Meta Shares Rise On Strong Revenues, Profits

Meta Platforms’ shares rose slightly in after-hours trading on Wednesday after it beat analysts’ expectations on revenues and profits.

Revenues for the fourth quarter came to $48.39 billion (£38.9bn), compared to LSEG analysts’ expectations of $47.04bn, up 21 percent year-on-year.

Net income rose by 49 percent year-on-year to $20.8bn, up from $14bn for the same period a year earlier.

The company said it expects first-quarter revenues in the range of $39.5bn to $41.8bn.

AI growth

The company’s Meta AI chatbot had more than 700 million monthly active users, up from 600 million in December.

The firm has said it expects to reach one billion users this year.

Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the arrival of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI chatbot that topped Apple’s iPhone download charts over the weekend, validated Meta’s open-source strategy for its Llama models.

DeepSeek’s models are also released as open source.

The company said it has finished training a mini version of Llama 4 and is making progress at training a larger version of the large language model (LLM).

The firm reiterated that it plans to spend $60bn to $65bn on capital expenditure this year to support its AI strategy, including building data centres.

Daily active users reached 3.35 billion for the quarter, up from 3.29 billion the previous quarter and beating analysts expectations of 3.32 billion.

Fourth-quarter expenses were $25.02bn, up 5 percent year-on-year.

Total expenses for 2025 are expected to reach $114bn to $119bn, with the bulk of the spending on infrastructure.

Smart glasses

Meta didn’t provide a revenue outlook for this year, saying only that it expected its core business to “continue delivering strong revenue growth”.

Meta said it plans to hire workers for infrastructure, monetisation, its Reality Labs wearable unit, generative AI, regulation and compliance.

At the end of December Meta’s staff numbered more than 74,000, up 10 percent year-on-year.

Reality Labs, once touted as the heart of the company’s “metaverse” strategy with wearable virtual and augmented reality hardware, saw an operating loss of $5bn for the quarter, with $1.1bn in sales.

The company said wearable gear similar to its Ray-Ban branded smart glasses could become universal in a decade’s time.