On Wednesday February 2, Meta unveiled the results for the year 2021 to its investors. For the first time since its creation, the American giant has lost users. Between September and December 2021, the number of people connecting daily to the group’s applications fell 4 million. A turnaround that panicked Wall Street. Meta actions fell 26% the next day.
Big US tech stocks play yo-yo in financial markets
With 1.929 billion daily users, Mark Zuckerberg’s group remains by far the world market leader. Despite good growth between 2020 and 2021, this loss of users has crystallized doubts about the company’s prospects and more generally about those of the tech giants. Facebook (now Meta), is not the only one to have seen its shares plunge. In all, big tech companies have lost $800 billion in capitalization since the start of the year.
Meta pressures Europe on data transfer
Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Netflix, the big American technology stocks, are playing yo-yo on the financial markets. A trend that could last. According to Benoît Flamant, director of equities at the Swiss company Corraterie Gestion, “It’s been years since we’ve seen such corrections on major market capitalisations. The market is very nervous”. Mark Zuckerberg’s group notably suffered the largest monthly decline on the Nasdaq in two years. The group lost the equivalent of $250 billion in market capitalization in one day.
Meta faces “headwinds”
Mark Zuckerberg has accustomed his investors to crazy growth. It couldn’t go on forever. In the fourth quarter of 2021, Meta’s revenue increased “only” by 20%. Profit fell 8%. Over the year 2021, the group’s revenues reach $118 billion (+ 37% compared to 2020) and its profit is approaching 39 billion (+ 35%). Very good results on paper. Despite these figures, the loss of users is a worrying factor. On this subject, Mark Zuckerberg did not hesitate to expose the “headwinds encountered by Facebook for several months”.
“We are facing increased competition. People have many choices to spend their time, and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly” comments the boss of Facebook. In particular, he underlined the attractiveness of his Chinese rival to ” young adults “. Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune was directly impacted by this fall in the group’s shares. Estimated at 113 billion dollars a few days ago, this one was cut by 28 billion dollars at the close of trading.