90 miljard. Te wijten aan juridische kosten die werden geboekt in het tweede kwartaal.
Capex worden geschat op $27 tot $30 miljard in 2023. Lager dan de eerder gecommuniceerde $30 tot $33 miljard in 2023 lager uit te komen dan eerder geraamd. Maar die worden vooral doorgeschoven naar 2024. Door stevige (AI gerelateerde) investeringen (datacenters en servers) zullen de kosten dan flink toenemen.
Zuckerberg over capex: “The other major budget point that we're working through is what's the right level of AI CapEx is to support our roadmap. Since we don't know how quickly our new AI products will grow, we may not have a clear handle on this until later in the year.”
Tot slot nog enkele zaken uit de earnings call, voor de liefhebber:
Over Threads:
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO: “On Threads briefly, I'm quite optimistic about our trajectory here. We saw unprecedented growth out-of-the-gate. And more importantly, we're seeing more people coming back daily than I'd expected. And now we're focused on retention and improving the basics. And then after that, we'll focus on growing the community to the scale that we think is going to be possible. Only after that we are going to focus on monetization. We've run this playbook many times before with Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Stories, Reels and more. And this is as good of a start as we could have hoped for. So I'm really happy with the path that we're on here.”
Over ‘year of efficiency’:
Zuckerberg: “Now that we've gotten through the major layoffs, the rest of 2023 will be about creating stability for employees, removing barriers that slow us down, introducing new AI-powered tools to speed us up and so on. Over the next few months, we're going to start planning for 2024 and I'm going to be focused on continuing to run the company as lean as possible after these cultural reasons, even though our financial results have improved. I expect that we're still going to hire in key areas, but newly budgeted headcount growth is going to be relatively low.”
Over hoe Zuckerberg zijn tijd besteedt:
Analist: “Mark, things move quickly, like a month ago, we weren't talking about Reels, a quarter ago we were talking about Llama, start of the year we were barely talking about AI. If you think back to kind of just how you are prioritizing your time at the start of the year and kind of where you are today and how that kind of changed? Would love to just get some color on kind of the changing priorities and really where you're spending your time.”
Zuckerberg: “I actually think our priorities have been pretty consistent for a few years now. I think the way that people hear that might be different. But, for example, last year, I think we were getting quite a bit of critique for the volume of AI CapEx spending that we were doing and now, obviously, people want to understand where that's going and where we think that trajectory is going and want to make it as efficient as possible. But I think at this point, it's more well-understood that that -- I think that was a good investment and it's driving results in the near term and enabling us to build some of the new experiences that I think we all think are pretty fundamental.
I don't think Reels is new, although maybe even Threads when you said that. Threads, I would say, it's not that -- Thread is like -- it's not a massive project. It was -- I thought for a while that the opportunity around public conversations and kind of a text-based product was bigger than what had been executed yet in the markets, so we had a relatively small team work on that. And this year, I think there have been two things that have been -- that have just vastly exceeded my expectations, one was Llama. The initial model we thought it was interesting, but the scale of adoption, even just for the research version really spurred us to go do Llama 2 and that was vastly more than we expected.
And the second is, Threads has been dramatically more than we expected in terms of the adoption and the rate of that. We thought this was going to be kind of a project that we just -- we had a small team working on for a while, but it really kind of blew up and created a big opportunity immediately. But no, I mean, I think over-time you should expect that we're going to focus on AI and the Metaverse. AI includes both all of the ranking and recommendation systems that power the core apps, so all the content that you're seeing in Facebook and Instagram, all the ads content that you're seeing, it also underpins all the safety systems that we build and increasingly it's all the generative AI stuff. So, all the agents, all the generative features that we're going to be rolling out and a lot of the other work that's going under license, the efficiency stuff that we're doing internally. And then the Metaverse stuff I think we've talked about for a while.
So I don't think there's much change there except that it's sort of signals that we're getting from the market are it certainly not getting adopted a lot faster than we expected. That's sort of the somewhat sobering signal, but on the other side, I think a lot of companies that otherwise are doing, we respect and do great work. We don't necessarily view is building things that are ahead of where we are, which gives us confidence that we think the long-term thesis still will hold there. We think that we're going to be the leaders in it and nothing that we're seeing from the market makes us rethink that in a fundamental way. So, I think we're going to continue focusing on AI in the Metaverse as the two big thrust of what we're doing and all the other things kind of fall out of that."
Ter afsluiting heb ik een vraag van een analist en het antwoord van Zuckerberg laten samenvatten door AI (Google Bard! 😊)
Question: How do you think about the ROI of Reality Labs, both as a standalone business and as a complement to the Family of Apps?
Answer: I think the ROI of Reality Labs will be both direct and indirect.
Directly, Reality Labs will generate revenue from hardware sales, software sales, and advertising. Indirectly, Reality Labs will unlock new value for the Family of Apps by enabling new features and experiences.
I understand that this is a long-term bet, and I can't guarantee that it will be successful.
However, I believe that the metaverse is the future of computing, and I'm confident that Reality Labs will play a key role in building it.
Here are some additional details from the answer:
Zuckerberg said that he believes Reality Labs will eventually become a "large business" in its own right. He also said that he believes Reality Labs will unlock a lot of value for the Family of Apps, such as by enabling new ways for people to connect and collaborate.
Zuckerberg acknowledged that this is a long-term bet, but he said that he is confident that it will be successful.
Overall, Zuckerberg's answer suggests that he is very bullish on the future of Reality Labs. He believes that it has the potential to be a major driver of growth for Meta, and he is willing to make a significant investment in it in order to realize that potential.
Eerdere updates en analyses Meta:
Disclaimer: deze analyse is niet bedoeld als beleggingsadvies maar een persoonlijke mening en kan dienen als aanvulling op uw eigen onderzoek. De informatie is uitdrukkelijk niet bedoeld als advies tot het kopen of verkopen van bepaalde effecten of effectenproducten, maar om een beeld te schetsen van de onderliggende onderneming(en). U bent zelf eindverantwoordelijke voor de beslissingen die u neemt met betrekking tot uw beleggingen.
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