Meta’s stock continued to plummet Monday, adding another 5% to what is now a 27% drop in the last week since the company’s disappointing Q4 earnings.
After shedding more than $230 billion of its market value in the last week, its valuation is less than a quarter of Apple’s $2.8 trillion market cap. Meta went down in history last Thursday for the biggest one-day crash in the stock market.
The markets overall have been volatile in the last few weeks, and the tech sector in particular saw some dips across the board this last month. Twitter, Snap and Pinterest have all been trading lower, and Meta was trading at $237.76 when the market closed on Thursday. Meta’s market cap was previously at around $900 billion.
In Q4 2021, Facebook parent company Meta met revenue expectations but missed EPS projections in its Q4 earnings last Wednesday. The social giant’s quarterly revenue came in at $33.67 billion, meeting analyst expectations of $33.41 billion. The company, which rebranded as Meta last October, reported a revenue of $29 billion last quarter, which was on par with analyst expectations last year. After seeing a pandemic boost in online activity throughout 2020, its revenue and earnings growth is beginning to slow down.
User growth on its flagship platform Facebook this quarter was stagnant at 2.91 million monthly active users, compared to 2.9 million users reported last quarter — representing only an increase of 4% year-over-year. The platform’s daily active users declined from the previous quarter for the first time, dropping from 1.930 billion to 1.929 billion globally.
In the recent earnings call, Zuckerberg acknowledged the impact on business due to the “competitive marketplace” and named TikTok as a major challenger. “People have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time,” he said, which is why the company is focusing more on Instagram Reels, its short-form video clone of TikTok. Zuckerberg also said regulation in Europe and Apple’s privacy changes have impacted its personalized ads business.
