Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Meta Platforms, in July 2021.
Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Meta can thank Chinese retailers for helping lift the company’s first-quarter sales after three consecutive quarters of revenue declines.
As chief financial officer Susan Li told analysts during company’s first-quarter earnings call, the social networking giant “saw acceleration among advertisers in China targeting users and other markets, which we believe was due in part to dropping shipping costs and easing Covid lockdown for those advertisers.”
In other words, Chinese companies spent a lot of money over a three-month period ending in late March on Facebook ads intended for consumers living outside the country. It’s a sign that China’s recent easing of its zero-Covid policy has indirectly benefited Meta, with Chinese companies using Facebook and Instagram’s massive reach around the world to land new customers.
Still, Meta’s sales grew only 3% year-over-year to $27.91 billion during the first quarter, underscoring that there’s still turbulence in the digital advertising market.
Li said that Meta also saw stronger demand in the quarter as the Russia-Ukraine War passed its one-year mark as of February, but she wasn’t prepared to say that the rest of year will be smooth sailing for the company.
Meta expects “a volatile macro environment” for the rest of the year and a “challenging regulatory environment” overall, Li said, referring to European Union regulators who continue imposing tough data privacy laws and requirements that impact the company.
But the mere fact that Meta was able to turn the tide on its declining sales after a harsh period was enough to cause investors to rejoice, sending the company’s shares rising nearly 12% in after-hours trading.
Investors were also keen to hear Zuckerberg preach Meta’s “year of efficiency” that will result in some 21,000 employees exiting the company by early summer.
Zuckerberg addressed the company’s recent round of layoffs that impacted technical workers last week and reminded analysts that more job cuts will hit business groups in May.
After May, Li said that the company “will resume hiring and we would expect headcount growth in excess of 1 to 2% in 2024.”
Zuckerberg gave no signs of planning to slow down spending on the metaverse, the highly speculative bet on virtual worlds that engendered the company’s name change from Facebook announced in 2021.
Indeed the company’s Reality Labs unit, which is building the virtual reality and augmented reality technologies needed for the yet-to-be developed metaverse, logged nearly $4 billion in first-quarter losses off $339 million in sales.
The metaverse still remains a core priority for Meta, Zuckerberg said, even though it’s also working on new artificial intelligence technologies that could aid its advertising and business messaging services.
“A narrative has developed that we’re somehow moving away from focusing on the metaverse division, so I just want to say upfront that that’s not accurate,” Zuckerberg said. “We’ve been focusing on both AI and the metaverse for years now and we will continue to focus on both.”
Govini, a defense tech software startup taking on the likes of Palantir, has blown past $100 million in annual recurring revenue, the company announced Friday.
“We’re growing faster than 100% in a three-year CAGR, and I expect that next year we’ll continue to do the same,” CEO Tara Murphy Dougherty told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan in an interview. With how “big this market is, we can keep growing for a long, long time, and that’s really exciting.”
CAGR stands for compound annual growth rate, a measurement of the rate of return.
The Arlington, Virginia-based company also announced a $150 million growth investment from Bain Capital. It plans to use the money to expand its team and product offering to satisfy growing security demands.
In recent years, venture capitalists have poured more money into defense tech startups like Govini to satisfy heightened national security concerns and modernize the military as global conflict ensues.
The group, which includes unicorns like Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, Shield AI and artificial intelligence beneficiary Palantir, is taking on legacy giants such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, that have long leaned on contracts from the Pentagon.
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Dougherty, who previously worked at Palantir, said she hopes the company can seize a “vertical slice” of the defense technology space.
The 14-year-old Govini has already secured a string of big wins in recent years, including an over $900-million U.S. government contract and deals with the Department of War.
Govini is known for its flagship AI software Ark, which it says can help modernize the military’s defense tech supply chain by better managing product lifecycles as military needs grow more sophisticated.
“If the United States can get this acquisition system right, it can actually be a decisive advantage for us,” Dougherty said.
Looking ahead, Dougherty told CNBC that she anticipates some setbacks from the government shutdown.
Navy customers could be particularly hard hit, and that could put the U.S. at a major disadvantage.
While the U.S. is maintaining its AI dominance, China is outpacing its shipbuilding capacity and that needs to be taken “very seriously,” she added.
The launch of OpenAI’s updated Sora 2 AI video service kicked off another round of anxiety among musicians, actors and other content creators.
Sora allows users to generate short videos for free by typing in a prompt. The app is only available on iOS devices and is limited to invitees, meaning people need a code to access it. Still, Sora has climbed to the No. 1 spot in Apple’s App Store, and OpenAI said this week it hit 1 million downloads in less than five days after launch.
CNBC’s Julia Boorstin got access to Sora 2 and tried prompts like “show me a video of a fat orange cartoon cat eating lasagna” and “create a superhero that wears a black cape and is saving a woman from a burning building.” Some of the prompts failed due to copyright infringement, while others worked. Watch the video to see what happens when we put Sora 2 to the test.
Applied Digital shares jumped 16% on Friday after the company posted strong first-quarter revenue that was boosted by artificial intelligence data center demand, putting the stock up more than 350% for the year.
Here’s how the company did compared to LSEG estimates:
Loss per share: Loss of 7 cents vs. a loss of 13 cents expected
Revenue: $64.2 million vs. $50 million expected
First quarter revenue of $64.2 million was up 84% from a year ago, when it reported $34.85 million in revenue.
The data center company reported earnings after the bell on Thursday.
During the quarter, Applied Digital built on its $7 billion lease agreement with CoreWeave that was announced in June for another 150 megawatts at the firm’s Polaris Forge 1 campus in North Dakota. The additional capacity brings the anticipated contracted lease revenue for the project up to $11 billion.
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“With hyperscalers expected to invest approximately $350 billion into AI deployment this year, we believe we are in a prime position to serve as the modern-day picks and shovels of the intelligence era,” CEO Wes Cummins said in a release.
The new 150 MW building will join two other data cell blocks, each hosting 100 MW and 150 MW. The company noted that one building is nearly complete and construction will begin on the other.
Applied Digital also secured funding from Macquarie Equipment Capital for a second campus in North Dakota, dubbed Polaris Forge 2. The estimated $3 billion factory will hold two 150 MW buildings, bringing the total leased capacity to 600 MW across both campuses.
An initial 200 MW of power is expected to come online in 2026 and reach full capacity in 2027, the company said.
The company had a net loss of $18.5 million in the first quarter, a loss of 7 cents per share. A year ago, the company posted a net loss of $4.29 million, a loss of 3 cents per share.
Analysts polled by LSEG expect a loss of 15 cents per share for the second quarter on revenue of $76 million.