Meta (META) investors saw the stock closing -0.66% the last 5 days, which means it sits at +36.60% YTD.
Let's go through the news around Meta this week together.
2. NEW ML
3. THOUSANDS MORE LAYOFFS RUMORED
4. TENCENT PARTNERSHIP?
5. META VERIFIED
6. SOLD LAND
7. $4B SUIT HALTED
8. ANALYST CHANGES
LEGEND: Positive News | Neutral News | Negative News
The FTC has bowed out in the fight against Meta for its $400M purchase of Within Unlimited. They were expected to fight the ruling and prolong the pain, but have now stepped back and closed this case.
This is a big win for Meta - and 2023 is shaping to be a good year of positive news for the company.
Meta released a new LLM (large language model) and is determined to be a leader in AI.
In a quote from the company, they said "As part of Meta’s commitment to open science, today we are publicly releasing LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI), a state-of-the-art foundational large language model designed to help researchers advance their work in this subfield of AI".
Meta is setup to be a huge AI player and is making efforts to make sure it's an open platform.
We've been hearing rumors of another round of layoffs for a few weeks now - but it's getting closer to finalized and it appears to be in the thousands.
The goal is to flatten the org structure, remove middle managers, and create a more dynamic team where there's more transparency and less red tap to get past to innovate and make a difference.
This is speculation, but it appears Meta may have a new partner in China - Tencent.
There is possibility of Tencent selling Meta's Quest 2 VR headsets soon, and this comes shortly after Tencent abandoned plans for their own VR sets.
This would open Meta to a massive market (China) without directly having exposure/risk there. Just another revenue stream that could pose to be a massive deal long term. Shareholders should pay close attention.
Meta is entering the subscription game with a new verified badge (for Facebook and Instagram).
This will be a monthly plan that will cost $11.99/month on web or $14.99/month on iOS and Android. The value of this feature is to legitimize your account and show others you've been verified by Meta and you are who you say you are.
This is similar to Twitters initiative for a monthly subscription for a verified badge - which has shown to gain some traction.
This appears to be an extremely high margin business for Meta and could be another cash cow for them as creators adopt this.
Meta has sold a 15-acre land in Phoenix metro area for $1.2 million. It appears this is part of Meta's "year of efficiency" and cutting back on spending.
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Meta is involved in a nearly $4B class action lawsuit in the UK, but it did get halted this week.
It appears the court wants to see more evidence of damage by Meta to users, and has asked the plaintiffs to do so. We'll follow this story to see if anything comes out of it of it this gets thrown out of court.
There were no new analyst changes to report this week for Meta.
We look forward to spending a few minutes with you next Sunday for some new Meta news!
Disclosure: I am a Meta Platforms (META) shareholder at the time of publishing.
