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Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives for testimony before the House Financial Services Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill October 23, 2019 in Washington, DC.

Win McNamee | Getty Images

Meta shares plummeted in extended trading on Wednesday after Facebook’s parent issued a weak forecast for the fourth quarter and came up well short of Wall Street’s expectations for earnings.

  • Earnings per share (EPS): $1.64 vs $1.89 expected, according to Refinitiv
  • Revenue: $27.71 billion vs. $27.38 billion expected, according to Refinitiv
  • Daily Active Users (DAUs): 1.98 billion vs 1.98 billion expected, according to StreetAccount
  • Monthly Active Users (MAUs): 2.96 billion vs 2.94 billion expected, according to StreetAccount
  • Average Revenue per User (ARPU): $9.41 vs. $9.83 expected, according to StreetAccount

Meta is contending with a broad slowdown in online ad spending, challenges from Apple’s iOS privacy update and increased competition from TikTok. Add it up, and Meta is expected to post its third straight quarter of declining sales for the year.

The company said revenue for the fourth quarter will be $30 billion to $32.5 billion. Analysts were expecting sales of $32.2 billion.

Meta’s revenue declined 4% year over year to $27.7 billion in the third quarter. Meanwhile, the company’s costs and expenses rose 19% year over year to $22.1 billion. Operating income declined 46% from the previous year to $5.66 billion.

The Facebook parent’s operating margin, or the profits left after accounting for costs to run the business, sank to 20% from 36% a year earlier. Overall net income was down 52% year over year to $4.4 billion in the third quarter.

At its after-hours levels, Meta is trading at its lowest since July 2016, which was four months before the election of Donald Trump as president.

Revenue in the Reality Labs unit, which houses the company’s virtual reality headsets and its futuristic metaverse business, fell by almost half from a year earlier to $285 million. Its loss widened to $3.67 billion from $2.63 in the same quarter last year.

Reality Labs has lost $9.4 billion so far this year.

“We do anticipate that Reality Labs operating losses in 2023 will grow significantly year-over-year,” Meta said. “Beyond 2023, we expect to pace Reality Labs investments such that we can achieve our goal of growing overall company operating income in the long run.”

Meta said that it is “holding some teams flat in terms of headcount, shrinking others and investing headcount growth only in our highest priorities.”

“As a result, we expect headcount at the end of 2023 will be approximately in-line with third quarter 2022 levels,” the company added in a statement.

In the third quarter of 2022, Meta said that it has 197 million daily active users in the U.S. and Canada, up from 196 million during the same quarter in 2020. Meta derives the bulk of its revenue from users in North America.

Meta is the latest company impacted by the weak online advertising market, which is getting hammered by factors including Apple’s 2021 iOS privacy update and fears of an impending recession. Those concerns have caused companies to slash their marketing and ad campaigns.

Last week, Snap shares cratered 30% a day after the company reported weaker-than-expected revenue, which executives attributed to platform changes and a downtrodden economy.

Investors were also disappointed with Alphabet’s third quarter earnings, in which the company’s YouTube business unit reported a 2% year-over-year sales drop to $7.07 billion. Alphabet chief financial officer Ruth Porat said the decline “primarily reflects further pullbacks in advertiser spends.”

Even Microsoft wasn’t immune, with the tech giant reporting slowing growth rates for both its search and news advertising business and LinkedIn unit. Microsoft CFO Amy Hood attributed the slowdown to “reductions in customer advertising spend.”

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AI chipmaker Cerebras withdraws IPO

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AI chipmaker Cerebras withdraws IPO

AI chipmaker Cerebras pulls IPO after raising $1 billion

Artificial intelligence chipmaker Cerebras Systems said on Friday that it’s withdrawing plans for an IPO, days after announcing that it raised over $1 billion in a fundraising round.

In a filing with the SEC, Cerebras said it does not intend to conduct a proposed offering “at this time,” but didn’t provide a reason. A spokesperson told CNBC on Friday that the company still hopes to go public as soon as possible.

Cerebras filed for an IPO just over a year ago, as it was ramping up to take on Nvidia in an effort to create processors for running generative AI models. The filing revealed a heavy reliance on a single customer in the United Arab Emirates, Microsoft-backed G42, which is also a Cerebras investor.

In its prospectus, Cerebras said it had given voluntary notice to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States about selling shares to G42. In March, the company announced that the committee had provided clearance.

Since its initial filing to go public on the Nasdaq, Cerebras has shifted its focus away from selling systems and more toward providing a cloud service for accepting incoming queries to models that use its chips underneath.

The announced withdrawal comes three days into a U.S. government shutdown that’s left agencies like the SEC operating with a small staff. In a plan for a shutdown published in August, the SEC said its electronic system EDGAR “is operated pursuant to a contract and thus will remain fully functional as long as funding for the contractor remains available through permitted means.”

On Tuesday, Cerebras said it had raised $1.1 billion at a valuation of $8.1 billion in a private funding round. At the time, CEO Andrew Feldman said that the company still wanted to go public, rather than continue to raise venture capital.

“I don’t think this is an indication of a preference for one or the other,” he told CNBC in an interview. “I think we have tremendous opportunities in front of us, and I think it’s good practice, when you have enormous opportunities, not to let them fall by the wayside for lack of capital.”

Feldman thought the original prospectus from last year was out of date, especially considering developments in AI, the spokesperson said on Friday.

Well heeled technology companies have been quickly signing up for additional infrastructure to handle demand. On Tuesday CoreWeave, which rents out Nvidia chips through a cloud service, said it had signed a $14.2 billion agreement with Meta. ChatGPT operator OpenAI said last week that it had committed to spending $300 billion on cloud services from Oracle.

The government shutdown did not factor into Cerebras’ decision, the spokesperson said.

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Amazon shutters 4 Fresh stores in Southern California as grocery strategy keeps shifting

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Amazon shutters 4 Fresh stores in Southern California as grocery strategy keeps shifting

An employee arranges a salad dressing display at an Amazon Fresh grocery store on December 12, 2024 in Federal Way, Washington.

David Ryder | Getty Images

Amazon is closing four more Fresh supermarkets in Southern California as the e-commerce giant continues to focus its grocery strategy around Whole Foods and delivery.

The closures will take place in the coming weeks, Amazon confirmed to CNBC. They follow the shuttering of four other U.S. locations in recent months, in Washington, Virginia, New York and a Los Angeles suburb.

“Certain locations work better than others, and after an assessment, we’ve made the decision to close these Amazon Fresh locations,” Amazon spokesperson Griffin Buch said in a statement. “We’re working closely with affected employees to help them find new roles within Amazon wherever possible.”

At one Fresh supermarket in La Verne, California, employees were told to gather for an all-hands meeting on Wednesday, according to an internal message viewed by CNBC. They learned at the meeting that the store would close in mid-November, and that employees would receive a severance package, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the details were confidential.

The other three stores that are closing are in cities of Mission Viejo, La Habra and Whittier.

Last week, Amazon said it intends to close 14 Fresh grocery stores in the U.K. and convert its five other locations there into Whole Foods markets.

Amazon said it regularly evaluates its store portfolio, which can lead to opening, reopening, relocating or closing certain locations. In the U.S., the company has more than 60 remaining Fresh stores. Last year, the company removed its “Just Walk Out” cashierless technology from the stores. It’s also been culling its footprint of Go cashierless convenience stores.

Amazon has been determined to become a major grocery player for nearly two decades. The company launched Amazon Fresh in 2007, then a pilot project for fresh food delivery, before acquiring upscale chain Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in 2017, its biggest purchase on record.

Amazon debuted its Fresh grocery chain in 2020, with an eye toward mass-market shoppers. The rollout has been turbulent since its early days.

The company opened a flurry of Fresh locations by 2022, but the expansion plans ran into CEO Andy Jassy’s widespread cost-cutting efforts as the company reckoned with the impact of rising interest rates and soaring inflation. In 2023, Amazon announced it would shut some Fresh stores and halt further openings temporarily as it evaluated how to make the chain stand out for shoppers.

While it’s closing Fresh stores, Amazon continues to “innovate and invest in making grocery shopping easier, faster, and more affordable,” Buch said. The company still maintains 500 Whole Foods locations and has opened mini “daily shop” Whole Foods stores in New York City.

On Wednesday, Amazon also launched a new “price-conscious” grocery brand that will be offered online and in its physical stores. And last month, Amazon expanded same-day delivery of fresh foods to more pockets of the U.S.

Jassy and other company executives have touted the success of sales of “everyday essentials” within its online grocery business, which refers to items such as canned goods, paper towels, dish soap and snacks. Jassy told investors at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in May that he remains “bullish” on grocery, calling it a “significant business” for Amazon.

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Quantum stocks Rigetti Computing and D-Wave surged double-digits this week. Here’s what’s driving the big move

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Quantum stocks Rigetti Computing and D-Wave surged double-digits this week. Here's what's driving the big move

Inside Google’s quantum computing lab in Santa Barbara, California.

CNBC

Quantum computing stocks are wrapping up a big week of double-digit gains.

Shares of Rigetti Computing, D-Wave Quantum and Quantum Computing have surged more than 20%. Rigetti and D-Wave Quantum have more than doubled and tripled, respectively, since the start of the year. Arqit Quantum skyrocketed more than 32% this week.

The jump in shares followed a wave of positive news in the quantum space.

Rigetti said it had purchase orders totalling $5.7 million for two of its 9-qubit Novera quantum computing systems. The owner of drugmaker Novo Nordisk and the Danish government also invested 300 million euros in a quantum venture fund.

In a blog post earlier this week, Nvidia also highlighted accelerated computing, which it argues can make “quantum computing breakthroughs of today and tomorrow possible.”

Investors have piled into quantum computing technology this year, as tech giants Microsoft, Nvidia and Amazon have embraced the technology with a wave of new chip announcements, multi-million dollar investments and research plans.

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