Facebook's parent company, Meta, announced on Wednesday that its first-quarter profit increased by 35 percent to $16.6 billion due to higher revenue and wider operating margins.
Revenue rose 16 percent year-over-year, totalling $42.31 billion for the quarter ending March 31, up from $36.46 billion in the same period last year.
As the operating margin improved to 41 percent from 38 percent during the same period last year, the large tech company reported a 27 percent increase in operating income to $17.56 billion.
“We delivered a solid start to the year with a first-quarter profit of $16.6 billion, up 35 per cent from last year,” the company stated.
Diluted earnings per share increased from $4.71 in the first quarter of 2024 to $6.43, a 37 percent increase.
At a slower rate than revenue growth, Meta's total costs and expenses climbed by 9 percent to $24.76 billion. Additionally, the company's effective tax rate decreased to 9 percent from 13 percent the previous year.
Commenting on the results, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “We’ve had a strong start to an important year. Our community continues to grow, and our business is performing very well. We’re making good progress on AI glasses and Meta AI, which now has almost 1 billion monthly actives.”
Future prospects
The company stated that it anticipates total revenue for the second quarter of 2025 to be between $42.5 billion and $45.5 billion.
“Our guidance assumes foreign currency is approximately a one per cent tailwind to year-over-year total revenue growth, based on current exchange rates,” the company said.
Additionally, Meta lowered its total expenses forecast for the full year 2025 from $114 billion to $119 billion to between $113 billion and $118 billion.
The initial estimate of $60 billion to $65 billion for capital expenditures for the year, including principal payments on finance leases, has been revised up to between $64 billion and $72 billion.
“This updated outlook reflects additional data centre investments to support our artificial intelligence efforts, as well as an increase in the expected cost of infrastructure hardware. The majority of our capital expenditures in 2025 will continue to be directed to our core business,” the company said.
