Meta (META) investors had a pretty good week, with the stock gaining +4.42% the last 5 days, which means it sits at +9.81% YTD.
Meta has been holding up quite well over the last few months - climbing a little more every week, and we have a few pieces of news helping drive the stock higher this week. Let's go through it together.
LEGEND: Positive News | Neutral News | Negative News
Meta signed a deal with BP this week around a solar power project. BP is building a 134 megawatt facitlity to generate clean power, and will be selling all the power from here to Meta. The deal will help Meta decarbonize its data centers (and we know Meta has been spending a lot on their DC's recently during this investment cycle). Always good to see a megacap company focus on clean energy, but how much Meta is spending on this is not known as this time.
Meta lost it's place in Glassdoor's top 100 places to work in 2023. This doesn't come as a huge shocker after the company announced mass layoffs last year, naturally hurting employee morale, but the magnitude of the ranking drop is shocking. In 2021, Meta was ranked #11, and then dropped to #47 in 2022, only to get kicked out of the top 100 for 2023. At one point, Meta was ranked #1, so this shift is notable for investors because this could (and probably will) affect the type of talent Meta attracts in future years.
There was also a recording obtained regarding employees at Meta, and the general thoughts is very much in line with the Glassdoor ratings drop. Meta needs to turn things around (and there's a good chance they will) but it will take time. They are actively making moves in regards to reducing employee headcount and reprioritizing office space so we'll see what comes out all these changes through 2023. Maybe, just maybe, they make it back onto the top 100 Glassdoor list in 2024.
A couple pieces to share around the VR business at Meta. Firstly, news broke that they acquired an optics startup company (Gary Sharp Innovations) with the goal to improve their VR headsets and AR glasses. The deal actually closed back in June 2022 but we're learning about it this week after a Meta spokesperson confirmed the acquisition.
Secondly in the VR world, we got some rumors around the Meta Quest 3 display. After decoding lines of code, it is reported that the display resolution is likely to be 30% better than the Quest 2 display. Additionally, there's code hinting that a 120Hz display is also possibly coming. This is excellent as we have started hearing rumors of Apple developing a high resolution headset as well, so Meta needs to make sure they release top of the line specs with the Quest 3 to remain competitive. No firm release date is set for the Quest 3, but Q4 2023 is likely.
Meta is suing Voyager Labs (not to be confused with the recently struggling crypto company Voyager Digital) claiming they created fake accounts to scrape together user data, which is against Meta's terms of service. The process of scraping is referred to using automation to gather information from websites. Essentially, these "users" were really bots, and Meta was not happy. Meta claims Voyager Labs created over 38,000 fake accounts on Facebook and led to them scraping information from over 600,000 Facebook users.
Meta's goal with this lawsuit is two fold - first they want to ban Voyager Labs from being allowed to use their platforms, and second, they want to collect any profits from this stunt they pulled. We're not sure how much Voyager Labs could have made from this, but this looks like more of a scare tactic to discourage any other companies out there from doing the same. The likeliness of Meta winning this case is quite high since Microsoft just closed a similar case where a company was using LinkedIn in a similar manner and the court ruled in Microsoft's favor.
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.