Foreign media: The first financial report after Facebook's name change "bright blind" Wall Street Daily life declined for the first time

On Feb. 3, after Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook's parent company Meta, announced his bet on meta-universe, the company's first earnings report on Wednesday stunned investors.

The following key financial and operational data:

Earnings per share: $3.67, less than Wall Street analysts expected at $3.84;

-- Revenue: $33.67 billion, more than Wall Street analysts expected $33.4 billion;

Daily active users: 1.93 billion, less than the 1.95 billion expected by Wall Street analysts;

Monthly active users: 2.91 billion, less than the 2.95 billion expected by Wall Street analysts;

Average revenue per user: $11.57, more than Wall Street analysts expected at $11.38.

Meta earnings reports show that profits fell more than expected in the fourth quarter of last year, and the outlook was bleak. Meta plunged more than 20 percent after hours, meaning the company's market value would evaporate by about $180 billion if it opened on Thursday at an after-hours trading share price.

Facebook's daily active users in the fourth quarter fell slightly compared to the previous quarter, the first quarterly decline in the number of daily active users on record.

Q1 performance guidance was lower than Wall Street expectations

In addition to lower-than-expected net profit and user data for the fourth quarter, Meta also issued disappointing first-quarter results guidance.

Meta expects revenue in the first quarter of 2022 to be between $27 billion and $29 billion, less than Wall Street's forecast of $30.15 billion. That means Meta's revenue growth in the first quarter will be 3 to 11 percent, less than Wall Street expected at 15 percent.

Meta said it was buffeted by a variety of factors, including privacy changes and macroeconomic challenges for Apple's iOS. The company blamed the lower-than-expected growth in part on issues such as inflation and supply chains that affect advertisers' budgets. In addition, users' shift to products with low revenue dynamic messaging also affected Meta's overall revenue. For example, people spend more time on the Reels video service.

With the name change to Meta, the company's financial reporting structure has been adjusted accordingly.

Starting with its earnings report for the fourth quarter of 2021, Meta has made Meta Reality Labs (FRL) an independent reporting arm. As has been announced, the company is investing significant resources in augmented and virtual reality products and services, an important part of its efforts to develop the next generation of online social experiences.

Under this reporting structure, Meta provides revenue and operating profit data for two segments: the first segment, the app family, which includes Meta, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and other services. The second segment, Meta Reality Labs, will include hardware, software, and content related to augmented and virtual reality.

Meta said revenue from the app family was $32,794 million in the fourth quarter, compared to $27,355 million in the year-ago quarter, and operating profit was $15,889 million, compared to $14,874 million in the year-ago quarter. Revenue from Reality Labs for the fourth quarter was $877 million, compared to $717 million in the year-ago quarter, and operating loss was $3.304 billion, compared to an operating loss of $2,099 million in the year-ago quarter.

Brad Erickson, a capital markets analyst at RBC, said: "Meta Reality Lab is a huge unknown. ”

Social media plummeted en masse

For the fourth quarter of 2021, Meta proved to be an outlier among the top tech companies.

The day before the company announced its results, Alphabet released results that crushed Wall Street expectations, pushing the stock up more than 7 percent on Wednesday. Apple and Microsoft's profits and revenue also exceeded expectations.

Despite the overall plunge in tech stocks in January, other industry giants other than Netflix have released encouraging financial data, reminding investors of the power that dominates their businesses, even in a challenging macro environment.

As a result, shares of social media operators Pinterest, Snap and Twitter plummeted en masse in after-hours trading on Wednesday. Among them, Snap shares plunged more than 20% ;P interest shares fell by 10%; Twitter shares fell 7%.

This impact is not limited to social media. Amazon shares of the advertising business's growing stock fell 3 percent. Amazon reported earnings on Thursday. Shares fell nearly 1 percent at Microsoft, which also has an online advertising business, including business social network LinkedIn. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke about the digital advertising opportunity last week, telling analysts that Microsoft's advertising revenue over the past 12 months, including LinkedIn, has exceeded $10 billion. (No taboo)