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Meta (META) kicked off 2025 with a strong first quarter, delivering better-than-expected financial results and signaling continued momentum in its AI initiatives and core advertising business.
The company reported first-quarter revenue of $42.31 billion, marking a 16% year-over-year increase. Net income surged to $16.64 billion, up 35% from the same period last year, while earnings per share rose 37% to $6.43. That’s better than consensus estimates, which had pegged Meta’s first-quarter 2025 earnings per share at $5.21 and a 13% rise in revenue to $41.2 billion.
The rosy results initially drove Meta shares up more than 5% in after-hours trading.
Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement that the quarter was a “strong start to an important year.” And on the following call, he said this was a “pivotal moment” for the industry — in what he expects “will continue to be an intense year.”
Leading the way for Meta was its advertising business. Ad impressions from the company’s family of apps (including Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram) were up 5%, and the average ad price increased 10% year-over-year. On the earnings call, chief financial officer Susan Li said the online commerce vertical was the largest contributor to year-over-year growth.
Zuckerberg claimed on the call that integrating AI into its advertising department has helped drive revenue.
“AI has already made us better at targeting and finding the audiences that will be interested in [businesses’] products,” Zuckerberg said. “I think that this is really redefining what advertising is — into an AI agent that delivers measurable business results at scale.”
Meta is currently testing an ads recommendation model for reels, which the company said has increased conversion rates by 5%. Meta is seeing that 30% more advertisers used its AI creative tools in the last quarter.
“If we deliver on this vision, then over the coming years, I think that the increased productivity from AI will make advertising a meaningfully larger share of global GDP than it is today,” Zuckerberg said.
The CEO pointed to several advances in Meta’s artificial intelligence projects. Zuckerberg said that there are almost a billion monthly active users of Meta AI — and the company’s focus this year is on making it the “leading personal AI with an emphasis on personalization, voice conversations, and entertainment.” He envisions a world where AI is ever-present. Already, Meta AI is hard to avoid, after the company merged it with its search bar across its various apps.
“I think that we’re all going to have an AI that we talk to throughout the day, while we’re browsing content on our phones,” Zuckerberg said. The company just released its first standalone AI app.