We're Watching Facebook Die
In the first quarter of 2024, Meta made $36.45 billion dollars - $12.37 billion dollars of which was pure profit. Though the company no longer reports daily active users, it now uses another metric: “family daily active people.” This number refers to “registered and logged-in users of one or more of Facebook’s Family products who visited at least one of these products on a particular day.”
This quiet, seemingly innocent change to how Meta reports growth is significant insofar as it will no longer have to report its Daily Active or Monthly active users, meaning that the only source of truth in Meta’s growth story is a vague growth metric that could be manipulated to mean just about anything. Three billion “daily active people” across Meta’s “family” combines WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger (which I’m confident it counts separately), Oculus, and Threads.
Since it has shareholders, the only way for it to stay in business is ever-increasing growth. Profit themselves aren't enough. It needs to grow faster and faster so that dividends keep increasing, which is the goal.
Dividends aren't really the goal for most investors. It's stock prices they care about.
traditionally a stock price is the net present value of all future dividends. just like a home price is the net present value of all future rent payments. of course its all off the rails now due to extended periods of minimal interest rates and dollar cancer.
What? The stock price is based on the valuation of the company, not future dividends. Many stocks don't pay dividends at all, or do so rarely.
Similarly, a home's price is the market value of the home, not how much the rent/mortgage payments would be.
the valuation of a publicly traded company is traditionally the future dividends of outstanding shares. stocks that dont pay much dividends are counting on a growth strategy, capturing market share.
again with the homes, the market value of the home is traditionally based on what future revenues can be extracted out of it.
'the price is the value' should be based on something other than bigger fools.