Quarterly figures: Meta beats expectations, but profits are halved

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Good morning! While you slept, work continued elsewhere in the digital scene.

The top topics:

The Facebook parent company Meta performed better than analysts had expected in the past quarter. While heavy severance spending and corporate restructuring have given Meta a surprisingly steep profit slump, long-sluggish ad revenue appears to be recovering. For the current quarter, Meta expects revenues of $26 billion to $28.5 billion. Analysts had forecast an average of $27.14 billion. In the last quarter of 2022, however, profit collapsed by 55 percent to $ 4.65 billion.

The number of users increased again in the last quarter. Facebook currently has two billion daily active users, up from 16 million. 2.96 billion users used at least one Meta app per day, up from 2.93 billion three months earlier. The Facebook parent announced an additional $40 billion share buyback. The Meta share reacted in after-hours trading with a jump in price of over 18 percent. [More at Bloomberg, CNBC, Handelsblatt, The Information, Techcrunch and Financial Times]

On the start-up scene: The serial entrepreneur Robert Ermich does not appear in the foreground that often, but takes care of all kinds of projects in the background. The WHU graduate first sold the Deinhandy portal and now works at the advertising marketer Ontruck. He also invests in numerous startups. Our editor Fiona Mathewson has researched for you which companies have received his money so far. [More at Gründerszene+]

And here are the other headlines of the night:

OpenAI announced on Wednesday that it would start selling subscriptions to ChatGPT for $20 a month. Currently in the spotlight of the tech world, the AI-powered chatbot can answer questions and write poetry. ChatGPT will continue to be available for free to non-subscription users. However, paying customers get priority access, faster response times, and early access to new features. Experts estimated that the OpenAI AI service costs $100,000 a day or more. The company recently received a major new investment from Microsoft. [More at Axios, Techcrunch and Wall Street Journal]

Samsung unveiled three new Galaxy S23 smartphones and several new Galaxy Book 3 laptops at an event in San Francisco. The new models have better displays and more connections. The South Korean technology group is trying to expand the business with the Galaxy devices in order to fend off the profit slump in the semiconductor division. In the past quarter, operating profit fell by 97 percent to just around 200 million euros. [More at Axios, CNBC and Handelsblatt]

Rivian has announced that it will reduce its workforce. The US electric car manufacturer wants to lay off 840 of the approximately 14,000 employees. As reported by "Reuters", CEO Robert RJ Scaringe wrote in an e-mail to employees that Rivian must concentrate its resources on ramping up vehicle production and becoming profitable. The carmaker recently admitted that it had just missed the already significantly reduced production target for 2022. [More at Handelsblatt, Reuters and Wall Street Journal]

Pinterest is also laying off about 150 employees, or a little less than five percent of the workforce. The San Francisco-based digital company, which lets users create online bulletin boards, joins a tide of other tech companies laying off employees to cut costs. Pinterest had about 4,000 employees at the end of the third quarter. [More at Bloomberg and Reuters]

Web development platform Netlify has acquired competitor Gatsby, the company behind the open-source GatsbyJS framework. Netlify says it has clients like Twilio, Mattel and Verizon and hosts more than three million developers on its platform. The two companies did not provide any information about the purchase price. [More at Techcrunch]

Our reading tip on Gründerszene: No success in "The Lion's Den" - but money from other investors. The school portal Sdui collects a total of 25 million euros and is valued at more than 100 million euros after the financing round. [More at start-up scene]

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A nice Thursday!

Your Gründerszene editors

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