Meta share price rockets 24% - here is why

Meta share price: Instagram and Facebook parent company Meta' shares surged 23.3 per cent on Thursday. The surge came on the back of the company's stricter cost controls this year and a $40 billion share buyback, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg called 2023 the 'year of efficiency'.

The counter closed at $188.77 on Nasdaq up by 23.28 per cent. Meta revealed that the company is focused on improving its content recommendations powered by artificial intelligence and its ad targeting systems to keep users clicking which has fallen on hard times amid a broad post-pandemic decline in digital ads.

The company will cut costs in 2023 by $5 billion to a range of $89 billion to $95 billion, a steep drop from the $94 billion to $100 billion it previously forecast, and it projected first-quarter sales that could beat Wall Street estimates, a Reuter report said.

Zuckerberg in the official statement described the focus on efficiency as part of the natural evolution of the company and called it a "phase change" for an organization that once lived by motto "move fast and break things."

He said, "We just grew so quickly for like the first 18 years," Zuckerberg said in a conference call. "It's very hard to really crank on efficiency while you're growing that quickly. I just think we're in a different environment now."

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The cost cuts reflect Meta's updated plans for lower data-center construction expenses this year as part of a shift to a structure that can support both AI and non-AI work, it said in a statement.

The digital ad giant faced a brutal 2022 as companies cut back on marketing spending due to economic worries, while rivals like TikTok captured younger users and Apple Inc's (AAPL.O) privacy updates continued to challenge the business of placing targeted ads.

Meta in November cut more than 11,000 jobs in response, a precursor to the tens of thousands of layoffs in the tech industry that followed.

"Our management theme for 2023 is the 'Year of Efficiency' and we're focused on becoming a stronger and more nimble organization," Zuckerberg said in a statement.

Monetization efficiency for Reels on Facebook, a short-form video format, had doubled in the past six months and the business was on track to roughly break even by the end of 2023 or early 2024 and grow profitably after that, he said at the conference call.

The American multinational technology conglomerate has a market cap of 49.50TCr. YTD, the stock has given a return of 51 per cent. The stock has a 52-week high of Rs 248 to 52-week low of Rs 88.09.

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(with inputs from Reuters)