Meta Platforms Conference Call: 2023 is the Year of Efficiency, Chinese Advertisers Boost Financial Recovery

"2023 is our year of efficiency," Zuckerberg expressed his satisfaction with Meta Platforms' performance last year at the beginning of the conference call.

"Last year, we not only achieved our efficiency goals but also recovered strong revenue growth. Our applications had high user exposure. We released many exciting new products, such as Threads, Meta Platforms, and the mixed reality feature on Quest 3. And of course, we built world-class AI models that will serve as the foundation for many of our future products."

As Zuckerberg said, with the support of Chinese advertising giants, Meta Platforms delivered its strongest financial report in company history last year, surpassing Wall Street's expectations for both fourth-quarter performance and first-quarter guidance. They also announced a $50 billion stock repurchase and the first-ever dividend in history.

Zuckerberg stated that Meta Platforms' primary goal now is to "build the most popular and advanced AI products and services." Therefore, Meta Platforms needs to empower its models with "reasoning, planning, coding, memory, and many other cognitive abilities."

The biggest keyword for 2024: AI

AI assistants are one of the key themes for Meta Platforms in 2024.

Zuckerberg stated that this new generation of AI will generate a large number of excellent assistants, which will be one of the main values of this generation of AI. It is expected that Meta Platforms' AI assistant will be extended to more apps in Meta Platforms later in 2024.

According to CFO Susan Li, in 2024, Meta Platforms' focus will be on launching Llama 3, expanding the practicality of Meta Platforms' AI assistant, and advancing the AI Studio roadmap. "Making it easier for anyone to create AI characters."

Mark Zuckerberg reiterated that Meta Platforms' long-term strategic goal is to build open-source general AI models. The company is currently training Llama 3 and by the end of this year, Meta Platforms will have approximately 350,000 NVIDIA H100s. If other GPUs are included, there will be about 600,000 H100-equivalent computing power.

As a key strategy, Meta Platforms will leverage the unique data and content on its social platforms to train AI models. On Facebook and Instagram, there are trillions of publicly shared images and billions of publicly shared videos, which we estimate to be more than common web crawling datasets. People also share a large amount of public text posts and comments on our services.

Continuing to bet on the metaverse

In addition to AI, another long-term vision for Meta Platforms is the metaverse.

Mark Zuckerberg said:

"For a long time, we have invested heavily in AI and the metaverse, and we will continue to do so. These days, I have received many questions about AI, and this field is developing very rapidly.

"But I still expect the next generation of AR, VR, and MR computing platforms to provide immersive experiences, which will be the foundation for future social experiences and almost all other experience categories."

Meta Platforms previously stated that it will continue to invest heavily in the metaverse for the next decade. Now, with a major focus on AI, does this mean a change in the timeline for achieving this goal? Or is it possible to achieve this goal ahead of schedule?

Mark Zuckerberg did not directly answer this question. He said:

"I do believe that AI will make all of our products and services better, so it's hard to say exactly how things will turn out. But the work in Reality Labs, specifically, covers many areas.

"At this point, AI glasses seem to have the potential to be a killer product, and immersive holographic experiences may be realized later—perhaps within the same timeframe we discussed before, but with an impact that could be as significant as we expected. But before that, there may be a large market here. So I think we will address this issue in the next few years." China's advertising giants have played a significant role in Meta Platforms' financial recovery over the past year.

During the earnings conference call, Li stated that in 2023, revenue from Chinese advertisers accounted for 10% of Meta Platforms' total revenue, contributing 5 percentage points to the overall revenue growth.

In the future, Meta Platforms will no longer disclose monthly active user data.

According to Meta Platforms, Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp have a combined monthly active user base of 4 billion.

Zuckerberg mentioned that the short video platform "Reels" on Instagram and Facebook is now being reshared 3.5 billion times per day, and short video ads are contributing net revenue to these two applications.

He emphasized that continuous improvement of these videos, the ads provided here, and personalized user algorithms will remain a priority.

During the conference call, Li announced that Meta Platforms will no longer report the daily and monthly user numbers of its flagship social application, Facebook, in its financial reports.

Starting from this quarter, the company will instead report the year-on-year changes in ad impressions and average ad prices by region, while continuing to report the daily active user numbers of its app suite.

Meta Platforms expects first-quarter revenue to be between $34.5 billion and $37 billion, surpassing analysts' expectations of $33.64 billion. The company also expects overall expenses to remain between $94 billion and $99 billion in 2024, in line with analysts' expectations of $96.45 billion.

However, Meta Platforms did not provide full-year guidance. When asked by analysts, Li stated:

Our annual revenue will be influenced by many factors, including macro conditions, which are certainly harder to predict over time.

Other Highlights: Dividends, In-App Purchases, App Store

Meta Platforms is set to distribute dividends for the first time in the company's history, with a dividend of $0.50 per share, and has also announced a $50 billion stock repurchase program.

Li stated that dividends provide a more balanced capital return plan for the company and offer some flexibility, but "it will not change the way we determine the total amount of capital to be returned. Stock repurchases are expected to continue to be the primary means of returning capital to our shareholders."

When asked about the store advertising business, Meta Platforms stated that they will continue to utilize AI to enhance the effectiveness of store advertising.

Li mentioned that Meta Platforms is working with Amazon to launch the "Buy with Prime" one-click purchase service, aiming to improve the shopping experience for users on Facebook and Instagram platforms.

An analyst asked Zuckerberg about the impact of Apple's opening of the app store in the European Union on Meta Platforms' future app store development.

Zuckerberg believes that there will be no impact as Apple's conditions are too stringent and go against the original intention of EU regulations, so he believes that app developers are unlikely to abandon the Apple App Store in search of alternatives.