Binnenkort volgt een samenvatting van de resultaten van enkele bedrijven die ik op de blog volg. Het uitstekende rapport van Meta bespreek ik vandaag alvast gelet op de koersreactie nabeurs.
Gisteravond kwam Meta na de bel met resultaten van het laatste kwartaal van 2023. Het ging op alle mogelijke manieren over de lat. Een van de meest indrukwekkende kwartalen ooit, zowel intrinsiek als tegenover de verwachtingen. Waar Alphabet eergisteren nog onder de lat ging wat betreft advertentieverkopen als gevolg van moeilijke marktomstandigheden, ging Meta, dat in dezelfde vijver vist, er fors overheen.
Het aandeel steeg dit jaar al met 14%, maar er kwam na de slotbel nog eens 15% bij. Die stijging na de bel alleen al was goed voor bijna 6x de totale marktwaarde van rivaal Snap Inc.
Jaar-over-jaar en aan constante wisselkoersen
Omzet steeg met 22% tot $40.1 mia, boven de $39.2 mia waar analisten op rekenden. Kosten 8% lager (personeelbestand nam met 22% af). R&D steeg 8%. Operationele marge van 41% (FYI: Zonder effect van de kosten gelinkt aan herstructureringen in 2023, zou de marge op 43,6% zijn uitgekomen).
De nettowinst steeg meer dan 200% tot $14 mia, of $5,33 per aandeel. De analistenverwachting rekende op $4,97 per aandeel. Vrije kasstroom van $11,5 mia.
Gebruikers:
Laatste keer dat Meta het aantal gebruikers van Facebook apart rapporteert. Vanaf heden enkel dagelijkse gebruikers van alle apps.
Dagelijkse actieve gebruikers = DAP
Maandelijkse actieve gebruikers = MAP
Omzet per gebruiker = ARPP
DAP van alle apps steeg met 8% tot 3,19 mia, MAP met 6% tot 3,98 mia.
Facebook DAP steeg met 6% tot 2,11 mia, MAP met 3% tot 3,07 mia.
Ad impressies stegen met 21%.
prijs per advertentie steeg 2%.
Reality Labs (VR, AR, Metaverse)
Omzet Reality Labs in vierde kwartaal steeg 47% tot $1,1 miljard, ruim boven verwachting. Kosten reality labs stegen tot $5,7 mia, verlies $4,6 mia Het blijft miljarden pompen in zowel de metaverse als het ontwikkelen van AI modellen en zal daar de komende jaren op blijven inzetten. Ik heb dit vanaf het begin al toegejuicht, laat Zuck zijn ding doen met een paar procenten van de omzet. Disruptief durven zijn in deze sector is noodzakelijk en ja, dat kost wat. Ondertussen genereert het bedrijf na die kosten nog operationele marges van 41% (genormaliseerd nog wat hoger zelfs), het start met een dividend (kwartaaldividend van $0.50 per aandeel), kondigt een grote buyback ($50 mia) aan en er staat $65,4 mia op de balans. Metaverse next best thing? Prima. Niet? Op naar het volgende idee.
Nu lijkt ook de markt zich er bij neer te leggen nadat Zuckerberg zijn bedrijf een stuk ‘leaner’ heeft gemaakt.
Outlook:
Voor het eerste kwartaal van 2024 rekent CFO Susan Li op een omzet tussen $34,5 mia en $37 mia, boven de gemiddelde analistenverwachting van $33,8 mia. De kostenraming blijft onveranderd op $94 mia tot $98 mia. CapEx guidance licht verhoogd tot range $30 mia tot $37 mia.
We expect growth will be driven by investments in servers, including both AI and non-AI hardware, and data centers as we ramp up construction on sites with our previously announced new data center architecture. Our updated outlook reects our evolving understanding of our articial intelligence (AI) capacity demands as we anticipate what we may need for the next generations of foundational research and product development.
Twintig jaar na de geboorte van het vlaggenschip Facebook, kondigt Meta zijn eerste dividendbetaling aan. $0.50 kwartaaldividend lijkt weinig, maar kan fondsen aantrekken die gericht zijn op dividendbetalingen.
-
Na de verschroeiende stijging van het aandeel (ik geloof dit niet eerder te hebben meegemaakt) wordt het tijd voor een uitgebreide waarderingsoefening. Tot begin dit jaar beschouwde ik het aandeel na een stijging van 200% in 2023 nog steeds als niet duur. Wat iets wil zeggen over hoe de markt het aandeel eind 2022 waardeerde. EPS verwachtingen worden voor geheel 2024 nu naar boven bijgesteld, wat de waardering drukt. Echter we zullen naar alle waarschijnlijkheid ergens in de richting van 15% hoger openen vanmiddag, wat de koers-winstverhouding op basis van de verwachte winst van 2024 naar 25 zal opdrijven. Ik denk dat de tijd rijp nu is om een uitgebreide waarderingsoefening te doen en kijken naar de stand van zaken en naar wat er reeds in de koers gebakken zit. Een van de weken volgt een DCF en reverse DCF.
-
Ter afsluiting nog enkele noemenswaardige commentaren uit de earnings call.
CEO:
Mark Zuckerberg: We're well positioned now because of the lessons that we learned from Reels. We initially underbuilt our GPU clusters for Reels. And when we were going through that, I decided that we should build enough capacity to support both Reels and another Reels-sized AI service that we expected to emerge so we wouldn't be in that situation again. And at the time, the decision was somewhat controversial, and we faced a lot of questions about CapEx spending, but I'm really glad that we did this.
Zuckerberg: Now going forward, we think that training and operating future models will be even more compute-intensive. We don't have a clear expectation for exactly how much this will be yet, but the trend has been that state-of-the-art large language models have been trained on roughly 10x the amount of compute each year.
And our training clusters are only part of our overall infrastructure, and the rest, obviously, isn't growing as quickly. But overall, we're playing to win here, and I expect us to continue investing aggressively in this area. In order to build the most advanced clusters, we're also designing novel data centers and designing our own custom silicons specialized for our workloads.
Zuckerberg: Now that brings me to the last part of our playbook for building leading services, which is our culture of rapid learning and experimentation across our apps. When we decide that a new technology, like AI-recommended Reels, is going to be an important part of the future, we're not shy about having multiple teams experimenting with different versions across our apps until we get it right. And then we learn what works and we roll it out to everyone. And there used to be this meme that we'd probably launch Stories on our Settings page at some point. And look, I think it's kind of funny because it gets to a core part of our approach. We start by learning and tuning our products until they perform the way we want, and then we roll them out very broadly.
Zuckerberg: And sometimes, occasionally, products will blow up before we're ready for them to, like Threads, although I'll note that Threads now has more people actively using it today than it did during its initial launch peak. So that one is, I think, on track to be a major success.
Zuckerberg: Now we have 2 major parts of our long-term vision, and in addition to AI, the other part is the metaverse. We've invested heavily in both AI and the metaverse for a long time, and we will continue to do so. These days, there are a lot of questions more about AI that I get, and that field is moving very quickly. But I still expect that this next generation of AR, VR and MR computing platforms to deliver a realistic sense of presence that will be the foundation for the future of social experiences and almost every other category of experiences as well.
Zuckerberg: Reels continues to do very well across both Instagram and Facebook. People re-share Reels 3.5 billion times every day. Reels is now contributing to our net revenue across our apps. The biggest opportunity going forward is unifying our recommendation systems across Reels and other types of video that will help people discover the best content across our systems no matter what format it's in.
WhatsApp is also doing very well. And the most exciting new trend here is that it is succeeding more broadly in the United States, where there's a real appetite for a private, secure and cross-platform messaging app that everyone can use. And given the strategic importance of the U.S. and its outsized importance for revenue, this is just a huge opportunity.
Threads is also growing steadily with more than 130 million monthly actives. And I'm optimistic that we can keep the pace of improvements in growth going and show that a friendly, discussion-oriented app can be as widely used as the most popular social apps.
CFO:
Susan Li: On the first, we remain pleased with engagement trends and have strong momentum across our product priorities. We're seeing sustained growth in Reels and Video overall as daily watch time across all video types grew over 25% year-over-year in Q4, driven by ongoing ranking improvements.
Susan Li: On Instagram, we're making strong progress increasing the freshness of recommended content. And a big focus for Facebook this year will be unifying our video experiences and ranking across the app, which should create a more seamless user experience and deliver increasingly relevant video recommendations.
On WhatsApp, community growth remains strong, and we're seeing good traction with our Channels product, which has quickly scaled to over 500 million monthly active users since we rolled it out globally in September. We are also making good progress in areas that have the potential to grow people's engagement with our products in the longer term, such as Threads and generative AI.
On Threads, we're coming into 2024 with strong product momentum and remain focused on introducing additional valuable features and further scaling the community this year. With generative AI, we fully rolled out our Meta AI assistant and other AI chat experiences in the U.S. at the end of the year and began testing more than 20 GenAI features across our Family of Apps.
Q&A
Eric Sheridan
Mark, coming out of a year like you had with the year of efficiency, what do you see as the key messages you want to share with investors about what you learned during the year of efficiency and how it might inform running an organization with the scale of ambition and just your organizational scale that Meta has on a long-term basis? That would be number one.
Mark Zuckerberg
So the themes for the year of efficiency were to make us a stronger technology company by becoming leaner and more balanced towards our engineering work and more streamlined and to improve our financial performance, primarily with the goal of providing stability so we can invest in these long-term, ambitious visions around AI and metaverse over what we see as the coming decade or more as these things play out.
And I think a lot of people looked at what we were doing as if it might have been some kind of short-term thing, which that's never really our focus. But the part about making the company leaner, I think, is the more important part to take forward, right? Because obviously, we're in a place now where the business is performing well. And I think the obvious question would be, okay, well, given that, should we just -- should we invest a lot more in things?
And the biggest thing that's holding me back from doing that is that at this point, I feel like I've really come around to thinking that we operate better as a leaner company. So even though it's always -- there's always questions about like adding a few people here or there to do something. And I guess I just have more of an appreciation about how all of that adds up and in the near term, maybe makes you go a little bit faster. But over the long term, the discipline to kind of hold things to a more streamlined level actually improves the overall company performance. So I'm really focused on that.
In 2024, we do have a big recruiting backlog from last year because part of the layoffs that we did included teams basically swapping out certain talent profiles for others. And we still need to hire some of the other talent profiles that we swapped people out for, and that will be ongoing through this year. But in terms of new head count that we added to the plan, it's relatively minimal compared to what we would have done historically.
And I sort of expect that for the next period of time going forward, Even beyond 2024. My operating assumption is that we will also try to keep it relatively minimal because I think that -- until we reach a point where we're just really underwater on our ability to execute, I kind of want to keep things lean because I think that's the right thing for us to do culturally. So that's kind of the best window into how I'm thinking about this.
The other piece that, I guess, somewhat dovetails into what Susan is going to talk to you next is that a big part of why I wanted to improve our profitability is to give ourselves the ability to go through what is a somewhat unpredictable and volatile period over the next 5 or 10 years. There are different risk factors that are geopolitical or regulatory or different things, but also the technology landscape is somewhat unknown. And we want the ability to be able to surge investment on things like building out larger training clusters or just making different investments where that's necessary.
And in order to make sure that we have the flexibility to do that, we want to make sure that we keep our cost structure to a point where we sort of have some extra space built in. So those are really the 2 points. That was the theme that I laid out at the beginning of the year of efficiency last year: make us a stronger technology company and give us the flexibility and stability to execute the long-term goals. And those remain, I think, the big focuses going forward on that.
Mark Shmulik
Mark, you mentioned at the top of the call this vision, kind of everyone having a Meta AI assistant to kind of get things done. Previously, when we were talking about the metaverse from a time horizon perspective, we were looking at a decade to kind of get there. But given kind of the pace of innovation around AI that you've seen, has that time line changed? And like do you think we'll get there quicker?
Mark Zuckerberg
I do think that AI is going to make all of the products and services that we use and make better. So it's hard to know exactly how that will play out. But for the work in Reality Labs, specifically, there's a bunch of areas. Like if you take smart glasses, before, we thought that we would have to build like full displays and holograms and deliver the sense of presence before that became a mainstream product.
And now it seems quite possible that smart glasses that have AI assistance built in will be the killer app, and that the holograms and sense of presence will come later as a -- maybe on the same time horizon we were talking about before but could end up being just as important as we expected. But there could be a big market here even before that. So I think we'll figure that out over the next few years. But yes, I mean, overall, I think the 2 go together pretty hand-in-hand. I would have predicted that a lot of the parts of Reality Labs -- I guess the sequence in technology is sometimes surprising.
We always kind of expected that as part of building glasses or any of these platforms that having an AI assistant would be a foundational part of it. But the fact that that's -- that there have just been big strides in that over the last year or 2 is just -- is a big opportunity for these products sooner. So I think it's still unknown exactly how that will play out, but I think we'll know more over the next few years. It's very exciting, though.
Doug Anmuth
Can you just walk us through your thought process on adding a dividend to your capital returns at this stage beyond the share repurchases?
Susan Li
Doug, on your second question about why now in terms of initiating a dividend, returning capital to shareholders remains an important priority for us. And we believe introducing a dividend really just serves as a nice complement to the existing share repurchase program. The dividend doesn't change how much we will be -- or it doesn't change the way we determine the total amount of capital we return. And we expect that share repurchases will continue to be the primary way that we return capital to shareholders. But introducing a dividend just gives us a more balanced capital return program and some added flexibility in how we return capital in the future.
-
Bevalt deze manier van analyseren je en wil je weten hoe je zelf aan de slag gaat? Neem een kijkje naar mijn boeken:
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.
www.beleggeninkwaliteit.com - Quality investing, aandelenanalyses, blogartikelen en een vleugje behavioral finance.
Blijf je graag op de hoogte van nieuwe posts op de blog? Laat hier je e-mailadres achter.
Mijn boek ‘De kaviaarformule’ (Lannoo 2022) is hier beschikbaar.
Mijn tweede boek ‘Het beleggersbrein’ (Lannoo 2023) is hier beschikbaar.
Via deze link en promocode ‘kroeze’ geniet je een eenmalige korting op een abonnement op de uitstekende aandelenscreener Sharepad.