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4,600 | MCD | 1 | 2,025 | 2025-05-01 08:30:00 | McDonald's Corporation | 139,488 | Ian Borden: Good morning, Jeffrey. Maybe just let me touch on the other part of your question. And I think the U.S. is the perfect example to kind of lean into what you've been asking. But if you think of what our U.S. business did, it was obviously through the learnings we had in COVID and just the need during that period to get much clearer and simpler in the menu. And the U.S. has done, I think, a phenomenal job as a system on getting really focused on a strong core menu and then building on that core menu over the last several years. So, they greatly reduced the complexity from an execution. And I think the evidence of that is, as we talked about, we hit an all-time high from a customer satisfaction metric result in Q1 this year, which I think speaks to how the U.S. has continued to improve execution and how customers have kind of responded to that. I think if you think about what we're doing with strips and then later in the year with wraps building on that, it goes back to what Chris has talked about a lot previously, which is we're focused on platforms, right? McCrispy is a platform. So, the McCrispy Sandwich was the first element of that. We're now building on that with strips and then later in the year with wraps, which means we keep investing to build and strengthen the equity behind the product and then we're just addressing the needs from consumers that when we do things like menu architecture research, we can really see what are the opportunity areas in chicken and how do we address those behind the equity that we're putting in place and continue to build on that. So, we feel really good about where we are, the capacity we have to kind of add the items that are in our plan and not have that have an impact on execution, which as you know, is always critically important.
Dexter Congbalay: Thanks, everyone, for joining the call today. If you have any follow-up questions or would like a call, please contact us and we could set something up. Again, have a good day. Thank you. |
4,601 | MCD | 1 | 2,025 | 2025-05-01 08:30:00 | McDonald's Corporation | 139,488 | Operator: This concludes McDonald's Corporation investor call. You may now disconnect and have a great day. |
4,602 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Operator: Good afternoon. My name is Krista and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Meta Fourth Quarter and Full-Year 2024 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] And this call will be recorded. Thank you very much. Kenneth Dorell, Metta's Director of Investor Relations, you may begin.
Kenneth Dorell: Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to Meta Platforms fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings conference call. Joining me today to discuss our results are Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and Susan Li, CFO. Before we get started, I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that our remarks today will include forward‐looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by these forward‐looking statements. Factors that could cause these results to differ materially are set forth in today’s earnings press release, and in our quarterly report on form 10-Q filed with the SEC. Any forward‐looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today and we undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. During this call we will present both GAAP and certain non‐GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non‐GAAP measures is included in today’s earnings press release. The earnings press release and an accompanying investor presentation are available on our website at investor.atmeta.com. And now, I’d like to turn the call over to Mark. |
4,603 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Mark Zuckerberg: All right. Thanks, Ken. Thanks everyone for joining today. We ended 2024 on a strong note with now more than 3.3 billion people using at least one of our apps each day. This is going to be a really big year. I know it always feels like every year is a big year, but more than usual it feels like the trajectory for most of our long-term initiatives is going to be a lot clearer by the end of this year. So I keep telling our teams that this is going to be intense, because we have about 48-weeks to get on the trajectory we want to be on. In AI, I expect this is going to be the year when a highly intelligent and personalized AI assistant reaches more than 1 billion people, and I expect Meta AI to be that leading AI assistant. Meta AI is already used by more people than any other assistant, and once a service reaches that kind of scale it usually develops a durable long-term advantage. We have a really exciting roadmap for this year with a unique vision focused on personalization. We believe that people don't all want to use the same AI, people want their AI to be personalized to their context, their interests, their personality, their culture, and how they think about the world. I don't think that there's just going to be one big AI that everyone uses that does the same thing. People are going to get to choose how their AI works and what it looks like for them. I continue to think that this is going to be one of the most transformative products that we’ve made. And we have some fun surprises that I think people are going to like this year. I think this very well be the year when Llama and open source become the most advanced and widely used AI models as well. Llama 4 is making great progress in training. Llama 4 mini is done with pre-training and our reasoning models and larger model are looking good too. Our goal with Llama 3 was to make open source competitive with closed models, and our goal for Llama 4 is to lead. Llama 4 will be natively multimodal; it's an omni-model and will have agentic |
4,604 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | models, and our goal for Llama 4 is to lead. Llama 4 will be natively multimodal; it's an omni-model and will have agentic capabilities, so it's going to be novel and it’s going to unlock a lot of new use cases. I'm looking forward to sharing more of our plan for the year on that over the next couple of months. I also expect that 2025 will be the year when it becomes possible to build an AI engineering agent that has coding and problem-solving abilities of around a good mid-level engineer. And this is going to be a profound milestone and potentially one of the most important innovations in history, as well as over time, potentially a very large market. Whichever company builds this first I think is going to have a meaningful advantage in deploying it to advance their AI research and shape the field. So that's another reason why I think that this year is going to set the course for the future. Our Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses are a real hit, and this will be the year when we understand the trajectory for AI glasses as a category. Many breakout products in the history of consumer electronics have sold 5 million to 10 million units in their third generation. This will be a defining year that determines if we're on a path towards many hundreds of millions and eventually billions of AI glasses and glasses being the next computing platform like we've been talking about for some time or if this is just going to be a longer grind. But it's great overall to see people recognizing that these glasses are the perfect form factor for AI, as well as just great, stylish glasses. These are all big investments, especially the hundreds of billions of dollars that we will invest in AI infrastructure over the long-term. I announced last week that we expect to bring online almost 1 gigawatt of capacity this year, and we're building a 2 gigawatt and potentially bigger AI datacenter, that is so big that it will cover a significant part of Manhattan if it were placed there. We're planning to fund all this by at the same time investing |
4,605 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | cover a significant part of Manhattan if it were placed there. We're planning to fund all this by at the same time investing aggressively in initiatives that use these AI advances to increase revenue growth. And we've put together a plan that will hopefully accelerate the pace of these initiatives over the next few years. That’s what a lot of our new headcount growth is going towards. And how well we execute on this will also determine our financial trajectory over the next few years. There are a number of other important product trends related to our family of apps that I think we’re going to know more about this year as well. We're going to learn what's going to happen with TikTok, and regardless of that I expect Reels on Instagram and Facebook to continue growing. I expect Threads to continue on its trajectory to become the leading discussion platform and eventually reach 1 billion people over the next several years. Threads now has more than 320 million monthly actives and has been adding more than 1 million sign-ups per day. I expect WhatsApp to continue gaining share and making progress towards becoming the leading messaging platform in the U.S. like it is in a lot of the rest of the world. WhatsApp now has more than 100 million monthly actives in the U.S. Facebook is used by more than 3 billion monthly actives and we're focused on growing its cultural influence. And I'm excited this year to get back to some OG Facebook. All right. So this is also going to be a pivotal year for the metaverse. The number of people using Quest and Horizon has been steadily growing, and this is a year when a number of long-term investments that we've been working on that will make the metaverse more visually stunning and inspiring will really start to land. So I think we’re going to know a lot more about Horizon's trajectory by the end of this year. This is also going to be a big year for redefining our relationship with governments. We now have a U.S. administration that is proud of our leading companies, prioritizes |
4,606 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | our relationship with governments. We now have a U.S. administration that is proud of our leading companies, prioritizes American technology winning, and that will defend our values and interests abroad. And I'm optimistic about the progress and innovation this is can unlock. So this is going to be a big year. I think this is the most exciting and dynamic that I have ever seen our industry. Between AI, glasses, massive infrastructure projects, doing a bunch of work to try to accelerate our business, and building the future of social media, we have a lot to do. And I think we're going to build some awesome things that shape the future of human connection. As always, I'm grateful for everyone who is on this journey with us. Thank you and here’s Susan. |
4,607 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Susan Li: Thanks Mark and good afternoon everyone. Let’s begin with our consolidated results. All comparisons are on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise noted. Q4 total revenue was $48.4 billion, up 21% on both a reported and constant currency basis. Q4 total expenses were $25 billion, up 5%, compared to last year. Before I cover the specific cost lines, I would note that our fourth quarter expense growth rate reflects a 13 percentage point favorable impact from legal accrual reductions in Q4 and lower year-over-year restructuring costs. In terms of the specific line items. Cost of revenue increased 15%, driven mostly by higher infrastructure costs. R&D increased 16%, primarily driven by higher employee compensation and infrastructure costs, which were partially offset by lower restructuring costs. Marketing & Sales were approximately flat year-over-year. G&A decreased 67%, driven mostly by lower legal-related expenses due to a $1.55 billion reduction in legal accruals related to certain legal proceedings. We ended the year with over 74,000 employees, up 10% year-over-year, with growth primarily driven by hiring in priority areas of monetization, infrastructure, generative AI, Reality Labs, as well as regulation and compliance. Fourth quarter operating income was $23.4 billion, representing a 48% operating margin. Our tax rate for the quarter was 12%. Net income was $20.8 billion or $8.02 per share. Capital expenditures, including principal payments on finance leases, were $14.8 billion, driven by investments in servers, data centers and network infrastructure. Free cash flow was $13.2 billion. We paid $1.3 billion in dividends to shareholders, ending the year with $77.8 billion in cash and marketable securities and $28.8 billion in debt. Moving now to our segment results. I’ll begin with our Family of Apps segment. Our community across the Family of Apps continues to grow, and we estimate more than 3.3 billion people used at least one of our Family of Apps on a daily basis in December. Q4 Total Family of |
4,608 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | estimate more than 3.3 billion people used at least one of our Family of Apps on a daily basis in December. Q4 Total Family of Apps revenue was $47.3 billion, up 21% year-over-year. And Q4 Family of Apps ad revenue was $46.8 billion, up 21% on both a reported and constant currency basis. Within ad revenue, the online commerce vertical was the largest contributor to year-over-year growth. On a user geography basis, ad revenue growth was strongest in Rest of World at 27%, followed by Asia-Pacific and Europe at 23% and 22%, respectively. North America grew 18%. In Q4, the total number of ad impressions served across our services increased 6% and the average price per ad increased 14%. Impression growth was mainly driven by Asia-Pacific. Pricing growth benefited from increased advertiser demand, in part driven by improved ad performance. This was partially offset by impression growth, particularly from lower-monetizing regions and surfaces. Family of Apps other revenue was $519 million, up 55%, driven primarily by business messaging revenue growth from our WhatsApp Business Platform. We continue to direct the majority of our investments toward the development and operation of our Family of Apps. In Q4, Family of Apps expenses were $19 billion, representing 76% of our overall expenses. Family of Apps expenses were up 5%, primarily due to growth in infrastructure costs and employee compensation, which were partially offset by lower legal-related expenses. Family of Apps operating income was $28.3 billion, representing a 60% operating margin. Within our Reality Labs segment, Q4 revenue was $1.1 billion, driven by hardware sales and up 1% year-over-year. Reality Labs expenses were $6 billion, up 6% year-over-year, driven primarily by higher infrastructure costs and employee compensation, partially offset by lower restructuring costs. Reality Labs operating loss was $5 billion. Turning now to the business outlook. There are two primary factors that drive our revenue performance: our ability to deliver engaging |
4,609 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | now to the business outlook. There are two primary factors that drive our revenue performance: our ability to deliver engaging experiences for our community, and our effectiveness at monetizing that engagement over time. On the first, daily actives continue to grow across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp year-over-year, both globally and in the United States. In Q4, global video time grew at double-digit percentages year-over-year on Instagram, and we’re seeing particular strength in the U.S. on Facebook, where video time spent was also up double-digit rates year-over-year. We see continued opportunities to drive video growth in 2025 through ongoing optimizations to our ranking systems. We’re also making several product bets that are focused on setting up our platforms for longer-term success. Creators are one of our central focuses. On Instagram, we continue to prioritize original posts in recommendations to help smaller creators get discovered. We also want to ensure creators have a place to experiment with their content, so we introduced a new feature in Q4 that allows creators to first share a Reel with people who don’t follow them. This allows them to test content and see what performs best before deciding to share it with their followers, and also helps introduce them to entirely new audiences. Creative tools is another area we’re investing in. In the coming weeks, we’ll launch a new standalone app called Edits that provides a full suite of creative tools to make it easier for creators to make great Reels on their phone. Another focus is making it easier for people to connect over content. Reels are already reshared over 4.5 billion times a day, and we’ve been introducing more features that bring together the social and entertainment aspects of Instagram. In the U.S., we recently launched a new destination in Reels that consists of content your friends have left a note on or liked. We’re seeing very positive early results and will look to expand this globally in the coming months. On Threads, we made |
4,610 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | liked. We’re seeing very positive early results and will look to expand this globally in the coming months. On Threads, we made tremendous progress in 2024 and our focus this year is establishing Threads as the place people come to keep up with what they care about. We’re making a number of updates to our recommendation systems to prioritize more recent posts, surface content from top creators, and ensure people see more of the content from accounts they follow. We will also continue improving custom feeds so people can build personalized feeds on topics they’re interested in. Finally, Meta AI usage continues to scale, with more than 700 million monthly actives. We’re now introducing updates that will enable Meta AI to deliver more personalized and relevant responses by remembering certain details from people’s prior queries and considering what they engage with on Facebook and Instagram to develop better intuition for their interests and preferences. Now to the second driver of our revenue performance: increasing monetization efficiency. The first part of this work is optimizing the level of ads within organic engagement. We continue to grow supply on lower monetizing surfaces, like video, while optimizing ad supply on each of our surfaces to deliver ads at the time and place they will be most relevant to people. For example, we are continuing to better personalize when ads show up, including the optimal locations in the depth of someone’s feed, to introduce ad supply when it’s most optimal for the user and revenue. This is enabling efficient supply growth. Longer term, we also see impression growth opportunities on unmonetized surfaces like Threads, which we are beginning to test ads on this quarter. We expect the introduction of ads on Threads will be gradual and don’t anticipate it being a meaningful driver of overall impression or revenue growth in 2025. The second part of increasing monetization efficiency is improving marketing performance. The ongoing enhancements to our ads ranking systems are an |
4,611 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | monetization efficiency is improving marketing performance. The ongoing enhancements to our ads ranking systems are an important driver of this work. In the second-half of 2024, we introduced an innovative new machine learning system in partnership with Nvidia, called Andromeda. This more efficient system enabled a 10,000 times increase in the complexity of models we use for ads retrieval, which is the part of the ranking process where we narrow down a pool of tens of millions of ads to the few thousand we consider showing someone. The increase in model complexity is enabling us to run far more sophisticated prediction models to better personalize, which ads we show someone. This has driven an 8% increase in the quality of ads that people see on objectives we’ve tested. Andromeda’s ability to efficiently process larger volumes of ads also positions us well for the future as advertisers use our generative AI tools to create and test more ads. Another way we’re delivering value for advertisers is through increased automation of their ad campaigns with Advantage+. Adoption of Advantage+ shopping campaigns continues to scale, with revenue surpassing a $20 billion annual run-rate and growing 70% year-over-year in Q4. Given the strong performance and interest we’re seeing in Advantage+ Shopping and our other end-to-end solutions, we’re testing a new streamlined campaign creation flow so advertisers no longer need to choose between running a manual or Advantage+ Sales or App campaign. In this new setup, all campaigns optimizing for sales, app or lead objectives will have Advantage+ turned on from the beginning. This will allow more advertisers to take advantage of the performance Advantage+ offers, while still having the ability to further customize aspects of their campaigns when they need to. We plan to expand to more advertisers in the coming months before fully rolling it out later in the year. Advantage+ creative is another area where we’re seeing momentum. More than 4 million advertisers are now using at least |
4,612 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | year. Advantage+ creative is another area where we’re seeing momentum. More than 4 million advertisers are now using at least one of our generative AI ad creative tools, up from one million six months ago. There has been significant early adoption of our first video generation tool that we rolled out in October, Image Animation, with hundreds of thousands of advertisers already using it monthly. Next, I would like to discuss our approach to capital allocation. Our primary focus remains investing capital back into the business, with infrastructure and talent being our top priorities. On the first, we expect compute will be central to many of the opportunities we’re pursuing as we advance the capabilities of Llama, drive increased usage of generative AI products and features across our platform, and fuel core ads and organic engagement initiatives. We’re working to meet the growing capacity needs for these services by both scaling our infrastructure footprint and increasing the efficiency of our workloads. Another way we’re pursuing efficiencies is by extending the useful lives of our servers and associated networking equipment. Our expectation going forward is that we’ll be able to use both our non-AI and AI servers for a longer period of time before replacing them, which we estimate will be approximately 5.5 years. This will deliver savings in annual CapEx and resulting depreciation expense, which is already included in our guidance. Finally, we’re pursuing cost efficiencies by deploying our custom MTIA silicon in areas where we can achieve a lower cost of compute by optimizing the chip to our unique workloads. In 2024 we started deploying MTIA to our ranking and recommendation inference workloads for ads and organic content. We expect to further ramp adoption of MTIA for these use cases throughout 2025 before extending our custom silicon efforts to training workloads for ranking and 0recommendations next year. From a hiring standpoint, our focus continues to be on adding technical talent to support our |
4,613 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | and 0recommendations next year. From a hiring standpoint, our focus continues to be on adding technical talent to support our strategic priorities. In the fourth quarter, nearly 90% of our year-over-year headcount growth was within the R&D function. The remaining growth was primarily in cost of revenue as we added infrastructure headcount to support our data center operations. In 2025, we expect headcount growth will continue to be primarily driven by technical roles across our priority initiatives within infrastructure, monetization, Reality Labs, generative AI, as well as regulation and compliance. We anticipate headcount growth in our business functions will remain relatively limited. To achieve our ambitions in these areas, we will need to continue executing at a rapid pace. We’re supporting this by building tools to help our engineering base be more productive. As part of our efficiency focus over the past two years, we’ve made significant improvements in our internal processes and developer tools and introduced new tools like our AI-powered coding assistant, which is helping our engineers write code more quickly. Looking forward, we expect that the continuous advancements in Llama’s coding capabilities will provide even greater leverage to our engineers, and we are focused on expanding its capabilities to not only assist our engineers in writing and reviewing our code, but also to begin generating code changes to automate tool updates and improve the quality of our code base. Finally, we expect our strong financial position will enable us to support these investments while continuing to return capital to shareholders through share repurchases and dividends. Moving to our financial outlook. We expect first quarter 2025 total revenue to be in the range of $39.5 billion to $41.8 billion. This reflects 8% to 15% year-over-year growth, or 11% to 18% growth on a constant currency basis as our guidance assumes foreign currency is an approximately 3% headwind to year-over-year total revenue growth, based on |
4,614 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | basis as our guidance assumes foreign currency is an approximately 3% headwind to year-over-year total revenue growth, based on current exchange rates. This also reflects the effect of lapping leap day in the first quarter of 2024. While we are not providing a full-year 2025 revenue outlook, we expect the investments we’re making in our core business this year will give us an opportunity to continue delivering strong revenue growth throughout 2025. Turning now to the expense outlook. We expect full-year 2025 total expenses to be in the range of $114 billion to $119 billion. We expect the single largest driver of expense growth in 2025 to be infrastructure costs, driven by higher operating expenses and depreciation. We expect employee compensation to be the second-largest factor as we add technical talent in the priority areas that I referenced earlier. Turning now to the CapEx outlook. We anticipate our full-year 2025 capital expenditures will be in the range of $60 billion to $65 billion. We expect CapEx growth in 2025 will be driven by increased investment to support both our generative AI efforts and our core business. The majority of our CapEx in 2025 will continue to be directed toward our core business. On to tax. Absent any changes to our tax landscape, we expect our full-year 2025 tax rate to be in the range of 12% to 15%. In addition, we continue to monitor an active regulatory landscape, including legal and regulatory headwinds in the EU and the U.S. that could significantly impact our business and our financial results. In closing, this was a good year for our company, with investments across our priority areas delivering strong business performance and innovative new products for our community. We have a compelling set of opportunities to invest in this year, which we expect will help us drive continued strong growth and develop transformative technologies that shape the future of our company and of the industry. With that, Krista, let’s open up the call for questions. |
4,615 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Operator: Thank you. Thank you. We will now open the lines for a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from the line of Brian Nowak with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Brian Nowak: Thanks for taking my questions. Mark, I appreciate all the excitement about this year and all the innovation to come. I know there's a lot of announcements throughout the course of the year, but I wonder if you could just share a few sort of high-level examples of your vision on new potential use cases and offerings that could drive utility for your users and value for your advertisers. As you sort of think about Llama 4 and Meta AI changing throughout 2025? And then the second one on custom silicon, maybe a question for either of you. Just any learnings on the difference between your custom silicon and third-party chips in your ranking models and results? And how should we think about the main gating factors as to how quickly you'd be able to move a higher percentage of your engagement to your custom silicon? Thanks. |
4,616 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Mark Zuckerberg: On the first one, I tried to lay this out in my opening comments a bit. I mean we're very focused on Meta AI as a highly intelligent and personalized assistant that you can access across our apps. There's a website, you can access it outside of our apps, too. I think that the quality of this is just -- it's going to keep on improving and improved a lot over the last year. We're also finding more ways that it's useful to integrate it into our services to help more people discover it. I think that, that's undoubtedly why so many hundreds of millions of people are using it today, obviously, because it's kind of easy to discover what we're doing and then keep using it. I don't know. I want to keep some surprises and fun for the stuff that we're going to release this year. I gave a bit of detail on what we're planning to do with Llama 4 that I'm sure technical people will enjoy, because we haven't talked about that before. But I'm going to refrain from adding a whole lot more on what we're launching this year. But it's the different things that I talked about. It's Meta AI. I do expect Llama 4 to be a very exciting set of releases. It's not just one thing. Just like with Llama 3, there were kind of a few different models at different dates, I think we'll see that with Llama 4 too. And then the AI engineer piece, I'm really excited about it. I mean, I don't know that that's going to be an external product anytime soon. But I think for what we're working on, our goal is to advance AI research and advance our own development internally. And I think it's just going to be a very profound thing. So I mean that's something that I think will show up through making our products better over time. But -- and then as that works, there will potentially be a market opportunity down the road. But I mean, for now and this year, we're really -- I think this is -- I don't think you're going to see this year like an AI engineer that is extremely widely deployed, changing all of development. I think this is going to be |
4,617 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | see this year like an AI engineer that is extremely widely deployed, changing all of development. I think this is going to be the year where that really starts to become possible and lays the groundwork for a much more dramatic change in '26 and beyond. I don't know yes, that's kind of it. |
4,618 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Susan Li: Brian, I'm happy to take your second question about custom silicon. So first of all, we expect that we are continuing to purchase third-party silicon from leading providers in the industry. And we are certainly committed to those long-standing partnerships, but we're also very invested in developing our own custom silicon for unique workloads, where off-the-shelf silicon isn't necessarily optimal and specifically, because we're able to optimize the full stack to achieve greater compute efficiency and performance per cost and power because our workloads might require a different mix of memory versus network, bandwidth versus compute and so we can optimize that really to the specific needs of our different types of workloads. Right now, the in-house MTIA program is focused on supporting our core ranking and recommendation inference workloads. We started adopting MTIA in the first half of 2024 for core ranking and recommendations inference. We'll continue ramping adoption for those workloads over the course of 2025 as we use it for both incremental capacity and to replace some GPU-based servers when they reach the end of their useful lives. Next year, we're hoping to expand MTIA to support some of our core AI training workloads and over time, some of our Gen AI use cases.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Eric Sheridan: Thank you so much for taking the question. Maybe I can go back to your comments on open source. Can you help us understand how your views continue to evolve with respect to the competitive dynamic around your approach with open source versus others in the industry? And how your approach to open source could possibly bend the cost curve and improve return on capital for AI over the medium to long-term? Thanks so much. |
4,619 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Mark Zuckerberg: Yes. I mean on open source, I think the best analogy for us is what we did with open compute, where we weren't first to building the system. So then by the time that we got around to building it, it wasn't really a big advantage to have it be proprietary. So we shared it. And then a lot of the industry adopted what we were doing, contributed innovations back to it. By standardizing it on it, that meant that a bunch of supply chain standardized on building it, which made prices more efficient for everyone. I think what we see here is as Llama becomes more used, it's more likely, for example, that silicon providers and others -- other APIs and developer platforms will optimize their work more for that and basically drive down the costs of using it and drive improvements that we can, in some cases, use too. So I think that the strategy will continue to be effective, and yes, I mean, I continue to be optimistic about this. I think it's kind of -- I think it's working. I also just think in light of some of the recent news, the new competitor DeepSeek from China, I think it also just puts -- it's one of the things that we're talking about is there's going to be an open source standard globally. And I think for our kind of national advantage, it's important that it's an American standard. So we take that seriously, and we want to build the AI system that people around the world are using and I think that if anything, some of the recent news has only strengthened our conviction that this is the right thing for us to be focused on.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Mark Shmulik with Bernstein. Please go ahead. |
4,620 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Mark Shmulik with Bernstein. Please go ahead.
Mark Shmulik: Yes, thank you for taking my questions. Mark, I appreciate we may get an answer this year. But looking out, as you kind of track the progress of smart glasses, Orion and so forth, do you view that as a better form factor to get the most out of the Meta AI assistance you highlighted in your opening remarks? Or is it more complementary to kind of the in-app experience in the way you've seen people use it today? And then, Susan, the last few quarters, we've kind of seen pricing growth is the dominant driver of ad revenue growth. Given the efforts you've highlighted around driving deeper, more commercial engagement and better advertiser ROI, how do we just think about the contribution of the formula for ad revenue growth going forward? Thank you. |
4,621 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Mark Zuckerberg: Yes. I mean, I can talk about glasses. I mean it's -- yes, I mean, I've said for a while that I think that glasses are the ideal form factor for an AI device, because you can let an AI assistant on your glasses see what you see and hear what you hear, which gives it the context to be able to understand everything that's going on in your life that you would want to talk to it about and get context on. So -- but look, I mean, I think the glasses are going to be a very important computing platform in the future. When phones became the primary computing platform, it's not like computers went away. I think we'll have phones for some time. But there are a lot of people in the world who have glasses. It's kind of hard for me to imagine that a decade or more from now, all the glasses aren't going to basically be AI glasses, as well as a lot of people who don't wear glasses today, finding that to be a useful thing. So I'm incredibly optimistic about this. And like I shared last year, I think one of the big surprises last year was I previously thought that glasses weren't going to become a major form factor until we got these -- the full kind of holographic displays that we started showing in the prototype for Orion. But now I think it's pretty clear that AI is actually going to drive at least as much of the value as the holographic AR is. So that's a cause to be excited. But look, the Ray-Ban Metas were hit. We still don't know what the long-term trajectory for this is going to be. And I think we're going to learn a lot this year. So I think that this is a really important year for that. |
4,622 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Susan Li: And I can take the second question on pricing growth. So first of all, what I would say is over the long term, we think we have continued opportunity to drive revenue growth across both pricing and impression growth, so both sort of supply and demand dimensions. When we look at pricing, our reported growth can be influenced by different factors such as supply because of the auction dynamics by the mix shift of the different types of surfaces where ads show up. For example, services like video or lower monetization efficiency, relatively speaking. And then, of course, broader macro factors. But we generally expect that we are going to be able to deliver ongoing ad performance improvements through a lot of the ongoing work that we're doing across our monetization road map and that will have the sort of effect of benefiting pricing overall. And part of what I think is kind of important to think about here when we think about price growth is we really -- the average price per ad as we reported, is really blending, it's an output metric. It's blending a lot of things that are happening, including what our advertiser is bidding for, what are their bids for those things? What is the average cost of their actions. So given that there are so many different objectives that advertisers can optimize for that have different values, it's a very complex metric that tries to distill that into one thing. Overall, we are seeing healthy cost per action trends for advertisers for whatever is the action that they are optimizing for. And we believe we'll continue to get better at driving conversions for advertisers. And when we do, that will have the effect of continuing to lift CPMs over time, because we're delivering more conversions per impression served, resulting in higher value impressions.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Justin Post with Bank of America. Please go ahead. |
4,623 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Justin Post with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Justin Post: Great, thanks. Maybe one for Mark and one for Susan. Mark, you mentioned political changes in the U.S. and better positioning maybe for U.S. companies abroad. But how do you think about it in the U.S. as far as usage and advertiser adoption, you got rid of fact checking. So do you think the content could change? Could it appeal to more users? Will that impact advertising at all? And then Susan, on Meta AI, I know people are pretty excited about the use case, but also thinking about the revenue case. How do you think about monetizing that? Could it be CPC ads? Or how are you thinking about that? Thank you.
Mark Zuckerberg: The question was about fact checking and our content policies. I mean, look, I think we're trying to build the service that we think is the best for people. I believe in free expression for quite a while. People don't want to see misinformation, but you need to build an effective system that gives people more context. And I think what we found over time is that the community note system, I think, is just going to be more effective than the system that we had before. And I'm not afraid to admit when someone does something that's better than us. I think it's sort of our job to go and just do best work and implement the best systems. So I think that there's been a lot of people who have read this announcement is if we somehow don't care about adding context to things that are on our platform that are misinformation, that's not right. I actually think that the community note system, like what X has had for a while is actually just more effective than what we were doing before. And I think our product is going to get better because of it. |
4,624 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Susan Li: I would add to that, just to say, we also haven't seen any noticeable impact from our content policy changes on advertiser spend. So we're continuing to see strong advertiser demand. Again, particularly for AI-powered tools that are helping businesses maximize the value of their ad spend. So our commitment to brand safety is unchanged, and we expect that we will invest in our suite of tools to meet the needs of advertisers. On your second question in terms of monetizing Meta AI, our initial focus for Meta AI is really about building a great consumer experience, and that's frankly, where all of our energies are kind of directed to right now. There will, I think, be pretty clear monetization opportunities over time, including paid recommendations and including a premium offering, but really not where we are focused in terms of the development of Meta AI today.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Douglas Anmuth with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.
Douglas Anmuth: Thanks for taking the questions. One for Mark, one for Susan. Mark, just following up on open source as DeepSeek and other models potentially leverage Llama or others to train faster and cheaper. How does this impact in your view? And what could have been for the trajectory of investment required over a multiyear period? And then, Susan, just as we think about the $60 billion to $65 billion CapEx this year, does the composition change much from last year when you talked about servers as the largest part followed by data centers and networking equipment. And how should we think about that mix between like training and inference just following up on Jan's post this week? Thanks. |
4,625 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Mark Zuckerberg: I can start on the DeepSeek question. I think there's a number of novel things that they did that I think we're still digesting. And there are a number of things that they have advances that we will hope to implement in our systems. And that's part of the nature of how this works, whether it's a Chinese competitor or not. I kind of expect that every new company that has an advance -- that has a launch is going to have some new advances that the rest of the field learns from. And that's sort of how the technology industry goes. I don't know -- it's probably too early to really have a strong opinion on what this means for the trajectory around infrastructure and CapEx and things like that. There are a bunch of trends that are happening here all at once. There's already sort of a debate around how much of the compute infrastructure that we're using is going to go towards pretraining versus as you get more of these reasoning time models or reasoning models where you get more of the intelligence by putting more of the compute into inference, whether just will mix shift how we use our compute infrastructure towards that. That was already something that I think a lot of the other labs and ourselves were starting to think more about and already seemed pretty likely even before this, that -- like of all the compute that we're using, that the largest pieces aren't necessarily going to go towards pre-training. But that doesn't mean that you need less compute, because one of the new properties that's emerged is the ability to apply more compute at inference time in order to generate a higher level of intelligence and a higher quality of service, which means that as a company that has a strong business model to support this, I think that's generally an advantage that we're now going to be able to provide a higher quality of service than others, who don't necessarily have the business model to support it on a sustainable basis. The other thing is just that when we're building things like Meta AI, but also how |
4,626 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | model to support it on a sustainable basis. The other thing is just that when we're building things like Meta AI, but also how we're implementing AI into all the feeds and ad products and things like that, we're just serving billions of people, which is different from, okay, you start to pretrain a model, and that model is sort of agnostic to how many people are using it, like at some level, it's going to be expensive for us to serve all of these people, because we are serving a lot of people. And so I'm not sure what the kind of net effect of all of this is. The field continues to move quickly. There's a lot to learn from releases from basically everyone who does something interesting, not just the ones over the last month. We'll continue to kind of incorporate that into what we do as well as making novel contributions to the field ourselves And I continue to think that investing very heavily in CapEx and infra is going to be a strategic advantage over time. It's possible that we'll learn otherwise at some point, but I just think it's way too early to call that. And at this point, I would bet that the ability to build out that kind of infrastructure is going to be a major advantage for both the quality of the service and being able to serve the scale that we want to. |
4,627 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Susan Li: I'm happy to add a little more color about our 2025 CapEx plans to your second question. So we certainly expect that 2025 CapEx is going to grow across all three of those components you described. Servers will be the biggest growth driver that remains the largest portion of our overall CapEx budget. We expect both growth in AI capacity as we support our gen AI efforts and continue to invest meaningfully in core AI, but we are also expecting growth in non-AI capacity as we invest in the core business, including to support a higher base of engagement and to refresh our existing servers. On the data center side, we're anticipating higher data center spend in 2025 to be driven by build-outs of our large training clusters and our higher power density data centers that are entering the core construction phase. We're expecting to use that capacity primarily for core AI and non-AI use cases. On the networking side, we expect networking spend to grow in ‘25 as we build higher-capacity networks to accommodate the growth in non-AI and core AI-related traffic along with our large Gen AI training clusters. We're also investing in fiber to handle future cross-region training traffic. And then in terms of the breakdown for core versus Gen AI use cases, we're expecting total infrastructure spend within each of Gen AI, non-AI and core AI to increase in '25 with the majority of our CapEx directed to our core business with some caveat that, that is -- that's not easy to measure perfectly as the data centers we're building can support AI or non-AI workloads and the GPU-based servers, we procure for gen AI can be repurposed for core AI use cases and so on and so forth. But overall, I would reiterate what Mark said. We are committed to building leading foundation models and applications. We expect that we're going to make big investments to support our training and inference objectives, and we don't know exactly where we are in the cycle of that yet. |
4,628 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Ron Josey with Citigroup. Please go ahead.
Ron Josey: Hey, thanks for taking the question. Mark, I want to get back to your comment on getting back to the OG Facebook, and I want to understand a little bit more on the use cases and how that could expand? Video is clearly a benefit. Local marketplace groups have all been positive. So any insights on the OG Facebook? And then back to Meta AI, given the adoption we're seeing on the 600-plus MAUs, just how does the user experience evolved to? What are people doing with Meta AI? Thank you.
Mark Zuckerberg: Okay. So for Facebook, a lot of people use Facebook every day, and it's an important part of their lives. And I think that there are a lot of opportunities to make it way more culturally influential than it is today. And I think that, that's sort of a fun and interesting goal that will take our product development in some interesting directions that we maybe have a focus on it as much over the last several years. So I don't know that I have anything much more specific on this other than that this is going to be one of my focus areas for this year. I mean, I think it's an investment area and something I'm going to spend some time on it. It might mean that in the near-term, we make some trade-offs to kind of focus on some product areas of what we're doing ahead of just kind of maximizing business results in the near term on it. But overall, I'm really excited about doing some exciting stuff here. And I'm not going to get into many specifics now, but we'll get -- we'll follow up on this over the next, I don't know, call it, a year as we start rolling it out and I think some of this will kind of get back to how Facebook was originally used back in the day. So I think it will be fun. |
4,629 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Susan Li: I'm happy to share a little bit more about Meta AI and what people are doing with it. We are in a phase where we are really learning a lot from the way that people engage with Meta AI. So from an app perspective, WhatsApp continues to see the strongest Meta AI usage across our family of apps. People there are using it most frequently for information seeking and educational queries along with emotional support use cases. Most of the WhatsApp engagement is in one-on-one threads, though we see some usage in group messaging. And on Facebook, which is the second largest driver of Meta AI engagement, we're seeing strong engagement from our feed deep dives integration that lets people ask Meta AI questions about the content that is recommended to that. So across, I would say, all query types, we continue to see signs that Meta AI is helping people leverage our apps for new use cases. We talked about information gathering, social interaction and communication. Lots of people use it for humor and casual conversation. They use it for writing and editing research recommendations. And as we look forward to 2025 in our Meta AI road map, we are really focused on doing more to make it feel more personalized. So I would say some of the most exciting features we're working on, including improving sort of the memory dimension of the Meta AI experience. We'll be able to remember certain details that people share in one-on-one chats, for example, and use those details to personalize its responses and then really increasing its ability to deliver great content recommendations and enhance really what makes Facebook and Instagram, so valuable for people today.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Ken Gawrelski with Wells Fargo. Please go ahead. |
4,630 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Ken Gawrelski with Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.
Ken Gawrelski: Thank you very much. Two for me, please. First, could you talk a little bit -- I know you talked a little bit on the capital intensity side and the recent developments, and it's hard to see it's hard to tell yet where things are going? But maybe you could just talk a little bit more near term, '25, the CapEx budget you laid out or the CapEx forecast. Could you talk a little bit about the constraints you're seeing or where you're seeing constraints, either internally resources planning or externally and any one -- any parts of the ecosystem? And then on the second one, I'm curious, as you think about your needs for hiring and we just think about -- we know you gave the OpEx guide for this year. But as we think about future needs for hiring, could you just give us a sense of how we should think about that? You announced the performance-related reductions earlier this -- for early this year. Could you just talk about how we should be thinking about that '26, '27 and beyond? Thank you. |
4,631 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Susan Li: Sure. I'm happy to take both of those. So on your first question on just where do we see constraints in our ability to execute against our CapEx plans. Obviously, we are staying on top of supply availability. That is certainly one of the factors that will influence our CapEx spend in 2025, but we don't really have any updates to share on supply availability right now. We are planning to significantly ramp up deployment of GPUs in 2025, and we'll continue to engage with our vendors and invest in our own silicon to meet those needs. When you asked how to think about capital intensity, we're not really -- as both Mark and I alluded to in our prior comments, I think it is really too early to determine what long-run capital intensity is going to look like. There are so many different factors. The pace of advancement in underlying models, how efficient can they be? What is the adoption and use case of our Gen AI products, what performance gains come from next-generation hardware innovations, both our own and third-party and then ultimately, what monetization or other efficiency gains our AI investments unlock. So again, I think we are sort of early in the journey here, and we don't have -- I would say we don't have kind of anything to share about long-run capital intensity yet. Your second question was about thinking about hiring needs. So it's a good segue after infrastructure, employee compensation is the next largest driver of expense growth in 2025. And here, growth in employee comp and headcount more broadly is primarily driven by those areas that I mentioned, infrastructure monetization, generative AI, Reality Labs and regulation and compliance. And those generally are more technical organizations. That means that it is a higher cost base relative to business functions where we are also expecting to keep headcount growth constrained. And I would say we are -- we're focused on running the company efficiently. But at the same time, it is -- we feel like we're in a critical period in terms of making sure |
4,632 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | running the company efficiently. But at the same time, it is -- we feel like we're in a critical period in terms of making sure that we are investing to win, and we want to make sure that we staff those priority areas in a way that really positions us to best do that. |
4,633 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Kenneth Dorell: Krista, we have time for one last question.
Operator: And that question comes from the line of Ross Sandler with Barclays. Please go ahead.
Ross Sandler: Yes. One for Mark, on agents. So we all saw OpenAI's operator demo last week. So Mark, as the industry moves from chat to agentic behavior and more commercial intent moves into these AI products? I guess how are you thinking about monetization potential for Meta AI? And then how might Llama 4 reasoning help drive some of these new agentic experiences for Meta AI? Thank you. |
4,634 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Mark Zuckerberg: Yes. So I guess a couple of things that I'd say on this. One is when you're thinking about agents and reasoning, a lot of this is about being able to perform multistep tasks. So right now, the way that a lot of these systems work as you kind of say something and then it responds and it's almost chat like. But I think that the direction that it's going is you're going to be able to give it an intent or a task and it's going to be able to go off and use sort of an arbitrary amount of compute as much as you want to use on it to be able to do a task. Some of the tasks might be pretty simple for people go buy a specific thing. Some of them might be really hard, like go write an app or optimize this code and like really make it as good as possible. And that type of thing, I think, is just going to start becoming more and more prevalent over the next a year or two. So I think it's very exciting. It's sort of we'll feel in some ways like the current products are just getting smarter and others, it will feel like sort of a new form factor, because it won't be as much like chat. But it's sort of another generation of these products. So I think it's just in general, there's a lot to build and be excited about. I guess my note of caution or just my kind of periodic reminder on our product development process, if you will, is we build these product. We try to scale them to reach usually 1 billion people or more. And it's at that point once they're at scale that we really start focusing on monetization. So sometimes we'll experiment with monetization before, we're running some experiments with Threads now, for example. But we typically don't really ramp these things up or see them as meaningfully contributing to the business until we reach quite a big scale. So the thing that I think is going to be meaningful this year is the kind of getting of the AI product to scale. Last year was sort of the introduction and starting to get to be used. This year my kind of expectation and hope is that we will be at a |
4,635 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | was sort of the introduction and starting to get to be used. This year my kind of expectation and hope is that we will be at a sufficient scale and have sufficient kind of flywheel of people using it and improvement from that, that this will have a durable advantage. But that doesn't mean that it's going to be a major contributor to the business. This year the improvements of the business are going to be taking the AI methods and applying them to advertising and recommendations and feeds and things like that. So the actual business opportunity for Meta AI and AI studio and business agents and people interacting with these AIs remains outside of '25 for the most part. And I think that's an important thing for us to communicate and for people to internalize as you're thinking about our prospects here. But nonetheless, we've run a process like this many times. We built a product. We make it good. We scale it to be large. We build out the business around it. That's what we do. I'm very optimistic, but it's going to take some time. |
4,636 | META | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-01-29 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Kenneth Dorell: Great. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We appreciate your time, and we look forward to speaking with you again soon.
Operator: This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation, and you may now disconnect. |
4,637 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Operator: Good afternoon. My name is Krista and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Meta Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers’ remarks there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] This call will be recorded. Thank you very much. Kenneth Dorell, Meta's Director of Investor Relations, you may begin.
Kenneth Dorell: Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to Meta Platform's Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. Joining me today to discuss our results are Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, and Susan Li, CFO. Before we get started, I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by these forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause these results to differ materially are set forth in today's earnings press release and in our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, filed with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today and we undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. During this call, we will present both GAAP and certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release. The earnings press release and an accompanying Investor Presentation are available on our website at investor.fb.com. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Mark. |
4,638 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Mark Zuckerberg: Thanks, Ken. This was a good quarter with strong product and business momentum and with parts of our long-term vision around AI and the future of computing coming into sharper focus. We estimate that there are now more than 3.2 billion people using at least one of our apps each day and we're seeing rapid adoption of Meta AI and Llama, which is quickly becoming a standard across the industry. So let's start with some highlights from the apps. For WhatsApp, the US remains one of our fastest-growing countries and we just passed a milestone of 2 billion calls made globally every day. On Facebook, we continue to see positive trends with young adults, especially in the US. On Instagram, global growth remains strong. We also lunched teen accounts this quarter which add built-in protections that limit who teens are messaging and what content they can see. On Threads, the community now has almost 275 million monthly actives. It's been growing more than a million signups per day. Engagement is growing too, so we continue to be on track towards this becoming our next major social app. We are making a lot of progress with our AI efforts too, and we're seeing AI have a positive impact on nearly all aspects of our work, from our core business engagement and monetization to our long-term roadmaps for new services and computing platforms. I think that this partially comes from having a vision and roadmap that is aligned with the direction that technology is heading, but even more importantly from our teams doing some really excellent work on execution on so many fronts. Meta AI now has more than 500 million monthly active improvements to our AI driven feed and video recommendations have led to an 8% increase in time spent on Facebook and a 6% increase on Instagram this year alone. More than a million advertisers used our Gen AI tools to create more than 15 million ads in the last month and we estimate that businesses using image generation are seeing a 7% increase in conversions and we believe that there's a |
4,639 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | and we estimate that businesses using image generation are seeing a 7% increase in conversions and we believe that there's a lot more upside here. We are also seeing great momentum with Llama. Llama token usage has grown exponentially this year and the more widely that Llama gets adopted and becomes the industry standard the more that the improvements to its quality and efficiency will flow back to all of our products. This quarter we released Llama 3.2 including the leading small models that run on device and open source multimodal models. We are working with enterprises to make it easier to use and now we're also working with the public sector to adopt Llama across the US government. The Llama 3 models have been something of an inflection point in the industry but I'm even more excited about Llama 4 which is now well into its development. We're training the Llama 4 models on a cluster that is bigger than 100,000 H100s or bigger than anything that I've seen reported for what others are doing. I expect that the smaller Llama 4 models will be ready first and they'll be ready we expect sometime early next year and I think that they're going to be a big deal on several fronts, new modalities capabilities, stronger reasoning and much faster. It seems pretty clear to me that open source will be the most cost effective, customizable, trustworthy, performant and easiest to use option that is available to developers and I am proud that Llama is leading the way on this. Right now it's the time of the year at Meta when we plan our budget for the next year, and that's still in progress, but I wanted to share a few things that have stood out to me as we've gone through this process so far. First, it's clear that there are a lot of new opportunities to use new AI advances to accelerate our core business that should have strong ROI over the next few years, so I think we should invest more there. And second, our AI investments continue to require serious infrastructure, and I expect to continue investing significantly there |
4,640 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | second, our AI investments continue to require serious infrastructure, and I expect to continue investing significantly there too. We haven't decided on a final budget yet, but those are some of the directional trends that I'm seeing. Now, moving on, this quarter, we also had several milestones around Reality Labs and the integration of AI and wearables. Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses are the prime example here. They're great-looking glasses that let you take photos and videos, listen to music, and take calls, but what makes them really special is the Meta AI integration. With our new updates, it'll be able to not only answer your questions throughout the day, but also help you remember things, give you suggestions as you're doing things using real-time multimodal AI, and even translate other languages right in your ear for you. I continue to think that glasses are the ideal form factor for AI because you can let your AI see what you see, hear what you hear, and talk to you. Demand for the glasses continues to be very strong. The new clear edition that we released at Connect sold out almost immediately and has been trading online for over $1,000. We've deepened our partnership with EssilorLuxottica to build future generations of smart eyewear that deliver both cutting-edge technology and style. At Connect, we also showed Orion, our first full holographic AR glasses. We've been working on this one for about a decade, and it gives you a sense of where this is all going. We're not too far off from being able to deliver great looking glasses that let you seamlessly blend the physical and digital worlds so you can feel present with anyone no matter where they are. And we're starting to see the next computing platform come together and it's pretty exciting. All right, we also released our newest mixed reality headset Quest 3S. It brings the best capabilities of Quest 3, high quality color pass-through, a new chipset, and more at the much more accessible price point of $300. Reviews are great so far and I'm looking forward to |
4,641 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | a new chipset, and more at the much more accessible price point of $300. Reviews are great so far and I'm looking forward to seeing how well it does this holiday season as more people get their hands on it. So overall, this has been a good quarter. I'm pretty amped about all the work that we're doing right now. This may be the most dynamic moment that I've seen in our industry and I am focused on making sure that we build some awesome things and make the most of the opportunities ahead. And if we do this well then, the potential for Meta and everyone building with us will be massive. As always, I'm grateful for everyone who is on this journey with us, our teams, our partners, and our investors. And now here's Susan. |
4,642 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Susan Li : Thanks, Mark. And good afternoon, everyone. Let's begin with our consolidated results. All comparisons are on a year-over-year basis, unless otherwise noted. Q3 total revenue was $40.6 billion, up 19% or 20% on a constant currency basis. Q3 total expenses were $23.2 billion, up 14% compared to last year. In terms of the specific line items, cost of revenue increased 19% driven primarily by higher infrastructure costs. R&D increased 21%, mostly driven by higher headcount related expenses and infrastructure costs. Marketing and sales decreased 2% driven primarily by lower restructuring costs. G&A decreased 10% driven primarily by lower legal related expenses. We ended the third quarter with over 72,400 employees, up 9% year-over-year with growth primarily driven by hiring in our priority areas of monetization, infrastructure, Reality Labs, generative AI, as well as regulation and compliance. Third quarter operating income was $17.4 billion, representing a 43% operating margin. Our tax rate for the quarter was 12%. Net income was $15.7 billion or $6.03 per share. Capital expenditures, including principal payments on finance leases, were $9.2 billion driven by investments in servers, data centers, and network infrastructure. Our capital expenditures were impacted in part by the timing of third quarter server deliveries, which will be paid for in the fourth quarter. Free cash flow was $15.5 billion. In Q3, we completed a debt offering of $10.5 billion, re-purchased $8.9 billion of our Class A common stock, and paid $1.3 billion in dividends to shareholders, ending the quarter with $70.9 billion in cash and marketable securities, and $28.8 billion in debt. Moving now to our segment results. I'll begin with our Family of Apps segment. Our community across the Family of Apps continues to grow, with more than 3.2 billion people using at least one of our Family of Apps on a daily basis in September. Q3 Total Family of Apps revenue was $40.3 billion, up 19% year -over -year. Q3 Family of Apps ad revenue was |
4,643 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | in September. Q3 Total Family of Apps revenue was $40.3 billion, up 19% year -over -year. Q3 Family of Apps ad revenue was $39.9 billion, up 19% or 20% on a constant currency basis. Within ad revenue, the online commerce vertical was the largest contributor to year -over -year growth, followed by healthcare and entertainment and media. On a user geography basis, ad revenue growth was strongest in rest of world in Europe, at 23% and 21%, respectively. Asia Pacific grew 18%, and North America grew 16%. On an advertiser geography basis, total revenue growth was strongest in North America and Europe at 21%. Rest of world was up 17%, while Asia Pacific was the slowest growing region at 15%, decelerating from our second quarter growth rate of 28% due mainly to lapping a period of stronger demand from China-based advertisers. In Q3, the total number of ad impressions served across our services increased 7%, and the average price per ad increased 11%. Impression growth was mainly driven by Asia Pacific and rest of world. Pricing growth was driven by increased advertiser demand, in part due to improved ad performance. This was partially offset by impression growth, particularly from lower monetizing regions and surfaces. Family of Apps Other revenue was $434 million, up 48%, driven primarily by business messaging revenue growth from our WhatsApp business platform. We continue to direct the majority of our investments for the development and operation of our Family of Apps. In Q3, Family of Apps expenses were $18.5 billion, representing approximately 80% of our overall expenses. Family of Apps expenses were up 13%, primarily due to higher infrastructure and headcount related expenses, partially offset by lower legal related expenses. Family of Apps operating income was $21.8 billion, representing a 54% operating margin. Within our Reality Labs segment, Q3 revenue was $270 million, up 29% driven by hardware sales. Reality Labs expenses were $4.7 billion, up 19% year-over-year, driven primarily by higher headcount related |
4,644 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | by hardware sales. Reality Labs expenses were $4.7 billion, up 19% year-over-year, driven primarily by higher headcount related expenses and infrastructure costs. Reality Labs operating loss was $4.4 billion. Turning now to the business outlook. There are two primary factors that drive our revenue performance. Our ability to deliver engaging experiences for our community and our effectiveness at monetizing that engagement over time. On the first, we are focused on both improving people's experiences within our apps today and investing in longer term initiatives that have the potential to contribute to engagement in the years ahead. We expect our content recommendations roadmap will span both of these timeframes as we have newer term work streams focused on improving recommendations as well as multi-year initiatives to develop innovative new approaches. I'll focus first on the near term. In the third quarter, we continue to see daily usage grow year-over-year across Facebook and Instagram, both globally and in the US. On Facebook, we're seeing strong results from the global rollout of our unified video player in June. Since introducing the new experience and prediction systems that power it, we've seen a 10% increase in time spent within the Facebook video player. This month, we've entered the next phase of Facebook's video product evolution. Starting in the US and Canada, we are updating the standalone video tab to a full screen viewing experience, which will allow people to seamlessly watch videos in a more immersive experience. We expect to complete this global rollout in early 2025. On Instagram, Reels continues to see good traction, and we're making ongoing progress with our focus on promoting original content, with more than 60% of recommendations now coming from original posts in the U.S. This is helping people find unique and differentiated content on Instagram, while also helping earlier stage creators get discovered. Next, let me talk more about our multi-year roadmap for recommendations. Previously, we |
4,645 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | earlier stage creators get discovered. Next, let me talk more about our multi-year roadmap for recommendations. Previously, we operated separate ranking and recommendation systems for each of our products because we found that performance did not scale if we expanded the model size and compute power beyond a certain point. However, inspired by the scaling laws we were observing with our large language models, last year we developed new ranking model architectures capable of learning more effectively from significantly larger datasets. To start, we have been deploying these new architectures to our Facebook video ranking models, which has enabled us to deliver more relevant recommendations and unlock meaningful gains in watch time. Now, we're exploring whether these new models can unlock similar improvements to recommendations on other services. After that, we will look to introduce cross-surface data to these models so our systems can learn from what is interesting to someone on one surface of our apps and use it to improve their recommendations on another. This will take time to execute, and there are other explorations that we will pursue in parallel. However, over time we are optimistic that this will unlock more relevant recommendations while also leading to higher engineering efficiency as we operate a smaller number of recommendations. Beyond recommendations, we're making progress with our other longer term engagement priorities, including generative AI and Threads. Meta AI usage continues to scale as we make it available in more countries and languages. We're seeing lifts in usage as we improve our models and have introduced a number of enhancements in recent months to make Meta AI more helpful and engaging. Last month, we began introducing voice so you can speak with Meta AI more naturally and it's now fully available in English to people in the US, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. In the US, people can now also upload photos to Meta AI to learn more about them, write captions for posts, and add, |
4,646 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Zealand. In the US, people can now also upload photos to Meta AI to learn more about them, write captions for posts, and add, remove, or change things about their images with a simple text prompt. These are all built with our first multimodal foundation model, Llama 3.2. Threads remains another area where we see exciting potential. We are bringing on an increasing number of new users each quarter while depth of engagement also continues to grow. Looking ahead, we plan to introduce more features to make it even easier for people to stay up to date on topics they care about. Now to the second driver of our revenue performance, increasing monetization efficiency. There are two parts to this work. The first is optimizing the level of ads within organic engagement. We continue to see opportunities to grow ad supply on lower monetizing surfaces like video. Within Facebook, video engagement continues to shift to short form following the unification of our video player, and we expect this to continue with the transition of the video tab to a full screen format. This is resulting in organic video impressions growing more quickly than overall video time on Facebook, which provides more opportunities to serve ads. Across both Facebook and Instagram, we're also continuing our broader work to optimize when and where we should show ads within a person's session. This is enabling us to drive revenue and conversion growth without increasing the number of ads. The second part of improving monetization efficiency is enhancing marketing performance. Similar to organic content ranking, we are finding opportunities to achieve meaningful ads performance gains by adopting new approaches to modeling. For example, we recently deployed new learning and modeling techniques that enable our ad systems to consider the sequence of actions a person takes before and after seeing an ad. Previously, our ad system could only aggregate those actions together without mapping the sequence. This new approach allows our systems to better anticipate how |
4,647 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | aggregate those actions together without mapping the sequence. This new approach allows our systems to better anticipate how audiences will respond to specific ads. Since we adopted the new models in the first half of this year, we've already seen a 2% to 4% increase in conversions based on testing within selected segments. We're also evolving our ads platform to ensure that the results we drive are customized to each business' objectives and to the way they measure value. In Q3, we introduce changes to our ads ranking and optimization models to take more of the cross-publisher journey into account, which we expect to increase the Meta-attributed conversions that advertisers see in their third-party analytics tools. We're also testing new features and settings for advertisers that will allow them to optimize their campaigns for what they value most, such as driving incremental conversions rather than absolute conversions. Finally, there is continued momentum with our Advantage + solutions, including our ad creative tools. We're seeing strong retention with advertisers using our generative AI-powered image expansion, background generation, and text generation tools, and they're already driving improved performance for advertisers even at this early stage. Earlier this month, we began testing our first video generation features, video expansion and image animation. We expect to make them more broadly available by early next year. Next, I'd like to discuss our approach to capital allocation. We continue to take a long-term view in running the business, which involves investing in a portfolio of opportunities that we expect will generate returns over different time periods. We are very optimistic about the set of opportunities in front of us and believe that investing now in both infrastructure and talent will not only accelerate our progress, but increase the likelihood of maximizing returns within each area. This includes investing in both near-term initiatives to deliver continued healthy revenue growth within |
4,648 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | within each area. This includes investing in both near-term initiatives to deliver continued healthy revenue growth within our core business, as well as longer-term opportunities that have the scale to deliver compelling returns over time. Given the lead time of our longer-term investments, we also continue to maximize our flexibility so that we can react to market developments. Within Reality Labs, this has benefited us as we've evolved our roadmap to respond to the earlier-than-expected success of smart glasses. Within generative AI, we expect significantly scaling up our infrastructure capacity now while also prioritizing its fungibility will similarly position as well to respond to how the technology and market develop in the years ahead. Moving now to our financial outlook. We expect fourth quarter 2024 total revenue to be in the range of $45 billion to $48 billion. Our guidance assumes foreign currency is approximately neutral to year-over-year total revenue growth based on current exchange rates. Turning now to the expense outlook. We expect full year 2024 total expenses to be in the range of $96 billion to $98 billion updated from our prior range of $96 billion to $99 billion. For Reality Labs, we continue to expect 2024 operating losses to increase meaningful year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts and investments to further scale our ecosystem. Turning now to the CapEx outlook. We anticipate our full year 2024 capital expenditures will be in the range of $38 billion to $40 billion, updated from our prior range of $37 billion to $40 billion. We continue to expect significant capital expenditure growth in 2025. Given this, along with the back-end weighted nature of our 2024 CapEx, we expect a significant acceleration in infrastructure expense growth next year as we recognize higher growth in depreciation and operating expenses of our expanded infrastructure fleet. On to tax, absent any changes to our tax landscape, we expect our fourth quarter 2024 tax rate to be in the low teens. |
4,649 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | fleet. On to tax, absent any changes to our tax landscape, we expect our fourth quarter 2024 tax rate to be in the low teens. In addition, we continue to monitor an active regulatory landscape, including the increasing legal and regulatory headwinds in the EU and the U.S. that could significantly impact our business and our financial results. In closing, this was another good quarter for our business. Our global community continues to grow. We're seeing ongoing momentum across our core priorities, and we have exciting opportunities ahead of us to drive further growth in our core business in 2025 and capitalize on the longer-term opportunities ahead. With that, Krista, let's open up the call for questions. |
4,650 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Operator: [Operator Instructions] And your first question comes from Brian Nowak with Morgan Stanley.
Brian Nowak: Thanks for taking my questions. I have two. One for Mark and one for Susan. Mark, I wanted to sort of ask you about Meta AI a little bit. Can you help us understand some of the more recurring types of interactions or query types you're seeing with this product and whether they have commercial intent? And then just over time, how do you think about building your own in-house search offering as opposed to partnering and having another player partner those queries? And then, Susan, I wanted to ask you about sort of headcount because you talked a lot about sort of infrastructure investment into ‘25. How do we sort of think about relative headcount investments into ‘25 to sort of support all that infrastructure versus what you've been doing in 2024? Thanks. |
4,651 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Susan Li : Brian, thanks for the question. This is Susan. So your first question was around what kinds of recurring interactions that we see between people and their usage of Meta AI. And we're seeing first of all, I think, as Mark mentioned, just we're excited about the progress of Meta AI. It's obviously very early in its journey, but it continues to be on track to be the most used AI assistant in the world by end of year, and it has over 500 million monthly actives. And people are using it for many things. A number of the frequent use cases we're seeing include information gathering help with how-to tasks, which is the largest use case. But we also see people using it to go deeper on interest, to look for content on our services, for image generation. That's also been another pretty popular use case so far. And I would say that in the near term, our focus is really on making Meta AI increasingly valuable for people. And if we're successful, we think there will be a broadening set of queries that people use it for, including more monetizable queries over time. The second part of your question Meta AI draws from content across the web to address timely questions from users and it provides sources for those results from our search engine partners. We've integrated with Bing and Google, both of whom offer great search experiences. Like other companies, we also train our Gen AI models on content that is publicly available online and we crawl the web for a variety of purposes. Your second question was really, I think, around maybe how we're thinking about headcount in 2025. And we are still working through our budgeting processes for ‘25. That's in part why we changed our forward-looking guidance approach to give guidance in the next call. But as we're working through this, we are looking at where there are opportunities for us to invest in our strategic priorities, and that includes monetization, infrastructure, Reality Labs, Gen AI, our ongoing investments in regulation and compliance, and we're really evaluating |
4,652 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | infrastructure, Reality Labs, Gen AI, our ongoing investments in regulation and compliance, and we're really evaluating each of those opportunities with an eye towards what either the measurable ROI looks like or what the strategic opportunity looks like, depending on what the area is. And we're supporting that by continuing to really focus on streamlining our operations elsewhere. So we don't have specifics to share about headcount growth in 2025, but that gives you a little bit of the flavor of where we are in the budgeting process. |
4,653 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs.
Eric Sheridan: Thanks so much for taking the question. Maybe just one building on that question from Brian and going back to Mark's comments about the learnings as you do go through the business planning process. Mark, I wanted to understand better what you continue to learn about what the biggest opportunity sets are to apply AI to when you think about your platform, your product portfolio, and your internal processes because you sound quite optimistic about key learnings and how they continue to ramp and maybe even accelerate in terms of the potential for return profile. I just want to go a little bit deeper into what your key learnings are as you go through that process. Thank you. |
4,654 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Mark Zuckerberg: I think the main point here is just that it seems broadly applicable to a very wide variety of products. There are areas that are more part of our core business from making feed more relevant and reels more relevant to making ads more relevant, to helping advertisers generate better ads, to helping people create the content that they want, helping our integrity operations and compliance and the work that we do there. That's important. It's very valuable across all these aspects of the core business, but then it also is going to enable completely new types of services. We didn't have something like Meta AI before. We didn't have something like the Ray-Ban Meta Glasses before, and AI is going to be a really important ingredient of all of these things. There are also other new products like that, things around AI Studio. This year, we really focused on rolling out Meta AI as kind of our Single Assistant that people can ask any question to, but there's a lot of opportunities that I think will see ramp more over the next year in terms of both consumer and business use cases for people interacting with a wide variety of different AI agents, consumer ones with AI Studio around whether it's different creators or different kind of agents that people create for entertainment. Or on the business side, we do want to continue making progress on this vision of making it so that any small business or any business over time can, with a few clicks, stand up an AI agent that can help do customer service and sell things to all of their customers around the world. I think that that's a huge opportunity. So it's very broad, and I think part of what we're seeing is that there are a lot of opportunities. Some of the longer-term ones around Meta AI or AI Studio, those aren't necessarily a next few years massive profit opportunity, but there are a lot of things in the core business around engagement and monetization, which I think will be over the next few years. So I think we're trying to make sure that we get the |
4,655 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | and monetization, which I think will be over the next few years. So I think we're trying to make sure that we get the right people working on this and that we have the right amount of investment that's just going towards what we view as a very, very large opportunity. |
4,656 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Douglas Anmuth with JPMorgan/
Douglas Anmuth: Great. Thanks for taking the questions. Maybe just to follow up first on Meta AI, Mark, helpful context for me to understand how people are using the platform today, maybe you can just talk more about some of that functionality over time as agents are introduced, just how you really expect to use cases to expand beyond just longer and more complex queries. And then, Susan, on CapEx, just trying to understand your comment on 4Q a little bit more, it sounds like some of the payments pushed into 4Q with the guidance suggesting $15 billion to $17 billion in CapEx in the quarter. And is that something we should think about as run rate into 2025? Thank you. |
4,657 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Mark Zuckerberg: Yes, I mean, I can take the Meta AI question, although I'm sort of intentionally now not saying too much about the new capabilities and modalities that we're launching with Llama 4 e that are coming to Meta AI. I mean, I noted in the comments upfront that with each major generational update, I expect that there will be large new capacities that get added, but I think that that's just going to be, that's partially what I'm excited about, and we'll talk more about that next year when we're ready to. One of the trends that I do think we're going to see though is having the models, not just power Meta AI or our Single Assistant, but across AI Studio and business agents have that grow. I mean, this year, if you look back to where we were about a year ago, we were starting to roll out Meta AI. This year, we have really so far succeeded in having that grow and having a lot of people use that. There's obviously a lot more depth of engagement and new use cases that we want to add over time, but I'd say that we're today with AI Studio and business AIs about where we were with Meta AI about a year ago. So I think in the next year, our goal around that is going to be to try to make those pretty widespread use cases, even though there's going to be a multi-year path to getting kind of the depth of usage and the business results around that that we want. So there's a lot to do here though, and I'm excited to talk about that starting earlier next year. |
4,658 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Susan Li : Thanks Doug. So your second question was about Q4 CapEx. The expected step up in Q4 CapEx from Q3 is that part of that comes from increases in server spend and to a lesser extent data center CapEx, but with servers, there are these timing dynamics at play that you referred to because we had these server deliveries that landed late in Q3, and so the cash doesn't go out the door basically till Q4, and that's when you'll see the CapEx show up. And given the nature of capital expenditures generally, there is some actually quite a bit of lumpiness quarter-to-quarter. So it's a little bit hard to sort of extrapolate from any particular quarter. Overall, I'd say we're growing our infrastructure investments significantly this year, and we expect significant growth again in 2025.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Justin Post with Bank of America.
Justin Post: Great. I think I'll ask a cost question this time. Just thinking about use of AI and employee productivity, how are you able to utilize AI internally, and are you seeing big productivity gains in your R&D group? And second, I know I'll go after the headcount one more time, but Susan, how flexible is your headcount as you think about cost growth in other areas? Thanks. |
4,659 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Susan Li : Justin, so I'll take a crack at both of those. On the use of AI and employee productivity, it's certainly something that we're very excited about. I don't know that we have anything particularly quantitative that we're sharing right now. I think there are different efficiency opportunities with AI that we've been focused on in terms of where we can reduce costs over time and generate savings through increasing internal productivity in areas like coding for example, it's early, but we're seeing a lot of adoption internally of our internal assistant and coding agent. And we continue to make Llama more effective at coding, which should also make this use case increasingly valuable to developers over time. There are also places where we hope over time that we'll be able to deploy these tools against a lot of our content moderation efforts to help make the big body of content moderation work that we undertake to help it make it more efficient and effective for us to do so. And there are lots of other places around the company where I would say we're relatively early in exploring the way that we can use LLM-based tools to make different types of work streams more efficient. So all that is to say it's something we're pretty excited about. We have lots of teams focused on it. There are sort of small opportunities and G&A functions to what we hope will be big opportunities in areas like content moderation and coding productivity over time. On your second question about headcount, we're really, again, we're still mid-budget, so there's, we don't have very much that is definitive to share about this at the time. But as we're evaluating where there are opportunities for us to make good investments, we really think about there is a bucket of very ROI-driven headcount opportunities. We're very rigorous about the way we think about returns there and what the return opportunity is and what we think is the likelihood of those returns and what is the aggregate incrementality of those investments. And those are all |
4,660 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | we think is the likelihood of those returns and what is the aggregate incrementality of those investments. And those are all things that sort of we're evaluating when we think about where to invest in the core business and where we think we can deliver sort of ROI on a near-term basis. And then at the same time, we're also assessing what the opportunities look like, again, some of the more medium and long-term strategic areas of investment. And that includes our efforts in Gen AI and the infrastructure needed to support it and includes our investments in Reality Labs. And so those are all things that we're kind of assessing in kind of a portfolio of what we think we would do in 2025. With a couple of thoughts, one is, again, where can we sort of build the most flexibility into the way that we're thinking about either infrastructure or headcount plans. And the second is we're really focused across the company on our efficiency efforts broadly and making sure that we feel like we're continuing to push the whole company, including areas in which we expect that we will be making additional headcount investments to think about how they can be more efficient in 2025 than they were in 2024. |
4,661 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Ross Sandler with Barclays.
Ross Sandler: Great. Just two quick ones, Mark. You said something along the lines of the more standardized Llama becomes, the more improvements will flow back to the core Meta business. And I guess, could you dig in a little bit more on that? So the series of Llama models are being used by lots of developers building different things in AI. I guess, how are you using that vantage point to incubate new ideas inside Meta? And then second question is, you mentioned on one of the podcasts after the Meta Connect that assuming scaling laws hold up, we may need hundreds of billions of compute CapEx to kind of reach our goals around Gen AI. So I guess how quickly could you conceivably stand up that much infrastructure given some of the constraints around energy or custom ASICs or other factors? Is there any more color on the speed by which we could get that amount of compute online at Meta? Thank you. |
4,662 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Mark Zuckerberg: Yes, I can try to give some more color on this. I mean, the improvements to Llama, I'd say come in a couple of flavors. There's sort of the quality flavor and the efficiency flavor. There are a lot of researchers and independent developers who do work. And because Llama is available, they do the work on Llama and they make improvements and then they publish it and it becomes, it's very easy for us to then incorporate that both back into Llama and into our Meta products like Meta AI or AI Studio or Business AI because the work to be examples that are being shown are people doing it on our stack. Perhaps more importantly is just the efficiency and cost. I mean, this stuff is obviously very expensive. When someone figures out a way to run this better, if they can run it 20% more effectively, then that will save us a huge amount of money. And that was sort of the experience that we had with open compute and part of why we are leaning so much into open source here in the first place is that we found counterintuitively with open compute that by publishing and sharing the architectures and designs that we had for our compute, the industry standardized around it a bit more. We got some suggestions also that helped us save costs, and that just ended up being really valuable for us. Here, one of the big costs is chips. A lot of the infrastructure there, what we're seeing is that as Llama gets adopted more, you're seeing folks like NVIDIA and AMD and optimize their chips more to run Llama specifically well, which clearly benefits us. So it benefits everyone who's using Llama, but it makes our products better rather than if we were just on an island building a model that no one was kind of standardizing around in the industry. So that's some of what we're seeing around Llama and why I think it's good business for us to do this in an open way. In terms of Scaling Infra, when I talk about our teams executing well, some of that goes towards delivering more engaging products and some of it goes towards |
4,663 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | I talk about our teams executing well, some of that goes towards delivering more engaging products and some of it goes towards delivering more revenue. On the Infra side, it goes towards building out the expenses faster, right. So I think part of what we're seeing this year is the Infra team is executing quite well. And I think that's why over the course of the year, we've been able to build out more capacity and going into the year, we had a range for what we thought we could potentially do. And we have been able to do, I think, more than I think we'd kind of hoped and expected at the beginning of the year. And while that reflects as higher expenses, it's actually something that I'm quite happy that the team is executing well on. And I think that will, so that execution makes me somewhat more optimistic that we're going to be able to keep on building this out at a good pace. But that's part of this whole thing is this part of the formula around kind of building out the infrastructures is maybe not what investors want to hear in the near term that we're growing that, but I just think that the opportunities here are really big. We're going to continue investing significantly in this. And I'm proud of the teams that are doing great work to stand up a large amount of capacity. So that way we can deliver world class models and world class products. |
4,664 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Ron Josey with Citi.
Ronald Josey: Great. Thanks for taking the question. Maybe a bigger picture one as well, Mark, just this time on Threads, now one of the core apps on its way to becoming the next major social app and 275 million AMUs, wanted to hear your thoughts on how this product evolves over time, specifically from a monetization perspective, but also next steps on users. And then, Susan, with pricing up 11% in the quarter, I want to hear more about the pricing dynamics on the platform. I think you talked about just pricing increasing due to greater advertising demand and improved ad performance. So help us understand that a little bit more. Thank you. |
4,665 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Susan Li : Thanks, Ron. So your first question was about Threads. We're making good progress there. We are continuing to launch more features and make improvements to our ranking stack. We feel very good about the continued user growth on Threads. We're bringing on an increasing number of users each quarter and depth of engagement also continues to grow and in Q3, we saw especially strong user growth in key markets like the US, Taiwan, and Japan and we've added a number of new features over the course of Q3 including, account insights for businesses and creators to see how their posts perform, the ability to save multiple drafts, continuing to deliver on our commitment to integrate Threads with the Fediverse and basically we're very focused on continuing to build out the sort of functionality of Threads over time and being responsive to what users tell us that they're interested in. Specifically, as it pertains to monetization, we don't expect Threads to be a meaningful driver of 2025 revenue at this time. We've been just pleased with the growth trajectory and, again, are really focused on introducing features that the community finds valuable in working to deepen growth and engagement. Your second question was about the increase in average price per ad, so that grew 11% year-over-year driven by strong advertiser demand and part of that is because of better ad performance over time also and we saw that CPM growth accelerate slightly from 10% in Q2 in part because we experienced lower impression growth in Q3, but more broadly as we think about price and growth and this metric, the year-over-year growth in reported price per ad, there's a lot that goes into that including the auction dynamics resulting from fluctuations and impression growth. And one of the things that we feel like we're very focused on is really the input metrics. What are the conversions that we are delivering to advertisers? Are they getting more value over time? The sort of blended reported price per ad is complicated because all of those |
4,666 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Are they getting more value over time? The sort of blended reported price per ad is complicated because all of those things get rolled up into it. There are so many different objectives that advertisers are optimizing for. Those objectives have very different values that make them hard to compare on an apples to apples basis. But we care a lot about conversion growth, which is growing, continues to grow faster than impression growth. And are we seeing healthy cost per action or cost per conversion trends, which we are. And as long as we continue to get better at driving conversions for advertisers, that should have the effect of lifting CPMs over time because we're delivering more conversions for impressions served and that will result in higher value impressions. |
4,667 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Ken Gawrelski with Wells Fargo.
Ken Gawrelski: Thanks for the opportunity. I appreciate that. I have a bigger picture, kind of like ecosystem question here is, when we think, I'm curious, how far do you think we are from seeing a proliferation of third-party AI applications, specifically on the kind of the consumer side? I know we're seeing more and more on the enterprise side, agents, et cetera. But when do we see, how far out until we see a proliferation of consumer applications in the AI space? And how do you think about, and how does Meta think of itself as one of those key, it was one of those key application applications in the mobile internet and the desktop internet. But now you're also seemingly an infrastructure player as well. So I'd love to hear your thoughts there. Thank you. |
4,668 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Mark Zuckerberg: Yes, I mean, there are a lot of consumer products that we're working on. And with Llama, I would expect that app developers will be able to build a lot of really good things too. I've touched on Meta AI and AI Studio and Business AI as a bunch. And I expect those to be important parts of the consumer experience. Another part that I haven't talked about quite as much yet is the opportunity for AI to help people create content that just makes people's feed experiences better. But if you look at the big trends and feeds over the history of the company, it started off as friends, right. So all the updates that were in there were basically from your friends posting things. And then we went into this era where we added in creator content too. We're now a very large percent of the content on Instagram and Facebook is not from your friends. It may not even be from people that you're following directly. It could just be recommended content from creators that we can algorithmically determine is going to be interesting and engaging and valuable to you. And I think we're going to add a whole new category of content which is AI generated or AI summarized content or kind of existing content pulled together by AI in some way and I think that that's going to be just very exciting for Facebook and Instagram and maybe Threads or other kind of feed experiences over time. It's something that we're starting to test different things around this. I don't know if we know exactly what's going to work really well yet. Some things are promising. I don't know that this isn't going to be a big impact on the business in ‘25 would be my guess. But I think that there is, I have high confidence that over the next several years, this is going to be an important trend and one of the important applications. But you're going to get that, you're going to get Meta AI, AI studio, Business AI has been a whole lot of things that developers would do with Llama 2. |
4,669 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Youssef Squali with Truist Securities.
Youssef Squali: Yes, thank you very much, Mark, it appears that Meta AI now calls the web and provides conversational answers about pretty much anything including current events. And so with over 10 million advertisers and one of the best URLs offerings out there in your core business, just wondering if there are any plans to start maybe testing ads on commercial queries and move Meta AI closer to becoming a real answer engines for the billions of queries that you guys are already seeing. And then Susan, one of the biggest areas of pushback we get is around the reality of lasting the ongoing losses there. I think 16 billion last year, probably north of 20 billion this year. The question is, are we getting any closer to peak losses there or alternatively, what products do you think have the biggest potential there over the next couple of years? Thanks. |
4,670 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Susan Li : I'm happy to take both of these, Youssef, so your first question was on plans to provide ads on commercial queries. I think I alluded to this maybe in a much earlier question. Right now, we're really focused on making Meta AI as engaging and valuable a consumer experience as possible. Over time we think there will be a broadening set of queries that people use it for, and I think that the monetization opportunities will exist when over time as we get there. But right now, I would say we are really focused on the consumer experience above all, and it's just sort of a playbook for us with products that we put out in the world where we really dial in the consumer experience before we focus on what the monetization could look like. The second part of your question is about Reality Labs. We aren't sharing expectations beyond 2024 at this point. And we are certainly as we think about the 2025 budgeting process for Reality Labs, we're certainly thinking about where we want to make sure we're putting our sort of focus and energy. We are very excited again about the progress that we've seen with our smart glasses as well as the sort of strong consumer interest in them. And so we're kind of thinking about where we want to make sure that we are investing appropriately behind the consumer momentum that we see. Overall, I'd say Reality Labs is clearly one of our strategic long-term priorities and we expect it will be an area of significant investment as we build out towards the very ambitious product roadmap that we have there.
Operator: Your last question comes from the line of Mark Mahaney with Evercore ISI. |
4,671 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Operator: Your last question comes from the line of Mark Mahaney with Evercore ISI.
Mark Mahaney: Let me throw out two questions, please. One, this is a year in which we've had a lot of unusual events that could be driving ad revenue, major elections in not just the U.S. but Europe and in India and major sports events like World Cup and then there's some other things. Is there any, just in thinking about comps for next year and maybe in the future, anything, Susan, you would call out, like, how much of an impact there may have come from these one in every four or five year events. And then secondly, could you just talk a little bit more about WhatsApp monetization and where you are with that now? It sounds like that's the business messaging part; it's really feeding it nicely into other revenue. But help us think about where the monetization levels of WhatsApp are now versus where they can be two or three years down the road, how far away we are from optimization. Thank you. |
4,672 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Susan Li : Thanks, Mark. So your first question was about sort of the revenue backdrop in 2024. You mentioned events that occur once every four or five years, so I imagine we're talking about the Olympics. We historically have not seen meaningful incremental contribution from events like the Olympics. We believe that was largely the case this year. So when we think about the Q4 outlook and when we think about going into next year, we generally expect growth to continue to benefit from the healthy global advertising demand that we've seen. We think that our investments in improving our ads performance will continue to accrue benefits to advertisers. But obviously there's a big range of possible macro backdrops and that's something that we try to reflect in the range of revenue guidance that we give. But I don't know that there are a lot of specific events that we would say had a material sort of idiosyncratic to 2024 type of revenue impact. Your second question was around WhatsApp monetization and where we are. And right now what I would say again is click to message is really the big focus area for us here. We're seeing continued traction in this area. And in particular growth and click-to-WhatsApp ads remain particularly strong. And so we're continuing to focus both on scaling click-to-WhatsApp ads in more markets where WhatsApp has strong user adoption like Brazil for example. It's obviously earlier in the US but we're seeing good growth in click-to-WhatsApp ads and are continuing to invest in scaling in consumer adoption of WhatsApp in the US also which will create bigger opportunities down the line. So, and then of course a lot of work that we're doing to make the click to messaging ads more effective and helping to focus for the particular, helping advertisers optimize sorry for the particular conversion events that they care about. The other element of revenue on WhatsApp, I would say, is paid messaging that continues to grow at a strong pace again. This quarter remains, in fact, the primary driver of |
4,673 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | say, is paid messaging that continues to grow at a strong pace again. This quarter remains, in fact, the primary driver of growth in our Family of Apps, other revenue line, which was up 48% in Q3, and we're seeing generally a strong increase in the volume of paid conversations driven both by growth in the number of businesses adopting paid messaging, as well as in the conversational volume per business. |
4,674 | META | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-30 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Kenneth Dorell : Great. Thank you for joining us today. We appreciate your time, and we look forward to speaking with you again soon.
Operator: This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. And you may now disconnect. |
4,675 | META | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-07-31 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Operator: Good afternoon. My name is Krista and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Meta Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers’ remarks there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] This call will be recorded. Thank you very much. Kenneth Dorell, Meta's Director of Investor Relations, you may begin.
Kenneth Dorell : Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to Meta Platform's Second Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. Joining me today to discuss our results are Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, and Susan Li, CFO. Before we get started, I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by these forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause these results to differ materially are set forth in today's earnings press release and in our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, filed with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today and we undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. During this call, we will present both GAAP and certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release. The earnings press release and an accompanying Investor Presentation are available on our website at investor.fb.com. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Mark. |
4,676 | META | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-07-31 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Mark Zuckerberg : All right, thanks Ken. And hey everyone, thanks for joining today. This was a strong quarter for our community and business. We estimate that there are now more than 3.2 billion people using at least one of our apps each day. The growth we're seeing here in the US has especially been a bright spot. WhatsApp now serves more than 100 million monthly actives in the US, and we're seeing good year-over-year growth across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads as well, both in the US, and globally. I'm particularly pleased with the progress that we're making with young adults on Facebook. The numbers we are seeing, especially in the US, really go against the public narrative around who's using the app. A couple of years ago, we started focusing our apps more on 18 to 29 year olds and it's good to see that those efforts are driving good results. Another bright spot is Threads which is about to hit 200 million monthly actives. We're making steady progress towards building what looks like it's going to be another major social app. And we are seeing deeper engagement, and I'm quite pleased with the trajectory here. The big theme right now is, of course, AI. And I'll focus my comments today on three areas. What AI means for our family of apps and core business. What new AI experiences and opportunities we see, and how AI is shaping our metaverse work. So let's start. Across Facebook and Instagram, advances in AI continue to improve the quality of recommendations and drive engagement. And we keep finding that as we develop more general recommendation models, content recommendations get better. In this quarter, we rolled out our full screen video player and unified video recommendation service across Facebook, bringing Reels, longer videos, and live into a single experience. And this has allowed us to extend our unified AI systems, which had already increased engagement on Facebook Reels more than our initial move from CPUs to GPUs did. Over time I'd like to see us move towards a single unified recommendation |
4,677 | META | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-07-31 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | more than our initial move from CPUs to GPUs did. Over time I'd like to see us move towards a single unified recommendation system that powers all of the content including things like people you may know, across all of our surfaces. We're not there yet. They're still upside, and we're making good progress here. AI is also going to significantly evolve our services for advertisers in some exciting ways. It used to be that advertisers came to us with a specific audience they wanted to reach, like a certain age group, geography, or interests. Eventually, we got to the point where our ad systems could better predict who would be interested than the advertisers could themselves. But today, advertisers still need to develop creative themselves. And in the coming years, AI will be able to generate creative for advertisers as well. And we'll also be able to personalize it as people see it. Over the long term, advertisers will basically just be able to tell us a business objective and a budget, and we're going to go do the rest for them. We're going to get there incrementally over time, but I think this is going to be a very big deal. Moving on to some of the brand new experiences that AI enables, last quarter we started broadly rolling out our assistant Meta AI, and it is on track to achieve our goal of becoming the most used AI assistant by the end of the year. We have an exciting roadmap ahead of things that we want to add, but the bottom-line here is that Meta AI feels like it is on track to be an important service and it's improving quickly both in intelligence and features. Some of the use cases are utilitarian like searching for information or role-playing difficult conversations before you have them with another person and other uses are more creative like the new imagine yourself feature that lets you create images of yourself doing whatever you want in whatever style you want and part of the beauty of AI is that it's general. So we're still uncovering the wide range of use cases that it's valuable for. An |
4,678 | META | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-07-31 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | part of the beauty of AI is that it's general. So we're still uncovering the wide range of use cases that it's valuable for. An important part of our vision is that we're not just creating a single AI, but enabling lots of people to create their own AIs. And this week we launched AI Studio, which lets anyone create AIs to interact with across our apps. I think the creators are especially going to find this quite valuable. There are millions of creators across our apps, and these are people who want to engage more with their communities, and their communities want to engage more with them, but there are only so many hours in the day. So now they are going to be able to use AI Studio to create AI agents that can channel them to chat with their community, answer people's questions, create content and more. So I'm quite excited about this. But this goes beyond creators too. Anyone is going to be able to build their own AIs based on their interests or different topics that they are going to be able to engage with or share with their friends. Business AIs are the other big piece here. We're still in Alpha testing with more and more businesses. The feedback we're getting is positive so far. Over time, I think that just like every business has a website, a social media presence, and an email address, in the future I think that every business is also going to have an AI agent that their customers can interact with. And our goal is to make it easy for every small business, eventually every business, to pull all of their content and catalog into an AI agent that drives sales and saves them money. When this is working at scale, I think that this is going to dramatically accelerate our business messaging revenue. There are a lot of other new opportunities here that I'm excited about too, but I'll save those for another day when we're ready to roll them out. The engine that powers all these new experiences is the Llama family of foundation models. In this quarter we released Llama 3.1 which includes the first frontier level |
4,679 | META | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-07-31 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | is the Llama family of foundation models. In this quarter we released Llama 3.1 which includes the first frontier level open source model as well as new and industry leading small and medium sized models. The $405 billion model has better cost performance relative to the leading closed models, and because it's open, it is immediately the best choice for fine-tuning and distilling your own custom models of whatever size you need. I think we are going to look back at Llama 3.1 as an inflection point in the industry where open source AI started to become the industry standard, just like Linux is. I often get asked why I'm so bullish on Open Source. I wrote a letter along with the Llama 3.1 release, explaining why I believe that Open Source is better for developers, for Meta app, and for the world more broadly. My view is that Open Source will be safer, will enable innovation that improves all of our lives faster, and we'll also create more shared prosperity. For Meta's own interests, we're in the business of building the best consumer and advertiser experiences. And to do that, we need to have access to the leading technology infrastructure and not get constrained by what competitors will let us do. But these models are ecosystems. They're not just isolated pieces of software that we can develop by ourselves. So if we want the most robust ecosystem of tools, efficiency improvements, silicon optimizations, and other integrations to develop around our models, then we need them to be widely used by developers across the industry. And once we know that we're going to have access to the leading models, then I'm confident that we are going to be able to build the best social and advertising experiences. Part of why I'm so optimistic about this is that we have a long track record of success with open source. We've saved billions of dollars with open compute project by having supply chains standardized on our infrared designs. Open sourcing tools like PyTorch and React has led to real benefits for us from all the |
4,680 | META | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-07-31 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | standardized on our infrared designs. Open sourcing tools like PyTorch and React has led to real benefits for us from all the industry's contributions. This approach has consistently worked for us and I expect it will work here too. Another major area of focus is figuring out the right level of infra capacity to support training more and more advanced models. Llama 3 is already competitive with the most advanced models, and we're already starting to work on Llama 4, which we're aiming to be the most advanced in the industry next year. We are planning for the compute clusters and data we'll need for the next several years. The amount of compute needed to train Llama 4 will likely be almost 10 times more than what we used to train Llama 3, and future models will continue to grow beyond that. It's hard to predict how this trend -- how this will trend multiple generations out into the future. But at this point, I'd rather risk building capacity before it is needed rather than too late, given the long lead times for spinning up new inference projects. And as we scale these investments, we're of course, going to remain committed to operational efficiency across the company. The last area that I want to discuss is how AI is shaping our metaverse work, which continues to be our other long-term focus. Last quarter, I discussed how advances in AI have pulled in the timelines for some of our products. A few years ago, I would have predicted that holographic AR would be possible before Smart AI, but now it looks like those technologies will actually be ready in the opposite order. We're well positioned for that because of the Reality Labs investments that we've already made. Ray-Ban Meta Glasses continue to be a bigger hit sooner than we expected, thanks in part to AI. Demand is still outpacing our ability to build them, but I'm hopeful that we'll be able to meet that demand soon. EssilorLuxottica has been a great partner to work with on this, and we are excited to team up with them to build future generations of AI |
4,681 | META | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-07-31 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | has been a great partner to work with on this, and we are excited to team up with them to build future generations of AI glasses, as we continue to build our long-term partnership. Quest 3 sales are also outpacing our expectations. And I think that's because it is not just the best MR headset for the price, but it's the best headset on the market, period. In addition to gaming, people are increasingly taking advantage of Quest's capabilities as a general computing platform, spending time watching videos, browsing websites, extending their PC via virtual desktop, and more. Horizon also continues to grow across VR, mobile, and desktop, and I expect that it will become an increasingly important part of that ecosystem as well. We're hosting our Annual Connect Conference on September 25th, and we will have lots of exciting updates around all of our AI and Metaverse work, so I encourage you to tune into that. At the end of the day, we are in the fortunate position where the strong results that we're seeing in our core products and business give us the opportunity to make deep investments for the future. And I plan to fully seize that opportunity to build some amazing things that will pay off for our community and our investors for decades to come. The progress we're making on both the foundational technology and product experiences suggests that we're on the right track. I'm proud of what our team has accomplished so far, and I'm optimistic about our ability to execute on the opportunities ahead. As always, thank you to our teams who are pushing all this important work forward, and thanks to all of you for being on this journey with us. And now here is Susan. |
4,682 | META | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-07-31 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Susan Li : Thanks Mark and good afternoon everyone. Let's begin with our consolidated results. All comparisons are on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise noted. Q2 total revenue was $39.1 billion up 22% or 23% on a constant currency basis. Q2 total expenses were $24.2 billion, up 7% compared to last year. In terms of the specific line items, cost of revenue increased 23% driven primarily by higher infrastructure and reality labs inventory costs. R&D increased 13%, primarily driven by higher headcount-related expenses and infrastructure costs which were partially offset by lower restructuring costs. Marketing and sales decreased 14%, due mainly to lower restructuring and headcount-related costs. G&A decreased 12%, mostly due to lower legal-related expenses. We ended the first quarter with almost 70,800 employees, up 2% from Q1. Second quarter operating income was $14.8 billion, representing a 38% operating margin. Our tax rate for the quarter was 11%. Net income was $13.5 billion, or $5.16 per share. Capital expenditures, including principal payments on finance leases, were $8.5 billion, driven by investments in servers, data centers, and network infrastructure. Free cash flow was $10.9 billion. We repurchased $6.3 billion of our Class A common stock and paid $1.3 billion in dividends to shareholders, ending the quarter with $58.1 billion in cash and marketable securities and $18.4 billion in debt. Moving now to our segment results. I'll begin with our Family of Apps segment. Our community across the Family of Apps continues to grow, with approximately 3.27 billion people using at least one of our Family of Apps on a daily basis in June. Q2 total Family of Apps revenue was $38.7 billion, up 22% year-over-year. Q2 Family of Apps ads revenue was $38.3 billion, up 22% or 23% on a constant currency basis. Within ad revenue, the online commerce vertical was the largest contributor to year-over-year growth, followed by gaming and entertainment and media. On a user geography basis, ad revenue growth was strongest in |
4,683 | META | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-07-31 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | growth, followed by gaming and entertainment and media. On a user geography basis, ad revenue growth was strongest in rest of world and Europe at 33% and 26% respectively. Asia Pacific grew 20% and North America grew 17%. On an advertiser geography basis, total revenue growth continued to be strongest in Asia Pacific at 28%. The growth was below the first quarter rate of 41%, as we lapped a period of stronger demand from China-based advertisers. In Q2, the total number of ad impressions served across our services and the average price per ad both increased 10%. Impression growth was mainly driven by Asia Pacific and rest of world. Pricing growth was driven by increased advertiser demand in part due to improved ad performance. This was partially offset by impression growth particularly from lower monetizing regions and surfaces. Family of Apps other revenue was $389 million, up 73%, driven primarily by business messaging revenue growth from our WhatsApp business platform. We continue to direct the majority of our investments toward the development and operation of our Family of Apps. In Q2, Family of Apps expenses were $19.4 billion, representing approximately 80% of our overall expenses. Family of Apps expenses were up 4%, mostly due to higher infrastructure and headcount related expenses, which were partially offset by lower restructuring costs. Family of Apps operating income was $19.3 billion, representing a 50% operating margin. Within our Reality Labs segment, Q2 was $353 million, up 28% driven primarily by Quest headset sales. Reality Labs expenses were $4.8 billion, up 21% year-over-year, driven mainly by higher headcount-related expenses and Reality Labs inventory costs. Reality Labs operating loss was $4.5 billion. Turning now to the business outlook. There are two primary factors that drive our revenue performance, our ability to deliver engaging experiences for our community and our effectiveness at monetizing that engagement over time. To deliver engaging experiences, we remain focused on executing |
4,684 | META | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-07-31 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | and our effectiveness at monetizing that engagement over time. To deliver engaging experiences, we remain focused on executing our priorities, including video and in-feed recommendations. On Instagram, Reels engagement continues to grow as we make ongoing enhancements to our recommendation systems. Part of this work has been focused on increasing the share of original posts within recommendations so people can discover the best of Instagram, including content from emerging creators. Now, more than half of recommendations in the US come from original posts. On Facebook, we're seeing encouraging early results from the global rollout of our unified video player and ranking systems in June. This initiative allows us to bring all video types on Facebook into one viewing experience, which we expect will unlock additional growth opportunities for short-form video, as we increasingly mix shorter videos into the overall base of Facebook video engagement. We expect the relevance of video recommendations will continue to increase as we benefit from unifying video ranking across Facebook and integrating our next-generation recommendation systems. These have already shown promising gains since we began using the new systems to support Facebook Reels recommendations last year. We expect to expand these new systems to support more services beyond Facebook video over the course of this year and next year. We are also seeing good momentum with our longer-term engagement priorities, including Generative AI and Threads. People have used Meta AI for billions of queries since we first introduced it. We're seeing particularly promising signs on WhatsApp in terms of retention and engagement, which has coincided with India becoming our largest market for Meta AI usage. You can now use Meta AI in over 20 countries and eight languages, and in the US we are rolling out new features like Imagine Edit, which allows people to edit images they generate with Meta AI. Beyond Generative AI, the Threads community also continues to grow and deepen |
4,685 | META | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-07-31 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | people to edit images they generate with Meta AI. Beyond Generative AI, the Threads community also continues to grow and deepen their engagement, as we ship new features and enhance our content recommendation systems. Now to the second driver of our revenue performance, increasing monetization efficiency. There are two parts to this work. The first is optimizing the level of ads within organic engagement. We continue to see opportunities to grow ad supply on lower monetizing surfaces like video, including within Facebook as the mix of overall video engagement shifts more to shorter videos over time, which creates more ad insertion opportunities. More broadly, we are continuing to get better at determining the best ads to show and when to show them during a person session across both Facebook and Instagram. This is enabling us to drive revenue growth and conversions without increasing the number of ads or in some cases even reducing ad load. The second part of improving monetization efficiency is enhancing marketing performance. We continue to be pleased with our progress here, with AI playing an increasingly central role. We're improving ad delivery by adopting more sophisticated modeling techniques made possible by AI advancements, including our Meta Lattice ad ranking architecture, which continued to provide ad performance and efficiency gains in the second quarter. We're also making it easier for advertisers to maximize ad performance and automate more of their campaign setup with our Advantage+ suite of solutions. We're seeing these tools continue to unlock performance gains, with a study conducted this year demonstrating 22% higher return on ad spend for US advertisers after they adopted Advantage+ Shopping campaigns. Advertiser adoption of these tools continues to expand and we are adding new capabilities to make them even more useful. For example, this quarter we introduced flexible format to Advantage+ Shopping, which allows advertisers to upload multiple images and videos in a single ad that we can |
4,686 | META | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-07-31 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | format to Advantage+ Shopping, which allows advertisers to upload multiple images and videos in a single ad that we can select from and automatically determine which format to serve in order to yield the best performance. We have also now expanded the list of conversions that businesses can optimize for using Advantage+ shopping to include an additional 10 conversion types, including objectives like add to cart. Looking forward, we believe Generative AI will play a growing role in how businesses market and engage with customers at scale. We expect this technology will continue to make it easier for businesses to develop customized and diverse ad creatives. We've seen promising early results since introducing our first Generative AI ad features, image expansion, background generation, and text generation with more than 1 million advertisers using at least one of these solutions in the past month. In May, we began rolling out full image generation capabilities into Advantage+ Creative, and we're already seeing improved performance from advertisers using the tool. Finally, we expect AI will help businesses communicate with customers more efficiently through messaging. We're starting by testing the ability for businesses to use AI in their chats with customers to help sell their goods and services and to generate leads. While we are in the early stages, we continue to expand the number of advertisers we are testing with and have seen good advances in the quality of responses since we began using Llama 3. Next, I’d like to discuss our approach to capital allocation which remains unchanged. We continue to invest both in enhancing our core experiences in the near-term and developing technologies that we believe will transform how people engage with our services in the years ahead. We expect that having sufficient compute capacity will be central to many of these opportunities. So we’re investing meaningfully in infrastructure to support our core AI work in content ranking and ads, as well as our generative AI and |
4,687 | META | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-07-31 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | meaningfully in infrastructure to support our core AI work in content ranking and ads, as well as our generative AI and advanced research efforts. Our ongoing investment in core AI capacity is informed by the strong returns we've seen and expect to deliver in the future, as we advance the relevance of recommended content and ads on our platform. While we expect the returns from Generative AI to come in over a longer period of time, we’re mapping these investments against the significant monetization opportunities that we expect to be unlocked across customized ad creative, business messaging, a leading AI assistant and organic content generation. As we scale generative AI training capacity to advance our foundation models, we’ll continue to build our infrastructure in a way that provides us with flexibility in how we use it over time. This will allow us to direct training capacity to gen AI inference or to our core ranking and recommendation work, when we expect that doing so would be more valuable. We will also continue our focus on improving the cost efficiency of our workloads over time. Reality Labs remains our other long-term initiative that we continue to invest meaningfully in. Quest 3 is selling well and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are showing very promising traction with the early signals that we’re seeing across demand, usage and retention increasing our confidence in the long-run potential of AR glasses. Finally, as we pursue these investments across near and long-term priorities, we will remain focused on operating the business efficiently. Turning now to the revenue outlook. We expect third quarter 2024 total revenue to be in the range of $38.5 billion to $41 billion. Our guidance assumes foreign currency is a 2% headwind to year-over-year total revenue growth based on current exchange rates. Turning now to the expense outlook. We expect full year 2024 total expenses to be in the range of $96 billion to $99 billion, unchanged from our prior outlook. For Reality Labs, we continue to expect 2024 |
4,688 | META | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-07-31 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | be in the range of $96 billion to $99 billion, unchanged from our prior outlook. For Reality Labs, we continue to expect 2024 operating losses to increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts and investments to scale our -- to further scale our ecosystem. While we do not intend to provide any quantitative guidance for 2025 until the fourth quarter call, we expect infrastructure costs will be a significant driver of expense growth next year. As we recognize depreciation and operating costs associated with our expanded infrastructure footprint. Turning now to the CapEx outlook. We anticipate our full year 2024 capital expenditures will be in the range of $37 billion to $40 billion, updated from our prior range of $35 billion to $40 billion. While we continue to refine our plans for next year, we currently expect significant CapEx growth in 2025 as we invest to support our AI research and our product development efforts. On to tax. Absent any changes to our tax landscape, we expect our full year 2024 tax rate to be in the mid-teens. In addition we continue to monitor an active regulatory landscape, including the increasing legal and regulatory headwinds in the EU and the US that could significantly impact our business and our financial results. In closing, Q2 was another good quarter. We continue to execute well across our business priorities and have exciting opportunities in front of us to deliver more value to the people and businesses using our products around the world. With that, Krista let's open up the call for questions. |
4,689 | META | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-07-31 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Operator: Thank you. We will now be open the line for question-and-answer session [Operator Instructions] And your first question comes from the line of Brian Nowak from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Brian Nowak: Great. Thanks for taking my questions. I have two, one for Mark, one for Susan. Mark I wanted to sort of go back to some of the new generative AI-enabled use cases for users and advertisers. You talked about Meta AI, Studio, chatbots, [foundation] (ph) models. If you could just sort of hone in on one or two of those that you are most excited about, we are seeing good signal that could be a real driver for the business in '25, '26 just so we sort of know where are you most focused on all those opportunities it would be helpful. And the second one, Susan, you have a lot of CapEx priorities from building new infrastructure for next-generation models, compute capacity. Just walk us through again on the CapEx philosophy and any guardrails you have around ensuring you generate a healthy return on invested capital for investors from all the CapEx. Thanks. |
4,690 | META | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-07-31 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Mark Zuckerberg: I can take the first one. So I think the things that will drive the most results in 2025 and 2026 are actually the first category of things that I talked about in my comments which are the ways that AI is shaping the existing products. So the ways that it is improving recommendations and helping people find better content, as well as making the advertising experiences more effective. I think there is a lot of upside there. Those are already products that are at scale. The AI work that we are doing is going to improve that. It will improve the experience and the business results. The other areas that we are working on, I mean I think you all know this from following our business for a while, but we have a relatively long business cycle of starting a new product, scaling it to something that reaches 1 billion people or more and only then really focusing on monetizing at scale. So realistically, for things like Meta AI or AI Studio, I mean these are things that I think will increase engagement in our products and have other benefits that will improve the business and engagement in the near term. But before we are really talking about monetization of any of those things by themselves, I mean I don't think that anyone should be surprised that I would expect that -- that will be years, right? It's just -- I think that that's like what we've seen with Reels, it's what we saw with all these things. But I think for those who have followed our business for a long time, you can also get a pretty good sense of when things are going to work years in advance. And I think that the people who bet on those early indicators tend to do pretty well, which is why I wanted to share in my comments the early indicator that we had on Meta AI, which is I mean look, it is early. Last quarter, we -- I think it just started rolling it out a week or two before our earnings call. This time we are a few months later. And what we can say is I think we are on track to achieve our goal of being the most used AI assistant by the |
4,691 | META | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-07-31 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | few months later. And what we can say is I think we are on track to achieve our goal of being the most used AI assistant by the end of this year. And I think that is a pretty big deal. Is that the only thing we want to do? No. I mean we obviously want to kind of grow that and grow the engagement on that to be a lot deeper, and then we will focus on monetizing it over time. But the early signals on this are good and I think that -- that's kind of all that we could reasonably have insight into at this point. But I do think that part of what's so fundamental about AI is, it is going to end up affecting almost every product that we have in some way. It will improve the existing ones and will make a whole lot of new ones possible. So it is why there are all the jokes about how all the tech CEOs get on these earnings calls and just talk about AI the whole time. It is because it is actually super exciting, and it is going to change all these different things over multiple time horizons. |
4,692 | META | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-07-31 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Susan Li: And Brian, I can take the second question. On the ROI part of your question, I’d broadly characterize our AI investments into two buckets; core AI and Gen AI. And the two are really at different stages, as it relates to driving revenue for our businesses and our ability to measure returns. On our core AI work, we continue to take a very ROI based approach to our investment here. We are still seeing strong returns as improvements to both engagement and ad performance have translated into revenue gains and it makes sense for us to continue investing here. Gen AI is where we are much earlier, as Mark just mentioned in his comments. We don't expect our Gen AI products to be a meaningful driver of revenue in 2024. But we do expect that they are going to open up new revenue opportunities over time that will enable us to generate a solid return off -- of our investment while we are also open sourcing subsequent generations of Llama. And we've talked about the four primary areas that we are focused here on the Gen AI opportunities to enhance the core ads business, to help us grow in business messaging, the opportunities around Meta AI, and the opportunities to grow core engagement over time. The other thing I’d say is, we are continuing to build our AI infrastructure with fungibility in mind, so that we can flex capacity where we think it will be put to best use. The infrastructure that we build for gen AI training can also be used for Gen AI inference. We can also use it for ranking and recommendations by making certain modifications like adding general compute and storage. And we are also employing a strategy of staging our data center sites, at various phases of development, which allows us to flex up to meet more demand and less lead time if needed while limiting how much spend we are committing to in the outer years. So while we do expect that we are going to grow CapEx significantly in 2025, we feel like we have a good framework in place in terms of thinking about where the opportunities are and making |
4,693 | META | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-07-31 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | in 2025, we feel like we have a good framework in place in terms of thinking about where the opportunities are and making sure that we have the flexibility to deploy it, as makes the most sense. |
4,694 | META | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-07-31 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Mark Shmulik with Bernstein. Please go ahead.
Mark Shmulik: Yes. Hi, thanks for taking my question. Just as we look at the revenue guidance and the outlook, Susan, any color you can share on just kind of the state of the overall digital ad market? And you've highlighted some areas where you are seeing strength versus kind of some of the idiosyncratic efforts you've made to kind of improve the efficacy of the ad product. Thank you.
Susan Li: Hi, Mark. We are continuing to see healthy global advertising demand, and we are also delivering ongoing ad performance improvements just related to all of the investments that we've continued to make over time. And improving the sort of ads, targeting ranking, delivery, all of the fundamental infrastructure there. And we expect that all of that will continue to benefit ad spend in Q3. We do expect year-over-year growth to slow in Q3, as we are lapping strong growth from China-based advertisers, as well as strong Reels impression growth from a year ago. And we also expect modestly larger FX headwinds in Q3 based on current rates.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Eric Sheridan: Thank you so much for taking the question. I'll just ask one. You called out building community size and what's happened in the United States, as well as Threads. How are you thinking about those newer faster-growing elements of either Messaging or Threads as a platform and the mix between the potential for engagement growth and overall monetization longer term of either the messaging layer or Threads and what you are most excited about there to build to sort of capitalize on scale but bring it back towards monetization? Thank you. |
4,695 | META | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-07-31 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Mark Zuckerberg: I can start and Susan can jump in, if she has anything else that she wants to add. So the WhatsApp stat I think, is really important as a business trend just because the United States punches above its weight in terms of, it is such a large percent of our revenue. So before, WhatsApp was sort of the leading messaging app in many countries around the world but not in the US. And I think now that we're starting to make inroads into leading in the US as more and more people use the product and realize that, hey, it was a really good experience, the best experience for cross-platform communication and groups and on all these different things. I think that -- that's going to just mean that all of the work that we are doing to grow the business opportunity there over time is just going to have a big tailwind if the US ends up being a big market. So that's one reason why it's really relevant. It is obviously also personally somewhat gratifying to see all the people around us starting to use WhatsApp, so I think that is pretty fun but maybe somewhat less relevant from a business perspective. Threads, I think it is another example of something that it got off to about as good of a start of any app that I can think of. I think, it was the fastest growing app to 100 million people. And it is a good reminder that even when you have that start, the path from there to 1 billion people using an app is still multiple years. And that's our product cycle. And I think that -- that's something that is a little bit different about Meta in the way we build consumer products and the business around them than a lot of other companies that ship something and start selling it and making revenue from it immediately. So I think that's something that our investors and folks thinking about analyzing the business, if needed to always grapple with, is all these new products, we ship them and then there is a multiyear time horizon between scaling them and then scaling them into not just consumer experiences but very large |
4,696 | META | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-07-31 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | there is a multiyear time horizon between scaling them and then scaling them into not just consumer experiences but very large businesses. But the thing that I think is just super exciting about Threads is that we've been building this company for 20 years, and there are just not that many opportunities that come around to grow 1 billion person app. I mean, there are -- I don't know, maybe a dozen of them in the world or something, right? I mean, there are certainly more of them outside the company than inside the company, but we do pretty well and being able to add another one to the portfolio if we execute really well on this is just really exciting to have that potential. Now obviously, there is a ton of work between now and there. I mean, we are almost at 200 million. So it is a really good milestone, I'm excited about that. A lot of work between this and it being a large part of the business. But I do think that these kind of opportunities are pretty rare and that's something that we are just really excited about. I think the team is doing great work on it. |
4,697 | META | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-07-31 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Susan Li: Eric, I would just add to that in terms of [nearer-term] (ph) sources of impression growth, we really expect that video is going to remain a source of impression growth for us in the second half. On Instagram, we expect Reels to continue to drive growth, while on Facebook, we expect to grow overall video time, while increasing the mix of short-form video, which creates more impression growth opportunities. And generally we expect continued community growth foracross our apps.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Doug Anmuth with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.
Douglas Anmuth: Hi, thanks for taking my questions. One for Mark, one for Susan. Mark just in terms of infrastructure and CapEx, you've talked about currently building out not just for Llama 3 and 4 but really out to 7 perhaps and then Llama 4, 10x the compute required versus Llama 3. Just given how much you are building ahead, how does that influence the shape of the CapEx curve over a multiyear period? And then Susan, if you could talk a little bit more about the 3Q outlook. I know you are talking about tougher comps, but at the same time, it really suggests only 1 point of FX neutral [decel] (ph) at the high end. So just curious if there's anything else you can point to more specifically that's driving the expected strength here. Thanks. |
4,698 | META | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-07-31 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Susan Li: Thanks, Doug. I can go ahead and talk about both of those. So your first question was sort of about the longer-term CapEx outlook. We haven't really shared an outlook sort of on the longer-term CapEx trajectory. In part infrastructure is an extraordinarily dynamic planning area for us right now. We are continuing to work through what the scope of the Gen AI road maps will look like over that time. Our expectation obviously again, is that we are going to significantly increase our investments in AI infrastructure next year, and we'll give further guidance as appropriate. But we are building all of that CapEx, again with the factors in mind that I talked about previously thinking about both how to build it flexibly, so we can deploy to core AI and Gen AI use cases as needed. And making sure that we both feel good about the returns that we're seeing on the core AI investments, which we are able to measure more immediately. And then we feel good about the opportunities in the gen AI efforts. Your second question was about the Q3 revenue outlook. Again I mentioned this earlier. We have seen healthy global advertising demand on our platform. We are delivering ongoing ad performance improvements, which again we feel like is a result of many, many quarters of effort that have accrued and will continue to accrue value to our platform. And we saw basically in Q2 where revenue grew 22% that there was broad-based strength across regions and verticals including particular strength among smaller advertisers, and we expect that generally to continue into Q3.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Justin Post with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Justin Post: Great. Thank you. I just want to get back to the comment on US young adult user growth, especially maybe on Facebook and Instagram. I know you made a big change with Reels a couple of years ago. But what are those users doing on Facebook and Instagram? And can you give us any quantification of the usage growth? Thank you. |
4,699 | META | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-07-31 17:00:00 | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 20,765,463 | Susan Li: Thanks, Justin. So building products with young adults in mind has been a core priority area for the Facebook team in recent years, and we've been very encouraged to see these efforts translate into engagement growth with this cohort. We have seen healthy growth in young adult app usage in the US and Canada for the past several quarters. And we have seen that products like Groups and Marketplace have seen particular traction with young adults. Posting to groups in the US and Canada has been growing. That's been boosted mainly by young adults. And we also see that they are active users of Marketplace, which has benefited from product improvements and strong demand for second-hand products in the US.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Mark Mahaney with Evercore ISI. Please go ahead.
Mark Mahaney: I was going to ask about Marketplace so that's a nice segue. It is a great, somewhat under-monetized or arguably very under-monetized asset. I know you indirectly monetize it and it's a very large marketplace. It may even be bigger than eBay. Your thoughts on what you may want to do in the future in terms of monetizing it, in part maybe even improve the quality of the Marketplace. And then secondly, I just want to ask you about headcount. It is down about 1% year-over-year. You are pretty much back at par with where the employee headcount was prior to significant reduction. How should we think about headcount growth going forward? Did you talk about a significant growth in CapEx? Should we expect a moderate growth in headcount significant? Any thoughts on that would be helpful. Thank you. |
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