Release Date: October 30, 2024
For the complete transcript of the earnings call, please refer to the full earnings call transcript.
Positive Points
- Meta Platforms Inc (META, Financial) reported a strong quarter with total revenue of $40.6 billion, up 19% year-over-year.
- The company has seen significant growth in user engagement, with more than 3.2 billion people using at least one of its apps daily.
- Meta AI has over 500 million monthly active users, contributing to an 8% increase in time spent on Facebook and a 6% increase on Instagram.
- The company is making progress with its AI-driven initiatives, with over 1 million advertisers using its Generative AI tools to create more than 15 million ads in the last month.
- Meta Platforms Inc (META) has a strong cash position, ending the quarter with $70.9 billion in cash and marketable securities.
Negative Points
- Reality Labs continues to incur significant losses, with a $4.4 billion operating loss in Q3.
- The company anticipates increased operating losses for Reality Labs in 2024 due to ongoing product development efforts.
- Meta Platforms Inc (META) faces regulatory headwinds in the EU and the US, which could impact its business and financial results.
- The company expects significant capital expenditure growth in 2025, which may impact its financial flexibility.
- Despite strong revenue growth, the company is still working through its budgeting process for 2025, indicating potential uncertainties in future financial planning.
Q & A Highlights
Q: Can you help us understand some of the more recurring types of interactions or query types you're seeing with Meta AI and whether they have commercial intent?
A: Susan Li, CFO: People are using Meta AI for information gathering, help with how-to tasks, and image generation. While our focus is on making Meta AI valuable for users, we anticipate more monetizable queries over time. Meta AI draws from web content and partners with search engines like Bing and Google.
Q: What are the biggest opportunity sets to apply AI to your platform, product portfolio, and internal processes?
A: Mark Zuckerberg, CEO: AI is broadly applicable across our core business, enhancing feed relevance, ad relevance, and content creation. It also enables new services like Meta AI and Ray-Ban Meta glasses. We see opportunities in both consumer and business use cases, including AI agents for customer service.
Q: How do you expect Meta AI's functionality to expand over time, especially with the introduction of agents?
A: Mark Zuckerberg, CEO: With each major update, Meta AI will gain new capabilities. We aim to expand use cases through AI Studio and business agents, making them widespread. This year, we focused on Meta AI's growth, and next year, we'll work on expanding AI Studio and business AI use cases.
Q: How are you utilizing AI internally to improve employee productivity, and are you seeing gains in your R&D group?
A: Susan Li, CFO: We're excited about AI's potential to enhance productivity, especially in coding. We're seeing adoption of internal AI tools and expect Llama to improve coding efficiency. AI is also being explored for content moderation and other work streams.
Q: How does the adoption of Llama by developers benefit Meta, and how quickly can you scale infrastructure for Gen AI?
A: Mark Zuckerberg, CEO: Llama's adoption leads to quality and efficiency improvements, benefiting Meta's products. As Llama becomes a standard, chip manufacturers optimize for it, reducing costs. Our infrastructure team is executing well, allowing us to build capacity faster, which is crucial for delivering world-class models.
For the complete transcript of the earnings call, please refer to the full earnings call transcript.
