The series of bad news from the technology industry continues: Meta, the parent company of the social network Facebook, reported a drop in sales for the first time ever after the market closed on Wednesday.

The group also does not expect a quick recovery and announced another minus for the third quarter.

The numbers were worse than expected and the share price was down almost 3 in after-hours trading.

Since the beginning of the year, the Meta share has lost around 50 percent of its value.

Roland Lindner

Business correspondent in New York.

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The unusual drop in sales did not come as a complete surprise, Meta had already warned of it in its outlook when presenting the last quarterly figures in April.

According to the company, it is suffering from a “weak demand environment for advertising”.

Meta makes most of its revenue from online advertising.

A number of other Internet companies have also presented poor results in the past few days.

The Google parent company Alphabet, for example, reported significantly lower sales growth on its YouTube video site.

Twitter and the Snapchat parent company Snap disappointed with their numbers.

Competition from Tiktok

Meta's second-quarter revenue fell 1 percent year over year to $28.8 billion, slightly missing analysts' forecasts.

But because the company's costs continued to rise significantly, net income fell 36 percent to $6.7 billion.

Earnings per share of $2.46 were 13 cents below expectations.

The Internet giant now sees itself forced to put even more pressure on the brakes on costs.

He now expects costs of 85 billion to 88 billion dollars for the full year, in April there was still talk of 87 billion to 92 billion dollars, and that was also a downward correction.

Meta delivered bad news from the European market: Here the number of daily users of the regular service Facebook fell for the first time in a year, falling from 307 million in the first quarter to 303 million.

User numbers increased slightly around the world.

Meta is struggling on both Facebook and Instagram with increasing competition from the smartphone app Tiktok, which is primarily known for short videos.

The group has introduced some features in its services that are comparable to Tiktok.

Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said in a staff meeting that Meta wants to hire significantly fewer software developers this year than previously planned.

Regarding the general economic situation, he gave a very pessimistic assessment: "If I had to bet, I would say this downturn could be one of the worst in recent history."