Meta Platforms Inc is poised to become Wall Street’s top comeback kid.
It was only a couple of years back the Facebook owner suffered the single biggest market value destruction in stock-market history. But the company has come a long way since then, on Thursday it dazzled shareholders with yet another impressive quarterly earnings report as the social media giant focuses on cutting back costs and shoring up billions in profits.
The stock rose as much as 21% Friday, poised to add roughly US$200 billion to its market capitalization. This would be the biggest single-session market value addition, eclipsing the US$190 billion gains made by Apple Inc and Amazon.com Inc in 2022.
Top 10 Biggest Single-Day Market Cap Gains | Meta's post-earnings rally propels stock to top of the leaderboard
Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak praised Meta’s generative AI pipeline adding the firm’s “solid execution, faster growth, and increased capital structure efficiency improve the outlook from here,” in a note Friday.
See also: Alibaba anoints new chief in revamp of stalling commerce arm
Meta, which reduced headcount by 22% in 2023, unveiled plans for a US$50 billion stock buyback, and announced its first quarterly dividend on Thursday, a sign to investors that it has money to spare and a reason for them to stick around.
While the company is making big costs cuts, it continues to spend aggressively on artificial intelligence advancements, namely in generative AI but also on the background technologies to help feed its social media products and power its ad targeting.
