Social-media giant Meta isn’t forecasting a slowdown in business at this point, handily topping Wall Street expectations for the first quarter and issuing Q2 guidance within analyst forecasts.
For the first quarter of 2025, Meta significantly exceeded expectations. The company, parent of Facebook and Instagram, reported revenue of $42.31 billion (up 16%) and net income of $16.64 billion (up 35%), or $6.43 per share. Wall Street anticipated $41.36 billion in revenue and earnings per share of $5.22.
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“We’ve had a strong start to an important year, our community continues to grow and our business is performing very well,” Meta chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in prepared remarks with the company’s earnings report. “We’re making good progress on AI glasses and Meta AI, which now has almost 1 billion monthly actives.”
Meta plans to spend heavily on AI this year — and even more than it did three months ago. The company said it expects 2025 capital expenditures to be $64 billion-$72 billion, increased from its prior expectation of $60 billion-$65 billion. The higher capex reflects “additional data center investments to support our artificial intelligence efforts as well as an increase in the expected cost of infrastructure hardware.”
Other internet players have signaled they expect a pullback in ad spending. Asked how macroeconomic uncertainty might affect Google’s Q2 advertising sales, chief business officer Philipp Schindler told analysts last week that “it’s too early to really comment on that” but that for full-year 2025, he said, new U.S. tariffs “will obviously cause a slight headwind to our ads business” primarily with respect to spending from Asia Pacific-based retailers. Snapchat parent Snap did not issue formal Q2 financial guidance citing “uncertainty” about the market and said its ad sales have “experienced headwinds” so far in the month of April.
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