An average profit of $4.6 billion per month. Certainly, it’s less spectacular than Microsoft’s profits and $7.3 billion per month, but it’s still an incredible financial performance that Meta achieved in the fourth quarter of 2023. This Thursday, the Mark Zuckerberg-led group announced that it had generated $14 billion. Net profit in the last three months of last year on revenue of $60 billion. This is thanks to iron budgetary discipline and new artificial intelligence tools for advertisers. The results led to a more than 12% jump in stock prices during electronic trading after the New York Stock Exchange closed, above analysts’ estimates.
Meta in great shape
“ 2023 was a surprisingly good year for Meta
“, commented independent analyst Debra Williamson.“Four factors contributed to the group’s recovery: investment in artificial intelligence to improve ad performance, increased advertiser demand for reels (short videos), spending by Chinese advertisers (Shin, Temu) and continued growth in the number of monthly users of the app. »
At the same time, Amazon grew revenue 14% to $170 billion. Better results than market expectations. All for a net profit of 10.6 billion, well above Wall Street forecasts, driven by fast deliveries and a particularly successful holiday season.
“The holiday season in the United States was relatively strong,” noted Sky Canaves of Insider Intelligence. “Online spending was strong and focused on many lower-priced categories for which Amazon reported faster sales growth, such as food and beverage, health and personal care, and beauty.
The market was eagerly awaiting results from AWS, Amazon’s cloud (remote computing) arm, the world leader in a market that is exploding with the rise of generative AI. AWS revenue rose 13% year over year to $24.2 billion. Advertising activity grew 27% to 14.7 billion.
Apple guarantees
Finally, after four consecutive declines in its turnover, Apple surprised even investors who had been worried about a slowdown in its growth. The impression was reinforced by a 2% decline in iPhone shipments in China in the fourth quarter year-on-year. In the fourth quarter, the Apple brand reported revenue of $119.6 billion, up 2% year-on-year, while analysts had expected $117.9 billion. Profit rose 13% to $33 billion.
These results follow those of Microsoft and Alphabet, who also ended 2023 with better-than-expected revenues and profits, thanks in particular to their big investments in artificial intelligence, their traditional activities service, Google and online advertising for cloud (remote computing). . ) for both competitors. Alphabet reported revenue of more than $86 billion in the fourth quarter, up 13% year-over-year. The world’s number one in online advertising posted a net profit of 20.7 billion (+52%).
Microsoft is a hit
Microsoft, for its part, published a turnover of 62 billion dollars for the period from October to December (+18%), for a profit of about 22 billion dollars, an increase of a third in a year. Its cloud business particularly stood out with 20% year-over-year growth. It accounts for around 42% of the company’s revenue.
Combined, the five tech giants have made stratospheric profits of more than $100 billion in three months. And this while they are engaged in profound transformation to support the generative artificial intelligence (AI) revolution. Appetite for AI allows technological behemoths to escape, as they are, the fears associated with a slowdown in the American and global economies. The emergence of generative AI increases the needs of companies in remote computing (cloud computing), which rarely has the data processing and storage capacity offered by large providers. So investors have looked to the path to the cloud, especially for Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet, which together represent about two-thirds of the market.