Our AI work is driving good results, says Zuckerberg as Meta reports $28.65 bn revenues

Meta has reported revenue of $28.65 billion in Q1 2023, an increase of 3% year-over-year, and an increase of 6% year-over-year on a constant currency basis.

In the first quarter of 2023, ad impressions delivered across Meta’s Family of Apps (FoA) increased by 26% year-over-year, however the average price per ad decreased by 17% year-over-year.

Commenting on the results, Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO, Meta, said, “We had a good quarter and our community continues to grow. Our AI work is driving good results across our apps and business. We’re also becoming more efficient so we can build better products faster and put ourselves in a stronger position to deliver our long term vision.”

Facebook’s daily active users (DAUs) stood at 2.04 billion on average for March 2023, an increase of 4% year-over-year, while monthly active users (MAUs) were reported at 2.99 billion as of March 31, 2023, an increase of 2% year-over-year.

Family daily active people (DAP) was 3.02 billion on average for March 2023, an increase of 5% year-over-year. Family monthly active people (MAP) was 3.81 billion as of March 31, 2023, an increase of 5% year-over-year.

In March 2023, Meta announced three rounds of planned layoffs to further reduce its company size by approximately 10,000 employees across the Family of Apps (FoA) and Reality Labs (RL) segments. In connection with these layoffs, Meta expects to incur total pre-tax severance and related personnel costs of approximately $1 billion, of which $523 million was recognised during the first quarter of 2023 and the remaining charges will be substantially recorded by the end of 2023.

Meta has stated that total restructuring charges recorded under its FoA segment were $934 million and RL segment were $210 million during the first quarter of 2023. Excluding these charges, the operating margin would have been four percentage points higher and the diluted EPS would have been $0.44 higher for the first quarter of 2023.

Meta expects second quarter 2023 total revenue to be in the range of $29.5-32 billion. In a release issued, Meta stated, “Our guidance assumes foreign currency headwinds will be less than 1% to year-over-year total revenue growth in the second quarter, based on current exchange rates.”

It further said, “We anticipate our full-year 2023 total expenses will be in the range of $86-90 billion, updated from our prior outlook provided in March. This outlook includes $3-5 billion of restructuring costs related to facilities consolidation charges and severance and other personnel costs. We continue to expect Reality Labs operating losses to increase year-over-year in 2023.”

“We expect capital expenditures to be in the range of $30-33 billion, unchanged from our prior estimate. This outlook reflects our ongoing build out of AI capacity to support ads, Feed and Reels, along with an increased investment in capacity for our generative AI initiatives,” Meta added.