Meta Platforms Inc on Wednesday reported that its quarterly profit more than doubled from last year as it looks ahead at a volatile advertising market and lawsuits accusing it of profiting from “children’s pain.”
The tech giant said it made a profit of US$11.6 billion as ad revenue climbed 23 percent to US$34 billion compared with the same period a year earlier.
“We had a good quarter for our community and business,” Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg said.
Photo: AFP
The number of people using Facebook monthly rose slightly to 3.05 billion in a year-on-year comparison, while monthly active users of Meta’s “family” of apps was 3.96 billion, a 7 percent increase from the same quarter last year, the company reported.
Meta said it had trimmed costs, with layoffs and other belt-tightening measures started last year providing “greater efficiency.”
Meta chief financial officer Susan Li said during an earnings call that Meta is seeing “volatility” in an ad market that started to soften when the most recent conflict between Israel and Hamas began.
“It’s hard for us to attribute demand softness directly to any specific geopolitical event,” Li said. “We have seen broader demand softness follow other regional conflicts in the past, such as in the Ukraine war, so this is something that we’re continuing to monitor.”
Dozens of US states this week accused Meta of profiting from “children’s pain,” damaging their mental health and misleading people about the safety of its platforms.
“In seeking to maximize its financial gains, Meta has repeatedly misled the public about the substantial dangers of its social media platforms,” a joint lawsuit filed in federal court in California says.
Meanwhile, the EU is seeking details on measures Meta has taken to stop the spread of “illegal content and disinformation” in light of the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
The tech giant is putting artificial intelligence (AI) into digital assistants and smart glasses as it seeks to gain lost ground in the AI race.
Yet Meta has taken a more cautious approach than its rivals Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google to push out AI products, prioritizing small steps and making its in-house models available to developers and researchers.
Meta shares, which closed the formal trading day down, fell more than 3 percent further in after-hours trading to US$289.50 per share on Wednesday.
Shares in Microsoft closed 3.1 percent higher after reporting stronger profit and revenue for the summer than analysts expected.
However, Google parent Alphabet Inc fell 9.6 percent as its Google Cloud business missed consensus revenue expectations on slowing growth, casting a pall on results that otherwise beat earnings expectations overall.
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