Meta Platforms stock climbs nearly 9% after stronger Q2 revenue, upbeat sales forecast

Meta Platforms stock climbed nearly 9 per cent on Thursday after the Facebook and Instagram parent company reported better than expected revenue for second quarter and upbeat sales forecast for the current quarter.

At 12:04 pm EDT, Meta Platforms stock was at $505.97, higher $31.16 or 6.56 per cent.

The company reported sales of $39.1 billion for the quarter ended June 30.

For the third quarter, it expects sales of $38.5 billion to $41 billion.

Meta’s strong revenue growth drove a 9-point rise in its operating margin to 38 per cent.

Chief financial officer Susan Li said on Wednesday that Meta was reaping the fruits of a multi-year project to use AI to improve targeting, ranking and delivery systems for digital ads on its platforms.

Chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday expounded on Meta’s push into the type of large language models that power AI chatbots and praised the company’s AI smart glasses and virtual reality headsets.

“There are all the jokes about how all the tech CEOs get on these earnings calls and just talk about AI the whole time,” he said. “It’s because it’s actually super exciting and it’s going to change all these different things over multiple time horizons.”

In April, Zuckerberg had said that “smart investors” would see the long-term promises of artificial intelligence and metaverse technology, even if the financial returns are years away.

Meta has been using AI to improve the way its advertisers can find interested users, adding efficiency to its most lucrative business.

Meta’s costs jumped 7 per cent in the second quarter.

In 2024, the company expects capital expenditure between $37 billion and $40 billion.

Meta had 3.27 billion users across all of its apps as of June 30, up 7 per cent from a year earlier.

Recently, Meta had unveiled its largest model to date, which Zuckerberg said cost hundreds of millions of dollars in computing power to train.