Driven by AI, Meta posts excellent quarterly results (profit up 35%)

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On an upward slope since the beginning of the year, the Meta group has just announced very good results for the third quarter of 2024. Over this three-month period, the group's revenues reached 40.589 billion dollars, up 19% year-on-year. Profit was $15,688, up 35% from the same period in 2023. “This was a good quarter, with strong product and business momentum, and with elements of our long-term vision for AI and the future of computing coming together,”, Zuckerberg said.

AI investments are already paying off

Like Google and Microsoft, Meta is investing heavily in artificial intelligence. However, these investments are already paying off. First, thanks to AI-powered content recommendations, Meta Group has been able to increase the time users spend on social media. Time spent on Facebook has increased by 8%, while time spent on Instagram is up 6%. Second, generative artificial intelligence is already being leveraged by Meta on its advertising platform. During the month of September, 15 million Facebook ads were generated by advertisers using its generative AI-based tools. And advertisers using these tools are reportedly seeing a 7% increase in conversions.

And Meta AI, the ChatGPT competitor that is offered on some Meta products, is already very popular. In fact, it is already used by 500 million people each month. On the other hand, Mark Zuckerberg speaks of significant momentum with the group's Llama artificial intelligence models. “The use of Llama tokens has grown exponentially this year, and as Llama is adopted and becomes the industry standard, the improvements in its quality and efficiency will be reflected across all of our products. This quarter, we released Llama 3.2, which includes the core small models that run multimodal models on-device and open source,” he explained.

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Users are growing

Meta’s revenue growth has outpaced Wall Street’s expectations, but its app user growth has not. There are now more than 3.29 billion people using at least one Meta app every day. Year-over-year growth is 5%. However, according to The Guardian, analysts had expected a bigger increase.

But the positive is that, as mentioned above, engagement is up, thanks to Meta’s new system that relies heavily on AI to choose what content to recommend to users. On the other hand, Facebook is attracting a little more young adults, particularly in the US.

AR/VR and smart glasses: Mark Zuckerberg’s vision is taking shape

Meta’s Reality Labs division, which markets its mixed reality products, as well as smart glasses, is still not profitable. However, in the third quarter, this division reached several important milestones. During its Connect conference, Meta launched a transparent version of the smart glasses (but without mixed reality) that it markets with Ray-Ban. And the product sold out immediately after its release.

Meta also took advantage of the conference to lift the veil, for the first time, on its prototype of holographic glasses. In addition, the group launched the Quest 3S mixed reality headset, which is an affordable version of the Quest 3.

• Meta Group has just reported its third-quarter results
• These results are excellent, with a 19% increase in revenue and a 35% increase in profit
• The group’s investments in AI are already paying off, with artificial intelligence helping to increase engagement on Facebook and Instagram, and the Meta AI assistant already exceeding 500 million monthly users
• The Reality Labs division is still not profitable, but Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for mixed reality is gradually taking shape

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