Meta Platforms beat earnings expectations in Q2, delivering strong revenue growth and expanding user engagement while signaling ongoing AI initiatives through Meta AI and related hardware.
Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) jumped in Wednesday’s afterhours trade, after bumper second-quarter results that easily beat market expectations.
Revenue was up 22% year-over-year totalling $39.07 billion and was above the Wall Street consensus forecast which was pitched at $38.31 billion.
Net income for the quarter was $13.47 billion, massively higher than the $7.79 billion reported this time last year.
Meanwhile, earnings per share rose to $5.16, from $2.98 a year ago, and was comfortably ahead of the $4.73 predicted by analysts.
The Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp parent highlighted growth in user engagement, with its metric ‘daily active people’ (DAP) reaching 3.27 billion, which marked a 7% improvement year-over-year increase.
Mark Zuckerberg’s still-relatively new text-based social network app (designed to challenge Elon Musk’s X), boasted an expansion in monthly users up to 200 million.
Across the social media apps, Meta saw market shares in advertising an a 22% increase in ad related revenue – outpacing the 11% growth reported last week by Google parent Alphabet.
In 2024, it wouldn’t be a big-tech earnings report without some AI commentary, as thus Zuckerberg talked up the apparent penetration of Meta’s AI personal assistant platform.
“We had a strong quarter, and Meta AI is on track to be the most used AI assistant in the world by the end of the year," he said in a statement.
“We've released the first frontier-level open source AI model, we continue to see good traction with our Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, and we're driving good growth across our apps."
In afterhours trading, Meta shares were up around $30.00 or 6.25% priced at $504.62.
