TECH: BIG LOSS FOR A GIANT
Meta, the owner of Facebook records the biggest stock market loss of its existence.

Face­book own­er Meta Plat­forms saw its stock mar­ket val­ue plum­met by more than $230bn (£169bn) on Thurs­day, in a record dai­ly loss for a US company.

Its shares fell 26.4% after quar­ter­ly fig­ures dis­ap­point­ed investors.

Meta also said Face­book’s dai­ly active users (DAUs) fell for the first time in its 18-year history.

The crash in the com­pa­ny’s share price saw chief exec­u­tive Mark Zucker­berg’s net worth plum­met by $31 bil­lion, accord­ing to the Bloomberg Bil­lion­aires Index.

The drop in Mr Zucker­berg’s per­son­al for­tune was equiv­a­lent to Esto­ni­a’s annu­al gross domes­tic product.

Even after this drop, Mr. Zucker­berg has an esti­mat­ed net worth of near­ly $90 bil­lion, mean­ing he is still one of the rich­est peo­ple in the world.

It came after Meta revealed that Face­book’s DAUs fell to 1.929 bil­lion in the three months to the end of Decem­ber, from 1.930 bil­lion in the pre­vi­ous quarter.

It was the first time that this mea­sure of activ­i­ty on the world’s largest social net­work had been reversed.

Meta also warned of slow­ing rev­enue growth amid com­pe­ti­tion from rival plat­forms such as Tik­Tok and YouTube, while adver­tis­ers also cut spending.

Mr Zucker­berg said the com­pa­ny’s sales growth had been hurt as the pub­lic, espe­cial­ly younger users, left for rivals.

The com­pa­ny expects rev­enue of between $27 bil­lion and $29 bil­lion for the first quar­ter of this year, which is below ana­lysts’ expectations.

Although the com­pa­ny has invest­ed in video ser­vices to com­pete with Tik­Tok, owned by Chi­nese tech giant ByteDance, it makes less mon­ey from these offer­ings than its tra­di­tion­al Face­book and Insta­gram.
It’s clear that Meta faces a whirl­wind of dif­fer­ent issues.

Last year, Apple intro­duced its App Track­ing Trans­paren­cy Policy.

It lets users choose whether or not they want to be tracked across the inter­net by com­pa­nies like Meta, who can then sell that infor­ma­tion to advertisers.

This is a major prob­lem for Face­book because find­ing infor­ma­tion about you and sell­ing it to adver­tis­ers is exact­ly how it makes money.

Its quar­ter­ly results showed a decline in adver­tis­ing rev­enue, part­ly for this reason.

Meta rivals like Tik­Tok are also attract­ing a younger audi­ence. And user growth has stag­nat­ed around the world.

Meta earns mon­ey through adver­tis­ing. Yet the com­pa­ny’s name has been changed to mark a con­cept — the Meta­verse — some­thing that does­n’t yet exist and won’t for years.

Mark Zucker­berg has pledged to spend tens of bil­lions of dol­lars on the project, even though evi­dence that peo­ple actu­al­ly want to live their lives in vir­tu­al real­i­ty is scarce.

All of this means that many investors are not friends.
Meta, which owns the world’s sec­ond-largest dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing plat­form after Google, also said it was hit by pri­va­cy changes to Apple’s oper­at­ing system.