Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg attends the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on online child sexual exploitation at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., January 31, 2024.
Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
Meta will report fourth-quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday.
Here’s what analysts surveyed by LSEG, formerly Refinitiv, are expecting:
Earnings: $4.96 per share
Revenue: $39.18 billion
Wall Street will also be looking at these key user numbers:
Daily active users (DAUs): 2.08 billion expected, according to StreetAccount
Monthly active users (MAUs): 3.06 billion expected, according to StreetAccount
Average revenue per user (ARPU): $12.81 expected, according to StreetAccount
Meta is projected to report revenue growth of 22% as the online advertising market continues to recover from a brutal 2022, when soaring inflation and rising interest rates forced brands to reel in spending.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg attributes advances in artificial intelligence to improvements in the ad business, which is growing faster than rival Google. In Alphabet‘s earnings report on Tuesday, the company said Google ad revenue increased 11% from a year earlier, slower expansion than analysts were expecting.
Part of Meta’s financial recovery over the past year was driven by Chinese retailers, which have bolstered spending to reach users across the globe. Meta finance chief Susan Li most recently highlighted the significance of business from China in the company’s third-quarter earnings report in October. Li didn’t name specific companies, but fast-growing upstarts Temu and Shein, which originated in China, have been pouring money into ads on Facebook and Instagram.
While Meta has a very diverse base of advertisers, some analysts say the potential for Temu and Shein to pull back spending poses a risk because every point of growth matters for a company that saw revenue shrink for three straight quarters in 2022.
Zuckerberg, along with the top executives at TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), Snap and Discord, faced tough questioning from lawmakers on Wednesday. They accused the Facebook founder of ignoring the severity of child exploitation on the company’s family of apps.
Parents attending the hearing lambasted Meta and other companies for what they allege are insufficient safety and design measures that have caused mental health issues for their children and, in some cases, even resulted in their deaths.
“I’m sorry for everything you’ve all gone through. It’s terrible,” Zuckerberg told the parents in an emotional scene on Capitol Hill. “No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered.”
Investors will also be looking for signs that Meta’s pivot to the metaverse is bearing fruit. The company has been burning billions of dollars a quarter to build out a virtual world that Zuckerberg has said is the future of computing. In total, the division has lost about $25 billion since the beginning of 2022, shortly after Zuckerberg renamed his company.
Analysts expect Reality Labs to show revenue of $762.8 million for the quarter and an operating loss of $4.26 billion, according to StreetAccount.
Apple and Amazon are also slated to report fourth-quarter results on Thursday, wrapping up earnings season for tech’s mega-cap companies.
Shares of Electronic Arts closed up 15% on Friday following a report in the Wall Street Journal that the video game company is nearing a roughly $50 billion deal to go private.
Investors including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) and Silver Lake could announce the deal as soon as next week, the report said. PIF has been pouring billions of dollars into gaming, purchasing the makers of Pokemon Go and the parent company behind Monopoly Go, for example.
Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners is another participating investor, according to a source familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private.
The deal would be the largest leveraged buyout in Wall Street history, surpassing the agreement to take TXU Energy private for about $45 billion in 2007. A leveraged buyout (LBO) is when debt is predominately used for an acquisition, a tactic traditionally used by private equity firms or activists.
EA makes popular video games including The Sims, Madden NFL, the soccer game FC, formerly known as FIFA. With Friday’s gains, the stock is up about 32% for the year.
EA did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Former Meta global affairs chief Nick Clegg said Friday that tech companies should keep a distance from politics and people should feel “uneasy” about those firms intervening in the public space.
“I generally don’t think that politics and tech innovation mixes very well,” Clegg told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “I think it’s quite good when they kind of keep each other at a certain, respectful distance.”
President Donald Trump‘s deal with China this week to keep TikTok alive in the U.S. includes heavy doses of both elements, and the balance between the technology and political interests will be closely watched.
Clegg said two details should be especially looked at with TikTok: The safety of American data and the ownership of the algorithm, which he said would be “quite difficult” to share.
Clegg, who stepped down from his role at Meta earlier this year, questioned if U.S. data would be “kept safe here and not subject to surveillance,” but was also critical of other government efforts to silo data.
Clegg noted a recent legislative effort by India to impose “hard data localization” that would keep all data about citizens in India.
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“The moment countries start doing that, the dominoes will start to fall,” he said. “If everybody says, ‘No, we want our slice of the … data cake.’ Then, of course, the open data flows that drives the internet will start eroding.”
Trump’s executive order for the new TikTok structure establishes a joint-venture company to oversee TikTok’s U.S. data and algorithm, with Oracle controlling cloud services and running the app’s security operations, CNBC’s David Faber reported.
Neither China nor TikTok parent company ByteDance has commented on Trump’s Thursday executive order.
Clegg said the biggest risk to the internet is possibly the relationship between the U.S. and China, noting the potential of any fallout to push other countries into different policies.
He said the image of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi standing next to Chinese President Xi Jinping during a recent visit was “striking.”
“If India starts emulating China and starts trying to sort of cut off India, much like China has done from the rest of the internet. … I think that would be terrible for the kind of global open principles that the internet was based on,” Clegg said.
A car equipped with Momenta technology on display at the IAA Mobility show in Munich, Germany in September 2025.
Arjun Kharpal | CNBC
Momenta, a Chinese driverless technology startup, is raising a fresh round of funding that could value the company at around $6 billion, two people familiar with the matter told CNBC.
The valuation could change as the funding progresses, one of the people, who wished to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to discuss the details publicly, said.
Bloomberg first reported the deal with a valuation above $5 billion.
Momenta declined to comment when contacted by CNBC.
The Beijing-headquartered company develops software and algorithms that can be used by automakers to give their vehicles some automated driving features. These company claims that its Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) allows a car to carry out some functions autonomously such as changing lanes.
This week Momenta and Mercedes-Benz struck a deal to bring the Chinese firm’s technology to the German auto giant’s all-new electric CLA in China. The technology will power Mercedes-Benz’s driver assistance system across highways, urban streets, and parking, the two companies said in a joint press release on Thursday.
Momenta’s technology will eventually be equipped on 40 models developed by Mercedes-Benz, a person familiar with the matter said.
BMW signed a similar deal in June to equip its Neue Klasse electric vehicles in China with Momenta technology.
The company is participating in a competitive market that includes players like Nvidia and Horizon Robotics in China. There are a number of other players in the autonomous driving software space including WeRide and Pony.ai.
Signing with global automakers is a big win for Momenta which is also gearing up for an initial public offering. Reuters reported on Friday that the company is considering shifting its listing to Hong Kong from New York.