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Meta shares surge on better-than-expected revenue

Meta shares popped in extended trading on Wednesday after the company reported fourth-quarter revenue that topped estimates and announced a $40 billion stock buyback. Here are the results.

  • Earnings: $1.76 per share
  • Revenue:  $32.17 billion vs $31.53 billion expected, according to Refinitiv

The company also reported restructuring charges for its Family of Apps segment and Reality Labs unit of $3.76 billion and $440 million, respectively during the fourth quarter of 2022. Because of those charges, it’s difficult to compare the company’s earnings per share to analyst estimates of $2.22 per share.

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Here are some other key numbers:

  • Daily Active Users (DAUs): 2 billion vs 1.99 billion expected, according to StreetAccount
  • Monthly Active Users (MAUs):  2.96 billion vs 2.98 billion expected, according to StreetAccount
  • Average Revenue per User (ARPU): $10.86 vs $10.63 expected, according to StreetAccount

Revenue in the fourth quarter fell 4% from a year earlier, marking a third straight quarter of declining sales. The company’s cost and expenses ballooned 22% year-over-year to $25.8 billion.

Anwar Almojarkesh (L) and Alan Chalabi (R) from England take a photo at Meta (formerly Facebook) corporate headquarters in Menlo Park, California on November 9, 2022.

Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Images

Meta said it expects revenue in the first quarter of between $26 billion and $28.5 billion.  Analysts were expecting sales of $27.1 billion, according to Refinitv. Sales in the first quarter of 2021 came in at $27.9 billion. Should Meta reach the high end of its guidance range, the company could end its streak of year-over-year declines.

“Our community continues to grow and I’m pleased with the strong engagement across our apps,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement. “Our management theme for 2023 is the ‘Year of Efficiency’ and we’re focused on becoming a stronger and more nimble organization.”

Meta said that its headcount increased 20% year-over-year to 86,482 as of December 31, 2022. That number includes a large chunk of the over 11,000 workers that Meta said it would lay off last November.

The company expects that its total expenses in 2023 will be in the range of $89 billion to $95 billion, which is lower than its prior outlook of $94 billion to $100 billion for the year. Meta attributed the adjustment to “slower anticipated growth in payroll expenses and cost of revenue.”

Meta also said that it’s lowering its capital expenditure estimates for the year to be in the range of $30 billion to $33 billion, down from $34 billion to $37 billion. That’s partly due to the company spending less money on data center construction. Instead, Meta said it’s shifting to a different kind of data center architecture intended to be more cost efficient while acting as the backbone of its various artificial intelligence projects.

Meta said on Wednesday that it authorized a $40 billion increase to its stock repurchase plan. The company bought back $27.9 billion worth of its shares last year.

Earlier this week, Snap reported fourth quarter earnings that missed on sales, sending its shares tumbling. While much smaller than Meta, Snap faces some of the same challenges, including a slowdown in online advertising spend, increased competition from TikTok and a weakened targeting advertising system due to Apple’s 2021 iOS privacy update.

Alphabet and Amazon will wrap up earnings reports from the major online ad platforms on Thursday, followed by Pinterest next week.

Meta shares plummeted by over 60% last year, as Zuckerberg struggled to sell Wall Street on his plan to pivot the company towards the yet-to-be-developed world of the metaverse. Zuckerberg has said the metaverse, which would include virtual reality and augmented reality technologies, could represent the next major way people interact.

The big bet has frustrated investors, who worry the company is putting too much focus on a futuristic endeavor while its core ad business struggles to revive growth. Meta’s Reality Labs unit, home to the metaverse ambitions, lost $4.28 billion in the fourth quarter, bringing its total operating loss for the year to $13.72 billion.

Meta said last year that “Reality Labs operating losses in 2023 will grow significantly year-over-year.”

WATCH: Snap shares plunge on weak revenue

Snap shares plunge on weak sales outlook despite earnings beat

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Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

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Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.

Chris Jung | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.

S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.

Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.

Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.

While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.

DoorDash was the latest tech company to join during the last rebalancing in March. Cloud software vendor Workday was added in December, and that was preceded earlier in 2024 with the additions of Palantir, Dell, CrowdStrike, GoDaddy and Super Micro Computer.

Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.

New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.

Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

CNBC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

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Ether and related stocks gain amid the latest crypto craze: Tokenization

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Ether and related stocks gain amid the latest crypto craze: Tokenization

A representation of cryptocurrency Ethereum is placed on a PC motherboard in this illustration taken on June 16, 2023.

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

Stocks tied to the price of ether, better known as ETH, were higher on Wednesday, reflecting renewed enthusiasm for the crypto asset amid a surge of interest in stablecoins and tokenization.

BitMine Immersion Technologies, a bitcoin miner that announced plans this week to make ETH its primary treasury reserve asset, jumped about 20%. It’s gained more than 1,000% since the announcement. Betting platform SharpLink Gaming, which has also initiated an ETH treasury strategy, added more than 11%. Bit Digital, which last week exited bitcoin mining to focus on its ETH treasury and staking plans, jumped more than 6%.

“We’re finally at the point where real use cases are emerging, and stablecoins have been the first version of that at scale but they’re going to open the door to a much bigger story around tokenizing other assets and using digital assets in new ways,” Devin Ryan, head of financial technology research at Citizens.

On Tuesday, as bitcoin ETFs snapped a 15-day streak of inflows, ether ETFs saw $40 million in inflows led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust. ETH ETFs came back to life in June after much concern that they were becoming zombie funds.

The price of the coin itself was last higher by 5%, according to Coin Metrics, though it’s still down 24% this year.

Ethereum has been struggling with an identity crisis fueled by uncertainty about the network’s value proposition, weaker revenue since its last big technical upgrade and increasing competition from Solana. Market volatility, driven by geopolitical uncertainty this year, has not helped.

The Ethereum network’s smart contracts capability makes it a prominent platform for the tokenization of traditional assets, which includes U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins. Fundstrat’s Tom Lee this week called Ethereum “the backbone and architecture” of stablecoins. Both Tether (USDT) and Circle‘s USD Coin (USDC) are issued on the network.

Fundstrat's Tom Lee on being named chairman of BitMine Immersion Technologies

BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund (known as BUIDL, which stands for USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) also launched on Ethereum last year before expanding to other blockchain networks.

Tokenization is the process of issuing digital representations on a blockchain network of publicly traded securities, real world assets or any other form of value. Holders of tokenized assets don’t have outright ownership of the assets themselves.

The latest wave of interest in ETH-related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood this week that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, after a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s IPO and the Senate passage of its proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.

Ether, which turns 10 years old at the end of July, is sitting about 75% off its all-time high.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

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China’s Honor launches new challenge to Samsung with thin foldable smartphone and a big battery

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China's Honor launches new challenge to Samsung with thin foldable smartphone and a big battery

Honor launched the Honor Magic V5 on Wednesday July 2, as it looks to challenge Samsung in the foldable space.

Honor

Honor on Wednesday touted the slimness and battery capacity of its newly launched thin foldable phone, as it lays down a fresh challenge to market leader Samsung.

The Honor Magic V5 goes will initially go on sale in China, but the Chinese tech firm will likely bring the device to international markets later this year.

The company, which spun off from Chinese tech giant Huawei in 2020, is looking to stand out from rivals with key features of the Magic V5, like artificial intelligence, battery and size.

Honor said the Magic V5 is 8.8 mm to 9mm when folded, depending on the color choice. The phone’s predecessor, the Magic V3 — Honor skipped the Magic V4 name — was 9.2 mm when folded. Honor said the Magic V5 weighs 217 grams to 222 grams, again, depending on the color model. The previous version was 226 grams.

In China, Honor will launch a special 1 terabyte storage size version of the Magic V5, which it says will have a battery capacity of more than 6000 milliampere-hour — among the highest for foldable phones.

Honor has tried hard to tout these features, as competition in foldables ramps up, even as these types of devices have a very small share of the overall smartphone market.

Honor vs. Samsung

Foldables represented less than 2% of the overall smartphone market in 2024, according to International Data Corporation. Samsung was the biggest player with 34% market share followed by Huawei with just under 24%, IDC added. Honor took the fourth spot with a nearly 11% share.

Honor is looking to get a head start on Samsung, which has its own foldable launch next week on July 9.

Francisco Jeronimo, a vice president at the International Data Corporation, said the Magic V5 is a strong offering from Honor.

“This is the dream foldable smartphone that any user who is interested in this category will think of,” Jeronimo told CNBC, pointing to features such as the battery.

“This phone continues to push the bar forward, and it will challenge Samsung as they are about to launch their seventh generation of foldable phones,” he added.

The thinness of a foldable phone has become a battleground for smartphone makers to appeal to consumers who want the large screen size the device has to offer without extra weight.

At its event next week, Samsung is expected to release a foldable that is thinner than its predecessor and could come close to challenging Honor’s offering by way of size, analysts said. If that happens, then Honor will be facing more competition, especially against Samsung, which has a bigger global footprint.

“The biggest challenge for Honor is the brand equity and distribution reach vs Samsung, where the Korean vendor has the edge,” Neil Shah, co-founder of Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.

Honor’s push into international markets beyond China is still fairly young, with the company looking to build up its brand.

“Further, if Samsung catches up with a thinner form-factor in upcoming iterations, as it has been the real pioneer in foldables with its vertical integration expertise from displays to batteries, the differentiating factor might narrow for Honor,” Shah added.

Vertical integration refers to when a company owns several parts of a product’s supply chain. Samsung has a display and battery business which provides the components for its foldables.

Honor talks up AI

Smartphone players, including Honor, have also looked to stand out via the AI features available on their device.

In March, Honor pledged a $10 billion investment in AI over the next five years, with part of that going toward the development of next-generation agents that are seen as more advanced personal assistants.

Honor said its AI assistant Yoyo can interact with other AI models, such as those created by DeepSeek and Alibaba in China, to create presentation decks.

The company also flagged its AI agent can hail a taxi ride across multiple apps in China, automatically accepting the quickest ride to arrive? and cancelling the rest.

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