- Meta Platform Inc’s shares fell by 26% erasing more than ₹200 billion from the market.
- Meta blamed this decline on the number of active users and Apple’s privacy policy.
- Mark Zuckerberg lost $29 billion in net worth on Thursday and ranked on the 12th position on Forbes’ real-time billionaires list, right after Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani.
Meta Platform Inc’s shares marked a record one-day plunge, as the stock fell by 26% erasing more than ₹200 billion in the biggest ever single-day market value wipeout for a U.S. company. This was its worst one-day loss since its Wall Street debut in 2012.
Meta’s global daily active users on all social media platforms declined for the first time in their history. Facebook is facing tough competition from their rivals like YouTube and TikTok. Further, Apple updated its privacy policy last year according to which users can stop apps from collecting data to show personalized ads. Meta is being hit by these factors along with macroeconomic challenges.
On Wednesday, Meta reported disappointing earnings and said that its revenue in the first quarter will be somewhere between $27 billion to $29billion, which means that its year-over-year growth would be anywhere between 3% to 11%. This did not go down well with its shareholders.
Founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg lost $29 billion in net worth on Thursday. This pulled down his net worth to $85 billion, according to Forbes. He owns 12.8% of this tech behemoth. He is on the 12th spot on Forbes’ list of real-time billionaires, below business tycoons Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani.
Facebook has lost daily users for the first time since its inception in 2004. In the last quarter of 2021, it witnessed a drop of about 5 lakh users on a daily basis. According to the latest quarterly earning’s report, the company’s growth has stagnated for the first time, around the globe.
“Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg may be keen to coax the world into an alternate reality, but disappointing fourth-quarter results were quick to burst his metaverse bubble,” said Laura Hoy, an equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.
The Nasdaq which is dominated by tech giants and other growth stocks fell by 9% in January, which is its worst monthly drop since the corona virus-induced market crash in March 2020.
“The downgrade in the earnings outlook by Meta and other companies took markets by surprise,” said Kenneth Broux, a strategist at Societe Generale in London.
Meta was a widely held stock by various investor groups and this wipeout has affected individual as well as institutional investors. This fall affected other stocks in the sector like Pinterest, Twitter and Spotify However, some investors see it as a good opportunity to buy these stocks.
