Facebook’s parent company forecasted a weak fourth quarter and significantly more costs next year, sending shares down nearly 20 percent.
The forecast knocked more than $65 billion off Meta’s stock market value in extended trade, adding to the more than half a trillion dollars in value already lost since September 2021.
A year ago, on October 28, 2021, Zuckerberg signaled his intent by renaming and restructuring Facebook. The core social networking businesses became one-half of Meta. At the same time, Reality Labs, the division dedicated to the metaverse, completed the rebranding with $10bn of investment and a doubling of its workforce to 20,000 engineers.
Meta is now contending with slowing global economic growth, competition from TikTok, privacy challenges from Apple, concerns about massive spending on the metaverse, and the ever-present threat of regulation.
Net income in the third quarter fell to $4.40 billion, or $1.64 per share, from $9.19 billion, or $3.22 per share, a year earlier, its worst showing since 2019 and the fourth straight quarter of profit decline.
