Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gives the keynote speech at MetaConnect, an annual event held at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on September 25, 2024.
Manuel Orbegoso | Reuters
Meta Shares fell 9% after the company reported Wednesday that its third-quarter results beat sales.
Here’s how the company performed compared to the expectations of analysts surveyed by LSEG:
Earnings per share: Adjusted $7.25 vs. estimated $6.69 Revenue: $51.24 billion vs. estimated $49.41 billion
Mehta said President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act temporarily imposed $15.93 billion in non-cash income taxes. The company said it expects the legislation to “significantly reduce” its U.S. federal cash tax payments for the remainder of 2025 and in future years.
The social media company’s third-quarter revenue rose 26% year-over-year, the highest revenue growth since the first quarter of 2024.
The company said it expects fourth-quarter sales to be in the range of $56 billion to $59 billion. The midpoint of that range is above analyst expectations, according to street accounts.
Mehta raised the annual total spending floor by $2 billion, saying expenses would range from $116 billion to $118 billion. This figure was previously between $114 billion and $118 billion.
The company also raised its 2025 capital expenditure outlook, which will be in the range of $70 billion to $72 billion. Previous estimates had ranged from $66 billion to $72 billion.
Meta’s Reality Labs hardware division reported a loss of $4.4 billion on revenue of $470 million in the third quarter.
The company said it had 3.54 billion daily active users across its apps in the quarter, which is higher than Wall Street’s expectations for daily active users of 3.5 billion.
Meta’s third-quarter ad revenue was $50.08 billion, beating Wall Street’s $48.5 billion estimate.
The company has spent the past year investing heavily in AI, and after the lukewarm debut of its open source Llama 4 software in April, it underwent a major overhaul of the organization leading those efforts.
The social media company announced last Wednesday that it would lay off around 600 employees in its Superintelligence Labs AI division, but the group’s top-tier TBD Lab remained intact. A day earlier, Meta announced that it had entered into a $27 billion joint venture agreement with Blue Owl Capital to help finance and build a massive data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana.
According to Meta, the number of employees was 78,450 as of September 30, an 8% increase from the previous year.
On September 25th, the company debuted a short video tool powered by Vibes AI and a social feed for its Meta AI standalone app. Since the release of Vibes, downloads of Meta AI have increased 56% month over month on both iOS and Android, reaching a total of 3.9 million downloads as of October 18, according to data provided to CNBC by mobile research firm Appfigures.
“Vibes is an example of a new type of content enabled by AI, and I think there will be more opportunities to build many more new types of content in the future,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on an earnings call.
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Correction: Analysts had expected Meta’s revenue to be $49.41 billion. A previous version of this article incorrectly listed this number.
