The decline in sales on Facebook group Meta accelerated in the last quarter. Meta said revenue fell 4 percent year-on-year to $27.7 billion after the U.S. market closed on Wednesday.
As a result, profits fell 52 percent to about $4.4 billion. The sales forecast also disappointed investors. They temporarily dropped the stock around 12 percent in after-hours trading.
Rising costs with falling revenue
Facebook is concerned that advertisers are spending less on online ads in the face of high inflation and economic concerns. Google’s business and photography app Snapchat is also suffering.
In the second quarter, Meta reported the first drop in sales, at the time it was minus 1 percent. With less money coming in, costs rose nearly a fifth in the last quarter to $22 billion.
Metaverse will be even more expensive
Among other things, the development of virtual worlds that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (38) wants to align the group continues to consume a lot of money. In the last quarter alone, the Reality Labs division working on it called Metaverse reported an operating loss of almost $3.7 billion.
It has had a deficit of $9.4 billion since the beginning of the year. And CFO Dave Wehner announced that Reality Labs’ losses will “increase significantly” next year.
For the current quarter, Meta estimates sales to be between $30 billion and $32.5 billion. In the same quarter of the previous year, it reached approximately 33.7 billion dollars, an increase of 20 percent. (SDA/sfa)