Shares of Facebook owner Meta tumbled sharply on yesterday’s market wiping an unprecedented $200billion off the value of the company.
Meta saw its stock drop over 26 percent when the closing bell rang on Wall Street on Thursday, after the company said it expected its first-quarter revenues to fall short of Wall Street forecasts because of the “increasing competition”.
The steep fall marks one of the largest one-day declines in any company’s market value on record.
Investors were reacting to news that Facebook has reportedly lost roughly 1 million daily users globally between the last two quarters of 2021- with consequences for advertising revenue and growth.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg told AFP News that “People have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time, and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly”.
Some have speculated that a root cause of the decline in users is due to people abandoning the platform over growing concerns with censorship by Facebook.
Like California, Facebook is losing people. Wonder why
Get woke, go broke. Happens even to the big boys.https://t.co/kbyT3ZKHyb
— American Thinker (@AmericanThinker) February 3, 2022
Forecast revenues for the next quarter are between $27 billion and $29 billion, which is significantly lower than analysts had expected, the BBC reported.