Text size
It’s shaping up to be a very bad day for Meta shareholders.
Drew/Angerer/Getty Images
Shares in
Meta Platforms
were down in the dumps outside of regular trading hours and already some investors are talking about buying the big dip.
Meta (ticker: FB) stock fell almost 23% in after-hours trading Wednesday and was almost 20% in the red in Thursday’s premarket. If it finishes more than 18.96% lower in Thursday’s regular-hours trading, it will be the worst one-day plunge for the stock in the company’s history.
All eyes on Wall Street will be on what plays out in the day ahead for the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and not just because it could impact the wider stock market.
The blame for Meta’s plunge is fourth-quarter financial results, released after the bell Wednesday. While sales beat estimates, earnings were lower than what analysts had expected.
More troubling than weak earnings was dismal guidance. Meta expects revenue in the first quarter of 2022 to be between $27 billion and $29 billion, representing comparatively anemic annual growth of 3% to 11%, not what’s usually expected from the company.
In terms of the substance of the results, there were multiple facets that Wall Street soured on. These include higher costs linked to spending on the metaverse and headwinds to revenue from changes by
Apple
(AAPL) to its mobile advertising rules. But the biggest issue seems to be that people are spending less time on Meta’s platforms, which would hit revenue growth moving forward.
All this has helped destroy billions…
..
