Sales increase: Meta posted revenue of £29.3bn for the three months to the end of March, up 27% on the previous year.
Facebook owner Meta has posted its fastest sales growth in nearly three years, but shares have fallen as spending on artificial intelligence increases.
In an announcement last night, the social media company posted revenue of £29.2bn for the three months to the end of March, up 27 per cent on the previous year.
This is the fastest growth rate since the third quarter of 2021 for Meta, which owns Instagram and Whatsapp, in addition to Facebook. Profits more than doubled to £10bn, from £4.6bn the previous year.
“It’s been a good start to the year,” said Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta. “We are seeing healthy growth in our apps and also continue to make steady progress in building the metaverse,” he added.
However, shares fell after the bell as the company warned that this year’s overhead would be higher than it had previously forecast as it pumps cash into artificial intelligence.
Meta will spend up to £32bn in 2024, up from a previous forecast of £30bn.
The update follows a bumper 2023 for the group, which saw the Silicon Valley titan post revenue of £106 billion, up 16 per cent on the previous year. This led the company to pay dividends to investors for the first time.
This completed Zuckerberg’s so-called “year of efficiency,” in which the company laid off 21,000 employees and cut several innovative projects.
Tech giants such as Amazon, Google parent Alphabet, and Microsoft also made significant cuts to their workforce.
And Meta shares have risen more than 40 percent since the start of this year as investors celebrate a successful turnaround for the group.
Meta’s value plummeted throughout 2022, wiping out more than three-quarters of its value at the time.
It came as advertisers began cutting budgets amid economic uncertainty and high interest rates.